Matei Apostolescu Master Study

Since I am still fairly new to the Wacom, I wanted to find a piece to copy that would make me practice a lot of drawing (I still sometimes have quite a problem with accuracy). I was lucky to find this freelance Illustrator, Matei Apostolescu, who does a lot of drawing and does a lot of his work in a really unique style that I fell in love with almost immediately.

His site can be found: here.

Here is his piece:

Here is mine:

He said that his process on this sketch started out in ink on paper that was then scanned in and gone over with a tablet, so I wanted to do just as he did. I sketched it out on a long piece of tracing paper, scanned it in (in three pieces) and then merged them in photoshop into this (note: the printer in Grinstead cut off a bit on the sides and I realized this halfway through. There are only a few lines missing):

Next, in Illustrator, I sampled the colors from his original and incorporated them into a gradient mesh.

I pasted those shapes into Photoshop, added the gray lines (also done in Illustrator and brought over), and then merged the layers together.

Next, I selected all the black from my scans (even with tolerance really high, some of the white still shows and it looks awful as you can see). I even tried selecting the white area and then inversing the selection but that gave me the same results. Either way, this is how it turned out and even though it looks terrible, it was still enough to give me an idea of the lines I needed to draw with my tablet:

... So then I drew it with my tablet. For the most part just used a default, Photoshop 4px brush at 82% hardness, and on the Wacom settings, the Tip Feel was just one notch toward Firm.

Looking back, I think I needed to go even darker with maybe some slightly thicker lines in a few areas.

I know this isn't really complex as far as colors go or anything, but as I said, I just wanted a lot of practice with the tablet and I definitely got it. My hand was pretty sore afterwards! Still not completely positive as to what I'm going to do with my original but I have a few ideas.