The Bulgarian Kuker
Yordan Pavlov is a Bulgarian illustrator currently working at a slot game company. For Art War 5 he chose to represent his home country Bulgaria. He'll take us through the process of creating his entry - the Bulgarian Kuker.
Research and Concept
This phase was mostly rushed as I like changing and building upon the design of the character during the illustration stage. When looking for a reference, my aim is to pick and settle on a couple of images to use as a basis of the design as quickly as I can. This way I don't spend too much time flip-flopping between possible directions I could take. After having picked a couple of reference images, I sketched out the character and slightly rendered some elements that I could use later on.
Additionally, I also roughly sketched the evil spirits that the Kuker would be squaring off against.
Composition
For the composition, I had to choose between a dynamic composition (that would focus on the action of the character) and a more static one (that would let me show off the traditional elements better).
I chose to go with the latter as that would be the quicker option. I took a picture of one of my traditional compositional sketches and started drawing over and digitally blocking in the image.
Once again for the purpose of speed, my process with solidifying the drawing was to quickly airbrush a background and block in the character by cutting parts of my concept. After that, I put a white semi-opaque layer on top and drew over everything to get a better idea for the forms and make any needed corrections. I've found this to be a time saver and a good solution whenever I'm stuck at any part of the process.
Progress
At this point, I had a good idea of how the image would look by the end so I started rendering the forms out. Something I find important at this stage is to work in such a way that every thirty-forty minutes there is visible progress made, ideally.
For this piece, I also made a lot of color corrections and edits (such as rotating the canvas, resizing elements, etc.) so I got to see different variants in a short span of time instead of having to wait a day or two to see the image with fresh eyes.
Detailing
This is perhaps my favorite part of the process - zooming in to paint in textures, adding different types of edges, and generally noodling around. I try not to overdo it so the details don't stand out more than they have to.
Final Touches
At the end, I do some final color corrections and maybe another highlight or two and I call the illustration done.
It's been a pleasure participating!
Follow or contact Danny here.