Cartooning Marty Friedman - My Process

 

It was a rainy day yesterday. A stay home day. While looking at Twitter I saw a few photos of Marty Friedman's current USA tour, and off the cuff thought doing a  cartoon would make my day better.

Making something always makes my day better, so did a rough scribble sketch, showing up his "pinball wizard" boots.  

I thought I was done, and should get onto Japanese Kanji practice. I did for a while.

So I came back and did cleaned up lines in pens. Much of the time I agonize about a likeness. But I didn't here. Just let his hair and chin carry it. But if I was doing this as a commission I would be agonizing over the likeness and spend hours in photoshop moving my ink on paper lines around a mm at a time searching for the "best" likeness.

I uploaded the black ink drawing, with the pens and pencil used over it, to twitter, and thought that would do.

And got back to Kanji practice again.

Then a few people liked that. I did feel like finishing that, so I colored it in Photoshop. I make 2 layers under the inked lines. Make the lines a MULTIPLY layer. Under that I paint the color using my medium sized WACOM tablet. It is kind of like painting color on the back of an acetate sheet doing animation. I use the other layer to help in making the background transparent.

Uploaded that to Twitter, and it got some comments.

And got back to Kanji practice again. For a while.

Then Marty Friedman himself saw it and made a comment, bringing in his many followers.

So I made the image at the top of this post, showing the original scribble I started with, and the colored image and lines. Posted that to twitter.

And got back to Kanji practice again.

Then after lunch it was time to do what I wanted to do, so I added a background to ground the toon in an environment.

This here...

 負けないで ( Makenaide ), Meaning "Don't give in" is a track he made during the Pandemic.

The background was put in with Photoshop, but then the speech balloon and strings on the guitar were put in with CorelDraw, which is still my favorite illustration tool. Small, simple and fast.

So that all happened yesterday. Hadn't planned it.  Also how I do comic book style illustrations. 

UPDATE: April 27 2023

So yesterday did this 2B pencil slightly cartooned sketch, then scanned and colored it. Didn't clean up  and ink the lines. A much more casual approach. A well known young music youtuber who just had his 61st birthday. I feel old, will be 65 next birthday...

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