Check, Please! Y4 Kickstarter illustration process [part 1]

Have you heard of Check, Please! ? I'd be very surprised if you haven't! It's a webcomic about a gay college hockey player who bakes pies and tries his hardest not to get checked (among many other things!!) It's written and drawn by my good friend Ngozi, and is totally free to read online! https://www.checkpleasecomic.com/ 

Over the years, Ngozi has been kind enough to commission me for a postcard print for every Check, Please! kickstarter! Here are my offerings: 

Boy this art looks old! 

That brings us to Year 4, which Kickstarted earlier this year! 

Ngozi decided my birthday was coming early this year and let me, nay, ENCOURAGED ME to draw a fish market, my one true love (sorry to my husband.) 

So, I thought it'd be fun to take you through my process of making this illustration. IN PAINSTAKING DETAIL. 

As far as I know, backgrounds are a dicey subject for many artists. Somehow I have managed to push through a general fear of detailed environments, maybe because Sakana takes place in such a specific area? The background really has to become another recognizable character in the comic. Do not fear complicated settings! With the right tools and a can-do attitude, ANY LEVEL OF DETAIL IS POSSIBLE. 

First, I sent Ngozi a few ideas for the illustration and asked for her feedback! 

We both agreed the Barbarella idea should be tucked away for a future illustration, but ultimately she chose option #1 with some alternate suggestions: change the characters to the Frog trio and put them in a fish market instead of a farmer's market. Maybe the perfect idea??? My experience drawing fish markets is almost exclusively through at Tsukiji lens, but the characters live in New England in the US, so I had to go looking for some new reference material! 

HERE'S WHERE I'LL GIVE YOU MY OPINIONS ON REFERENCE MATERIAL AND TRACING. 

• Reference is crucial for both real world and fantasy settings. Even if you've totally made something up in your head, 9 times out of 10 it will look BETTER if it's at least a little referenced from real world objects, people, or locations. 
• If you've taken a picture of something, it is 100% fine to trace your own picture as-is. HOWEVER, something 100% traced with no edits to detail or perspective will usually LOOK very traced. Even learning how to TRACE reference is a skill that needs to be developed. But in the end, there's only so much time you want to devote to learning how to draw a car or a horse, after all. YOU ONLY HAVE ONE LIFE TO LIVE. 
• If you have a bunch of reference images you DIDN'T TAKE, it's fine to bash them together into something new and totally unlike the individual pieces, and trace that. What I mean is typically called "photobashing" or something to that effect, and is a pretty common technique in concept art. 

I didn't have the time or money to travel around the world to see other fish markets (AND ALSO THERE WAS A PANDEMIC) so I found some helpful reference images and mixed them with an image I myself had taken on a trip to the Tsukiji market in 2010. 

Then I photobashed a really terrible-looking background! 

As you can see, this is pretty unrecognizable as any one of those images that I do not own, I think that's really important when you're incorporating outside reference into your work! 

I had a really specific idea in mind for the background of the farmer's market image, which was pretty easy to translate to a fish market setting. What I'm most interested in is creating the perspective lines in the environment I'm about to draw, for some reason that's the thing I have the most trouble figuring out from scratch! I think it's helpful to keep in mind what your common sticking points in art can be, and try and figure out how to use reference material to puzzle it out. 

Then I threw some dudes in there: 

AND THEN I WAS FINISHED no just kidding, there's still a lot more work to go lol. But I think that's it for Part 1 of this process! I hope this was an informative look into how I use and abuse reference images as part of my illustration process. Next I'll go into turning this disgusting pile of stretched and resized garbage into something I could actually get paid for! 

If you  have any questions about this part of the process, or would like me to speak more on anything, please let me know! Was this helpful? Do you use any similar techniques??  

<3 Mad