Monster Monday: Weekly Monster & Creature Sketch & Illustration Blog

For this “Igor” type character (the trusty Mad Scientist lab assistant guy), I started out with a sketch from an evil clown character I created a few years ago. I wanted to work with some new painting styles in Adobe Photoshop, specifically staying away from the Dodge/Burn tools as they seemed to render colors with too much saturation, and in general are a poor excuse for building color, shading and highlights on your own.

I started out with the head from an existing sketch so I didn’t have to bog myself down in creating something from scratch when really I wanted to experiment with coloring and painting in Photoshop. The evil clown sketch had a nice creepy character head/face, so I thought it was a good launching point.

The base colors were laid down on a separate layer, as were the shading and highlight layers. Hair and background also on separate layers. The body was just roughly worked up to keep the head from being a floating object.

Looking at him now, I am thinking he might have been better as a graveyard keeper, with an appropriately spooky latern instead of the test tube he’s holding.

I went for high-contrast dramatic lighting, and reworked the shading and highlights many times as I was experimenting. Brush was nothing fancy, just the standard Photoshop painting brush at very low opacity and set to use the pressure sensitivity of the Wacom Intuos3 tablet.

I think I could have gone into more detail, especially on the lips and the body, but I didn’t want to overwork the sketch while I was experiementing. I think I hit a nice stopping point and decided to share as-is. Perhaps I will revisit Igor sometime in the future.

Visit George Coghill’s cartooning & humorous illustration portfolio.

-- This Monster Monday monster was created by George Coghill

If you enjoyed this artwork, please let the artist know and sound off in the Comments below. Thanks!

Last 5 posts by George Coghill

• Oblong Ogre - January 5th, 2009
• Green Grimace - December 15th, 2008
• Cap'n Clobber - December 1st, 2008
• Orange Crush - November 24th, 2008
• Yellow Bellow - November 10th, 2008