Painting Process - SpongeBob Cover Art for Nick Magazine

The March issue of Nickelodeon magazine has finally hit the stands. A couple of months ago, I painted this cover image, and I've been eagerly waiting for it to come out because I think it's my favorite painting so far.

The concept from the editor was something like, "SpongeBob and Patrick are chewing bubblegum." There was no real gag idea yet, so I played with a bunch of different ideas before settling on this one:

Once the editor approved the sketch,
I tightened up the drawing in pencil.

Here's a screen capture from when I was inking the drawing in Adobe Illustrator. If you click on the image below, you can see a full-size version of my desktop at the time.

click on images to see a full-sized screen capture of my workspace

After inking in Illustrator, I exported the line art into Photoshop.

click on images to see a full-sized screen capture of my workspace

In Photoshop, I split up the drawing into layers and colored the outlines on SpongeBob and Patrick. Then I saved it and imported it into my favorite painting application, ArtRage 2.5. In this screen grab, I'm blending the colors for Patrick and his pants.

click on images to see a full-sized screen capture of my workspace

This close-up from the ArtRage interface shows a little more detail about how I apply the paint. You can see that I have a reference image open so that I never stray too far from SpongeBob's standard colors. I like to play around and get really sloppy with the digital paint because I know I can always press undo. If I go too far.

click on images to see a full-sized screen capture of my workspace

This is where I start laying in the colors for the sky. The bubble gum will have to wait until I bring it back into Photoshop. Normally I avoid the airbrush tool like the plague, but for painting bubblegum bubbles, it seemed to be the appropriate choice.

Back in Photoshop, I'm drawing the clouds in the sky. That little white scribbles underneath the red cloud is just a guideline. I set down before or using a Photoshop paintbrush to draw the cloud shape. I used a gaussian blur to push the clouds back into the distance.

click on images to see a full-sized screen capture of my workspace

It took quite a while to get those bubbles to look like real bubblegum. Trust me when I tell you that I was looking at dozens of reference photographs to try to capture the right transparency, highlights and shadows.

click on images to see a full-sized screen capture of my workspace

I keep almost all of my elements on separate layers so that the art director can move things around as needed. I also paint way outside the planned crop marks, which gives them a lot of freedom to resize things if they want to. So the finished cover always looks a little bit different than the original.

This was just a brief overview, but in about a week I'll go back into the process from the beginning and show you all the different rough sketches that I worked on during the idea phase. This time around, I used screen recording software to record the entire painting process from start to finish. If you all are interested, I can go into as much detail as you can stand -- so let me know if you want more!

UPDATE! The first Tutorial Videos are posted!

here are the first eleven
Adobe Illustrator Cartoon Inking
tutorial videos:

#1 - How to Set Up and Import Images

#2 - Palette Options and Settings

#3 - Freehand Calligraphic BRUSH Tool

#4 - We Start INKING in Illustrator!

#5 - How to Use Shapes & Ellipse Tool

#6 - How to Use Illustrator Graphic Styles

#7 - Working With Reshape Tool and Layers

#8 - Arrange, Transform, Reflect in Action

#9 - Picking Up The Pace

#10 - Finishing SpongeBob Inking

#11 - Illustrator Inking Finale

Keep checking this list of tutorial videos for more!

UPDATE #2: ArtRage tutorial Videos have begun!
Click on image above to jump to the ArtRage Tutorial Videos

ArtRage #1 - Intro to ArtRage 2.5
ArtRage #2 - Mixing Colors on the Canvas
ArtRage #3 Painting Reflective Light
ArtRage #4 - More Reflective Light & Colors