How I create a catalog cover illustration

[Al Agnew]

Well, I'm in the middle of doing my 6th Bass Pro Shop catalog cover of the year, and needed to take a break and thought I'd just post, for the fun of it, how I'm doing it.

I create these covers on the computer.  I have a Wacom Cintiq pen display with a screen about 13 X 18 inches that I use as my desktop monitor, and another smaller Wacom that I can use in other places with a laptop.  With these tablets I can draw directly on the screen with a "pen", actually a very smart stylus.  I use Photoshop and depend upon the Photoshop painting tools, especially the airbrush tool.  With it, I choose the color, degree of transparency, size of brush, even the shape of each stroke.  The display tablet is pressure sensitive, and I can set it where the harder I push down on the pen, the darker and/or wider the line or swath of color will be.  It is most like painting with colored pencils.  Of course, I can also incorporate parts of photos into the design.  Sometimes I do that, especially if I want a very involved background but don't have the time to spend creating such a background from scratch.  As for the fish, I usually create them completely by painting with the pen, without using photos of fish except sometimes for reference.  Other times I've been known to go out to the pond by the house, catch a bass, and "pose" it for a photo.  Unfortunately, I seldom catch a BIG bass out of my pond (lots of 10-15 inchers), so even if I have a good photograph of the bass I want to put into the design, I still have to modify the photo to make it look like a big bass--the big ones are proportioned differently than the smaller ones.

However, this cover is for their trout and fly fishing catalog, so I'm doing a rainbow.

For this one, instead of creating the trout from scratch, I decided to use this old design I did many years ago for reproducing on t shirts.  This original was done on paper with art pens, and as a t shirt design, it had to be very clear, with sharp lines and high contrasting colors.  It was not the same style I'd do for a finished painting, nor would it work as is for the catalog cover, but it was a good start because it already had all the details of scales, fin rays, head structures, etc.So I wouldn't have to take the time to redraw all those scales, which on trout are very time-consuming.  Of course, it would still require extensive modification to make it look like a painting and not a t shirt design.

As for the background, I didn't have a lot of time to spend on this design, so I decided to look through all the photos I've taken of trout streams and try to find something I could extract from a photo or two to use, with a little modification, for the backdrop to the fish.  I had to keep in mind that the parts of the design that are behind the BPS logo and title of the catalog have to be able to contrast well with those elements.  I found this photo of a nice rocky bank at the edge of a riffle on the Yellowstone River.  The trick here is to get the perspective right, though.  If I used the whole photo as the background, and put the trout in big enough to cover the main part of the image, the trout would either look like it was ten feet long, or jumping 8 feet out of the water.  So I had to select just a small part of the photo and blow it up to cover the background.  When I did that, I found that I didn't like that area of water behind the rocks...zooming in that close left me nothing but water behind the rocks, with the far bank outside the image.  I could have just moved that far bank down a bit, but I didn't really like the way that looked (one nice thing about composing in Photoshop like this is that you can just cut out a piece of a photo and move it around to other parts of the photo.)So instead, I went searching for another of my photos that I could splice into the background.  I found this one:

Now, I needed to flip the trout horizontally to make it work better with the cover copy, and when I did that I found I also needed to flip the elements of both photos I was using to make a better composition.  I selected a small piece on the right edge of the rocks, flipped it, blew it up, and made the foreground.  Then I selected another small piece on the left side of the other photo for the background bank, and decided I DIDN'T need to flip it.  I played around with the size of the pieces of the two photos until I had them the way that looked the best to me.  Then, I had to modify the colors of the photos so that they matched and made the background look like one image and not two spliced images, and after that, I decided to modify the bank area by blurring it somewhat to make it recede further into the background, and paint over the water and rocks, both where the two photos came together and over the rest of the image, to get rid of a lot of the "noise" inherent to blow-ups of photos and smooth out the water, plus add some details to wavelets and rocks.  I even stretched one of the background rocks to make it look better to my eyes.  So this is what resulted...the background is now pretty much finished:

I've been working on the trout, and will get back into it now.  When I'm closer to being finished with it I'll post what it looks like.  Hope everybody enjoys this little window into my creative process.

[Daryk Campbell Sr]

Very nice of you to show us your ways. 

[Al Agnew]

Okay, I've now gotten a lot farther along on the trout.  Rainbow trout, like most fish species, vary a lot in coloration depending upon their native stream, the time of year, water conditions, and just individual differences.  So I had this photo of a nice rainbow I caught on the Missouri River in Montana, and I really liked its coloration, plus it was in more of less the same light conditions as in the background of the design.  So I decided to use it as my reference for the colors of my trout:

Compare that to the colors on my original t shirt design:

So first I had to darken and enrich the colors by adding a lot more color, but transparently so the scale details still showed through--note that I've also begun to add more black spots at this point:

Here is the fish with most of the colors added to body and fins, except for bright white highlights, which is where I am now with it.  Note also, when comparing to the original t shirt design, I made some structural changes.  I lengthened the upper and lower jaw, and shortened the tail portion.

 

 

 

[Al Agnew]

Here is a closeup of a portion of the side of the original design, and my modifications.  Note the number of colors added to each scale.  This might look like it would take forever, but actually for each color you see, I can do about two scales per second, because I'm not carefully trying to make each stroke exact.  Plus, when "painting" on the computer, you don't have to keep dipping your brush in the paint!

[Al Agnew]

Okay...the highlights on the trout are now finished.  Note the sheen on the back which actually a reflection of the sky on the slimy, wet surface of its back.  Fish out of the water show these reflections, and in fact, that wet slime will reflect almost like a cloudy mirror, though it mainly reflects anything that is considerably lighter than the body color underneath it.  Fish underwater, on the other hand, do not reflect with a sheen like this.  I've painted a few fish lying in a couple inches of water, and I have to be cognizant of this...the parts of the fish that are out of the water reflect that sheen, while the underwater parts don't.  At this point, it's all done by the splash and water droplets...but that is one of the most tedious parts of painting an image like this.

[fshndoug]

way cool

 

[Al Agnew]

Just finished it.  Splash and water droplets took much of the afternoon.  Each droplet has an outline and three colors, except for the smallest ones, so it takes some time to do them.  Sorry about the copyright notice splashed across the painting, but it makes it a little more difficult for people to steal the design.  Look for it on the BPS fly fishing catalog, coming out in another month or so.

[fishinwrench]

I love seeing how people do their work, and showing how I do mine.  

Looks awesome, Al

This is like career day at OAF 

[ness]

Very cool!!

[MoCarp]

you sir have a gift