How to draw a monster using Illustrator

Welcome to Through The Looking Glass – a blog about how Creativity + Business = Win. In other words, how You can make money by doing the things You love, and the other way around. My name is Sebastian Sjoberg, originally from Sweden but nowadays living and working in London, Great Britain. Feel very free to join me on Twitter.

More to the point, here I would like to share with You the things I know and have yet to learn about how to apply creative skills together with business sense in order to achieve success. The content will evolve around the use of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and other aspects of graphic design – and then how to put it into practice.

We will deal with how to develop images for print on t-shirts as well as for electronic and regular books. We will explore how to create photos and graphic art for the purpose of microstock and advertising, and a lot more. I will produce helpful tutorials that will explain how to use the various tools to Your best benefit, how and where to get them cheaply if not for free – and how to make Your creativity into Your business.

In this first article, I will use as an example from my latest commissioned work – provided by the gaming-tshirt store www.thehandsomenerd.com. We will draw a monster from scratch with the purpose of making it into a t-shirt print. There are a lot of things to consider when designing art for that particular medium – it has to be fairly simple and often monochrome. Also, this character is based on art that is the intellectual property of a company – which is why we cannot simply take the existing image and modify it.

Instead, we must do it all from scratch, and for some of us who can’t really draw (myself very much included), that can be a daunting task. Luckily, there is Adobe Illustrator.

Most of the articles featured on this blog will make us of the latest versions of Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator. These programs are quite expensive, but also available for a free 30-day trial. Click here to download the Creative Suite and use it along with the tutorials of this blog, and then see if it’s worth the investment for You.

This tutorial is based on my own personal set-up of Illustrator, and You might prefer to use a different one. However, I arrange my work space like this: From the top menu, choose Window -> Workspace -> Like Photoshop.

All good work starts with proper foundations, and that’s what we will achieve by using Illustrator. The monster will be drawn directly from the front, i.e. all shapes will be completely symmetrical, at least initially. That is why we will only draw one half of it, and then copy that and flip it in order to make the whole creature.

Start a new file with a resolution of 2000 by 2000 pixels – just to have some room to work with. Then, choose the Pen Tool, which is one of the single most powerful tools in both Illustrator and Photoshop, and by which we will make this entire drawing.

While holding down Your shift-key, click on the top middle of the art board with the Pen Tool (shortcut -P), and click again below at the bottom of the board. A completely straight line now appears. Click at View in the top panel, scroll down to Guides, click Make Guide. This will make the dividing line into a Guide that will enable us to draw half of the creature, and then copy it to make a whole one.

Using this image as our inspiration, we are now going to create a monochrome and much simplified version of our own. In the end, that will look quite cool too.

Starting with the head of the monster, we will now do some Pen Tool-magic. Given that the entire creature consist of different rounded shapes, it would be difficult to get everything even, if not for the Guide we just made. If You are completely new to using the Pen Tool, which comes with a bit of a learning curve, fear not: in this video by the renowned Photoshop-guru Bert Monroy, he will explain and show what it can do and how to do it.

First of all, create a new Layer. Double-click on it and in the dialogue box that appears, give it an appropriate name, such ‘head’.

Now, with the head-layer selected, place Your mouse pointer (with the Pen Tool selected) on the guide somewhere slightly above the middle. Click and drag towards the left side (or whichever one You prefer) at a downwards angle. Then click again further down. This will generate two Anchor Points with a Path in between them. Such Paths will make up the entire basics of our drawing, because they are extremely easy to change and manipulate – and when You’re satisfied You can stroke and fill them with the colour of Your choice.

In this stage, we are drawing the outlines of the monster’s head. The way I’ve done it, the shape only have to consist of nine Anchor points (which we will then copy and make it into a horizontal reflection – creating a symmetrical outline of the entire head). In order to get it right, we place our Anchor Points correctly and then adjust the angles of the Paths accordingly. This can be easily achieved by using the Direct Selection Tool.

As already mentioned, the Pen Tool takes some getting used to. This exercise is however excellent for learning this, but if You feel completely lost I would again like to refer You to Bert Monroy’s excellent video-guide. There he uses the Pen Tool in Photoshop and not Illustrator, but the mechanics are identical in both of the programs.

With the Direct Selection Tool, we may click on the Anchor Points of our Path and adjust their positions or adjust their Handles – which determine the curvature and length of Paths in between the point. We might also want to add or remove Anchor Points from the Path, which can be easily achieved by using the Add Anchor Point- and Delete Anchor Point-tools which are hidden under the Pen Tool-button.

When we are happy with the shape of the first half of our monster’s head, it’s time to copy it and complete the head. Use the Selection Tool (not the Direct Selection Tool) and click on the path. Then copy it (top menu -> Edit -> Copy, or Command+C on a Mac / Ctrl+C on a PC) and paste it (Edit -> Paste, Command+V / Ctrl+V). A new identical Path should appear on Your art board. Right-click on it, choose Transform -> Reflect -> leave default settings (which should be 90 degrees) -> click OK.

Now, since we have that handy Guide, we just need to position our new copy of the original Path next to the original one. If You’re unsure on whether You’ve got it right, just zoom in a bit and turn off the Guide (View -> Guides -> Hide Guides). It might also be helpful to move Your Path around with the arrow keys on the keyboard rather the mouse, for increased accuracy.

When the two paths are lined up the way you want them to be, we need to join them together to create one united shape. Again, this might be more easily achieved if You have zoomed in a bit. Choose the Direction Selection Tool again (shortcut – A) and drag a box (just left-click and hold down) that will encompass only those Anchor Points that are at the both ends of our two shapes, like shown below.

Then right-click, choose Join (depending on the shape of Your Paths, Illustrator might ask You whether to join them as Corners or Smooth – which varies based on how You have shaped the head). Repeat the same actions for the other two end points of our shape. Now the outline of our head is complete, but should we want to change it later – no problem. The Selection Tools will enable us go back and adapt them at any time.

In order to give our monster some more oomph and making it easier for us to see what we’re doing, let’s give the path a stroke of colour and maybe even a filling colour. Having selected the path with the Selection Tool (shortcut – A), we go to the Appearance Menu and choose a colour and a width of our stroke. Depending on the resolution and other parameters of Your image, You will need to choose a thickness of the stroke that suits You. If You want to fill the Path with a colour, You do so here as well.

These steps will be repeated for each segment of our monster, all in a new Layer. It is immensely helpful to always organise every new part of a drawing in separate layers, in both Photoshop and Illustrator. For example, when we in the next step are going to create the body, we do so in a new layer that is placed below the head-layer (move them in order by clicking and dragging). That way, the head will appear on top of the body. However, it might be in the way when we are drawing the body, which is why we may want to turn of the visibility of the head-layer temporarily:

The pictures below will quickly show how I created the other elements of the monster, by using the very same techniques as before.

In order to give our creature some more character while still sticking to the monochrome theme, we must give it some shading. In new layers, on top of the respective layers, we may choose to give some parts of the head, body, arms and tail a bit of shadow. Herein lies a bit more of artistic creation, since we must shape convincing shadows using only single blobs of colour, so as to give our monster a touch of 3D-illusion.

My finished version looks like this. Hardly a Picasso, but on the other hand a basic concept that with some further Photoshop-magic is very well suited for being printed on t-shirts. Below are my finished sketches of this monster and two other characters, and how I imagine that they could look as finished shirts.

In the next tutorial, we will colorise our monster, making it into a more alive and frightening character, with a comic-book feel.

Did You find this Illustrator tutorial useful? To long, to weird, to boring – or helpful? I value every comment and all feedback, and would greatly appreciate to hear what You have to say. Also feel free to follow me on Twitter for more updates and conversation