Fuss, fuss, fuss: How this Tuatara drawing evolves

This terrific Tuatara illustrative design work evolves by focussing on the details, this is quite common

Surface Active Wildlife art – making waves in a sea of sameness.

To make digital art of New Zealand’s Tuatara, that has the look and feel of a natural line drawing, the editing, fussing process can take hours and while it isn’t easy it is a great deal of fun. I take pleasure in design and I enjoy using the computer to draw with the stylus, inking over the scan just as easily as I would with traditional pen and ink. The production of design work is an incredible drill when you are doing your utmost to make it terrific. I do my utmost to make sure that every design project I work on is mega.

I have been scanning at high resolution the back catalogue of our Surface Active Wildlife T-shirts artwork. This pen and ink drawing is one of the first that I illustrated for screenprinting with my design pARTner Chrissie Terpstra in our garment printing workshop back in the day.

To achieve a decent finished standard of art for reproduction the scans require detailed inking over in Photoshop using a stylus. A manual equivalent to inking over and scratching back the emulsion of the photolitho film shot from the original. This delivers nice clean and sharp line artwork that holds all detail in both shadow and highlight areas. This scan was made of the original drawing in Rotring® pent ink on Kodatrace® architectural drafting film. To ensure detail doesn’t go the way of Kodak in the scanning, a burst of light is back-projected through the film during the scan, this causes pin-holing in the solid areas of black ink and burns out delicate details.

Beautiful type makes a statement of its own; it adds elegance and attitude to my words; The tuatara is a two colour “pen & ink” wildlife art design printed using three dimensional “puff” inks.

‘Tuatara – Living fossil map’ two colour T-shirt print on black fabric using opaque and three dimensional puff inks.

The rigmarole of cleaning up the high-resolution-scanned Tuatara artwork drawing with a stylus as I would with natural media. The original pen and ink is about 30cm x 21cm.

Inking over the scan, removing dust and scratches from the shadow and highlight areas of my original pen and ink drawing with a stylus in Photoshop as I would with natural media.