Rats!

A few months back, my uncle asked me if I would create a rat design to be painted on his new rat rod (it's a style of hot rod/custom car). I said sure! We threw around ideas and I sent him some sketches. I've been wanting to do a process post for a while, so I thought this would be a great time. I love to see how different artists work. This is how I start most illustrations, whether for a client or personal.

I started out by looking at all kinds of rat pictures on Google image search. At this point I was just trying to get a feel for what an actual rat looks like. After looking at those for a while, I sat down with my sketchbook and did some quick, very rough sketches from memory. My main focus was just to play with some "rat-like" shapes. Most of these were drawn in pen. A couple of them were done on my iPad.

Here are a few of the initial sketches:

After doing some more of this sort of thing, I moved on to the sketches I would send my uncle. He wasn't entirely sure what kind of rat he wanted. Would he look friendly? Or would he have a rougher appearance? I worked through some different drawings and picked four sketches to send to my uncle and aunt.

Drawn on my Cintiq. Trying to get a feel for the direction they wanted to go with the design:

Once they picked out a sketch they liked, I took it into Sketchbook Pro. I created a new layer above the sketch (I also put it off to the side so I could reference it) and started to draw over it, trying to define shapes and strengthen the design:

After getting the drawing close to where I wanted it, I put a new layer on top and cleaned up the linework. Even at this point, I'm making changes and adjusting the drawing:

Here's the final linework:

And with color:

Of course, there were other little steps in between all these, but hopefully it gives you some idea of the process.