I was recently asked over on Facebook how I came up with ideas, so here is my process on a current project. The assignment; come up with five underwater scenes for a game. The first thing I do is start sketching rough little ideas that pop into my head related to the subject.

The pirate crab looking through a telescope grabs my attention, so I head off in that direction. What can I add to that to create a scene? What sort of underwater props can I use? Well duh, a cannon, of course… and there would need to be a whole band of these crazy pirate crabs… and they have to be pillaging and terrorizing somebody (in a friendly way, of course)… and magically, somehow, the underwater pirate crab scene unfolds beneath my pencil.

I lay a fresh piece of paper over my blue pencil sketch and using a light table, I create a cleaner pencil drawing to work from.

I scan the clean pencil drawing into Photoshop and away we go…