Introduction

Hi there! My name is Ken Barthelmey, and I am a 22 year old freelance illustrator and concept artist. In this tutorial I will talk about the working process I used to create my latest picture, Where is the Yum Yum???.

The picture shows a funny T-Rex searching for his food. It was my intention to create a perfect balance between realism, characterization and humor.

Sketching

At the beginning, I usually create several thumbnails to find a good composition (Fig.01). I finished the dinosaur drawing itself a long time ago and when I came across it again, I thought it would be good enough to justify making an illustration with the dinosaur as the focus.



I began to make a couple of environment sketches. It's very useful to make a lot of pencil sketches first. You can put them together afterwards in Photoshop (Fig.02). The sketch sort of serves as a guideline, thus it's easier for me to color the picture afterwards.