Stranger Things
Shortly after I binged watched the first season of Stranger Things, I found myself working for myself, freelancing full-time. I decided to have some fun and create a fun series of illustrations inspired by my new favorite show.
This project was a lot of fun for me to not only create but also to share with everyone. It has led to countless partnerships and collaborations and I'm excited to add more to this series in the future.
The First Stranger Things Doodle
The very same day that I finished the series, I created this fun little doodle of one of the show's main characters "Eleven". It was a super quick digital illustration that I shared on Dribbble and other social avenues and it received a great reception.
After that though I decided that I wanted to not only make a better version of the illustration but I also wanted to expand upon it and the cast.
So I set out sketching out a bunch of the characters, primarily my favorite ones. I think I actually ended up drawing about a dozen characters from the show but ended up just sticking to 8 in total... for now.
You'll see below 5 of the original sketches that I did. These were all done with pencil and paper and were then just brought into Adobe Illustrator where I inked them.
I ended having a blast in just doing the inking process on these characters. I was able to push my illustration skills and the limitations of the software itself to its breaking points many times over.
A lot of illustrators that I know, would normally doing this type of line-work in Photoshop but being a big fan of Illustrator, I decided to do it solely in my native software.
[Above] You can see a little snippet of the actual linework progress, sped up of course. [Below] You can see a real progression of the original sketch to the linework, creating the values and then finally coloring and shading.
The Final Illustration
When everything was said and done, I ended up going back and redoing the color and composition 3 times till I felt like it was just right. Eventually, because I created this piece I was asked to be apart of a "Stranger Things Pop-Up Show" in Anaheim, CA. Almost right across the way from Disneyland.
