How To Draw A Goalie In Six Easy Steps

I was asked recently to divulge how I go about making my illustrations, namely some that seem to be sharing a similar process and style of late. So here I'll describe how I went about creating the goalie I drew for Illustration Friday's recent glamour theme from a few weeks ago.

1) The Meeting Doodle – meetings can last an eternity. During one in January, for some reason I was picturing a hockey goalie so fat and immobile that he fills every inch of the net he's guarding – to the point that his dimensions are identical to the net, which is basically a square. I doodled a rough first attempt, but quit – since I think I was being watched.


2) The Sketch – later on, I put the idea to paper straight out of my head (above). There's not much I can draw this way – subject matter without reference material of some sort – but hockey players are one of them. I drew him in the style of "yesterday's player" than a modern-day goalie to enhance the fact he benefits more from girth (re: luck) than skill. This meant bulky pads, a few scars, a stick seemingly carved straight from the tree and no helmet. His rough shape and features were done first in pencil, then drawn over and detailed in pen and scanned into the computer.

3) Amendments – his face didn't work out the way I had imagined, but it's sealed in pen now and what can I do? That's my bad for not doing more in pencil right off the hop. I pulled out a few sheets of thinner paper, traced some outlines of his head and filled them in with a few stand-alone faces. The best one (right) was superimposed overtop of the image and merged in Photoshop by erasing away the bum parts of the original head. His shoulder-pads were also fixed to appear more symmetrical; the left shoulder was copied, flipped, pasted over the shorter right shoulder-pad (which was then erased) and merged with the rest of the figure. He was then pretty much ready to go (below).


4) Background – I knew the feel I wanted for this illustration from the get-go, in terms of colour and an overall look. In Photoshop, a texture backdrop was added first, made by blurring a photo I took of some rusted metal a few years ago (below). Any colours I used would then be subtle offshoots of this reddish-brown theme.


5) Colour – different parts of the goalie were 'painted over' with flat colours ranging from red to blue – to help differentiate the parts of his uniform – and saved as separate layers in overlay mode to blend with the background overtop of the base sketch layer (below).


6) Details – The illustration's words, arrow and other effects were added last. The words, even though part of the initial sketch, were cut early on, inverted to white and pasted in a separate layer for tweaking at the end. The arrow was built in Illustrator and added as its own layer. The white glow around the goalie was added late when I found the image as a whole was skewing too dark and muddy (below).


Once the image was finished, I added the scratchy frame effect – then changed my mind about the colour scheme and skewed the entire thing from rusty red to purple using hue shifts in Photoshop (below).