I’m going to walk you through the process I took, from sketch to final illustration, to create the “Arcane Eye” graphic used in my card game, Mephisto. Here‘s an example of a Spell card:

Setup

All illustrations start with a sketch. Once I have a drawing worth developing, I scan the sketch (or just take a photo with your smart phone and upload it to your computer) and boot up Adobe Illustrator.

The Trace

My immediate goal is to create a line art version of the sketch. Once that’s done, the rest falls into place quite easily. For this piece, I intentionally drew it with large circular shapes — knowing that these will be easier to trace with the ellipse tool in illustrator.

Now I get to work drawing circles on top of every curve I see, holding SHIFT so that they are perfectly round. This part can be quite tedious, but it’s where the majority of the “work” lies. Any other shapes that aren’t perfectly circular are drawn with the pen tool manually.

Finding the path

Once I’ve traced all the lines of the sketch, it’s time to clean up the unnecessary parts and form a unified object. Using the “divide” function (in the pathfinder tool), I clip the intersecting lines and delete any excess pieces.

Now I can start messing with the stroke widths to get the thickness I want. After I feel the thickness is appropriate, I expand the strokes into fills and merge them together. This gives me one complete object instead of a bunch of separate lines, making it easier to fill with colors and add a rounding effect to the corners.

Expanded

Expanded and merged into one object

Rounding third base

Part of the style I’m using with this piece and the rest of the artwork for Mephisto is a “rounded point” effect. To achieve that effect I go through each corner and round them out manually (tedious, I know).

At this point I just need to fill in the colors, so I push the design though a square to get the exact shapes I need (like a cookie cutter!).

I make a copy of the eye graphic and then “minus front” to push it through the black square

I delete the excess pieces and now have the inner shapes that I can fill

Finishing Touches

With all of the shapes built, I simply fill them in with the colors I want and voila, were done!

As an aside I’m currently running a Kickstarter where you can get an “Arcane Eye” enamel pin or sticker. Please check it out!

If you found this process interesting or would like to see more of my work, you can follow me on:

Twitter: Dylan Mangini

Instagram: dietr_dangl

Portfolio website: dammdesigns.com