Sometimes I take an assignment that is very different from my usual work for children, and it can provide a refreshing break. In this case, I was asked to depict a barbeque grill from a photograph — I needed to clean up the image and drop out the background.

I decided to draw the grill and add tone and depth digitally, using techniques I learned back in the old days as airbrush: we would cut frisket (like giant scotch tape) with x-acto knives to open some areas of the artwork and mask others. It was tedious compared with today’s digital tools, and much harder to correct a mistake.

I traced the photo, and then produced a clean, more precise pencil drawing, which I scanned into Photoshop.

Then it was a matter of using Photoshop to select areas of the drawing and create the colors and tones the way I learned when using an airbrush, only with much less mess and stress!