Fordoing

First off sketch your characters/dogs in Photoshop if you have a Wacom or sketch on paper and scan in your drawings. After I had my pack of sketched Husky’s I dragged them across into Illustrator to colour in.

I always sketch a full layout of what I want my final piece to look like then take a little longer on sketching each character.

Depending how much you can envisage your finished characters depends on the quality of the sketches you want to work from.

First I overlaid the main base colour vectors onto my sketch lowering the opacity on each layer to show my sketch and each individual layer underneath.

You can use gradients on your layers but I chose to keep this husky pretty simple and block coloured. Adding small lighter/darker streaks of hair to the dog will add a little texture to your character.

Keeping your colours bright does make your character stand out a lot more. If you are using greys like in this illustration try and keep them all highly contrasting to each other. After creating pretty much hundreds of vector layers on this Husky I was done with him.

You can check out my final piece below with 4 husky’s and even a sled. These illustrations took me in total around 9 hours.