About

Hi, my name is Justin Michael (@Xuff on Twitter), and one day, toward the end of November 2011, I decided to start drawing the 5by5 show titles.

The Process

There are three four physical things involved in the creation of each illustration:

  1. A Silver Metallic Mini Sketch Book from Barnes & Noble.
  2. A Pilot Hi-Tec-C Cavalier Executive Gel Ink Pen - 0.4mm.
  3. An iPhone 4S.
  4. An iPad 2.

No computer, no scanner, nothing I can’t take with me everywhere I go (if I wish). The future: we are in it.

In addition to that, three four iOS apps are involved:

  1. Camera+ on the iPhone.
  2. ArtStudio Procreate on the iPad.
  3. Fix it for iPad on the iPad.
  4. Tumblr for iPhone on the iPhone.

The process is as follows:

  1. I draw the illustration in the sketchbook with the pen. I usually challenge myself to draw the whole thing, start to finish, on a single page in a single sitting, and go with whatever comes out. However, I occasionally reject the first draft as too horrible and start over again.
  2. I take a picture of the page with Camera+ using the flashlight mode, which keeps the flash LED on the iPhone constantly lit and gives me the lighting effect I’m looking for.
  3. Once the picture is in Camera+, I apply the Clarity scene effect, square crop it, and make it black & white, then export it to my camera roll.
  4. Now it’s on to Procreate on the iPad (iCloud’s Photo Stream gets the images back and forth with literally no effort on my part, which is awesome). I import the picture from the camera roll, position it, set the blend mode to multiply, then switch to the lower layer and start coloring.
  5. Once the flat colors are in I’ll make a new layer with opacity set to around 20-30% and paint in the shadows. Depending on the demands of the piece I might add additional layers for lighting or other special effects.
  6. When I’m satisfied I export the image to the camera roll, then open it up in Fix it for iPad to crop it to a square.
  7. The final step is opening the Tumblr app on the iPhone, making a new Photo post, pulling the final image out of the camera roll, putting in the appropriate text and metadata bits, and hitting Post.

That’s it! If you have any questions you can ask me here or ask me on Twitter.