evolution of a doodle

I’m craving sushi, and had it in my head to do this pop-art sushi squares print.

My process has evolved a bit; I used to draw in color from the start, filling in shapes as soon as I’d outlined them. Now I tend to draw outlines and fill in with color later. I’ve found that makes it easier to try on multiple color schemes (especially for patterns) and helps me focus on the shapes and composition. Sometimes I also like the black and white version enough to save it as a separate version.

It starts out like this; a really, really rough sketch:

Unfortunately I forgot to screenshot the semi-finished outline this time. It looks something like this, but much less polished:

Once I have the general composition down, I start playing around with colors, stroke widths, shapes, and opacity:

Then comes the part where I tweak everything for hours. 😛 Lots of smoothing out rough curves and joining endpoints. In this case, I didn’t like the lack of detail in the wasabi, so I redrew it. I also swapped a couple blocks around for visual interest. And here’s the finished version: