Bernie - before and after

On the left, you can see my original sketch of Bernie, exactly as he was drawn... with a Paper Mate Flair pen in my Bee Paper Company Globetrotter sketchbook (I'm addicted to both Flair pens and Bee's 80 lb. paper!!!).

I scanned in the sketch as a bitmap (a.k.a. black and white a.k.a. lineart) at 1200 dpi. I do that so I can go in and isolate the crisp blacks and delete away any white space. Why?

Because of what you see on the right, the finished version of this character. I molded Bernie's lineart into a more sleek and proportioned final product. I shaved down the lines, shrunk his body a bit, shrunk his head even more, and tweaked some of the angles on his body. That's easier to do when you can manipulate the black lines without any white space getting in the way.

Here's the final colored version of Bernie that appeared in Super Haters: [link]