Simon Lissaman describes how he meticulously depicted a sleek and mean cartoon killing machine. Lissaman has created the archetypical razor-toothed shark through deft use of Photoshop combined with his own painting ability.

In the beginning
‘Shark Encounter' started out as a random doodle in my sketch book. I'd originally seen the shark leaping out of the water onto a boat or something, but thought I'd do an underwater scene to try out a few ideas. I wanted the piece to show off all the things we associate with sharks, the tall fin, the teeth like broken bottles, but do it in a fun, cartoon-style way.

Sketching
I generally scan my drawings at 600 dpi so that I can enlarge the drawing in Photoshop without compromising quality.

Rendering
I use a Wacom Intuous 6 x 8 graphics tablet for all my Photoshop work. There are very talented individuals out there who can paint with a mouse, but I'm not one of them.

My first step was to create the outline of the shark using the pen tool. After rasterizing the shape, I lock off the transparency and duplicate the layer. The original shark shape layer is hidden and is used as a mask when necessary.

One of the methods I use is to do a detailed greyscale rendering which I later color. This is a very useful technique that allows you to concentrate on your tonal range without being distracted by color. I fill the shark shape with a medium gray, duplicate the drawing layer and move it to the top of the stack. I set it to multiply at about 10-20% opacity. This gives me a faint outline that I can use to trace.

Using the same medium gray with the default 50% airbrush set to Screen blending, I get to work modeling the form. The same airbrush, set to multiply, gives me my shading. Once the big areas of light and shade are done, I head in to do the detailing, such as the eye, gills, wrinkles etc. I use the multiply airbrush at around 3-5 pixels to rapidly outline the features. I then set the airbrush to screen and cut in some highlights. This is a fairly fast and loose process, and I gradually reduce the opacity of the drawing layer as the painting becomes more detailed. I use the path tool to create the teeth. Sharks have multiple rows of teeth, so I created the rows on separate layers to ease shading.

For the lighter area on the shark's belly and around its mouth, I used the lasso tool to select the area and lightened it using the dodge tool. Lost contrast was then cut back in using my airbrush tool.

When I have finished the greyscale rendering (Fig 1), I create a new layer above it using the greyscale layer's transparency. I set this layer to ‘Color' and flood fill with a mid blue. I play around with the saturation until I get a pleasing result. A faint pink is airbrushed over the mouth and eye area (Fig 2) and the shark is basically complete (Fig 3).