Summer Boys illustrations and breakdown / tutorial

The sun is coming back to Portland and people are coming out of hibernation...!  I got to go to dinner with some good friends from high school last night, and when I got back to my studio, I was super inspired.  I ended up staying downtown 5 more hours to work on a series of Summer Boys!

People have expressed interest in breakdowns/tutorials when I post illustrations, so here's a little information about the method I was using on these pieces~

I recently downloaded this set of Photoshop brush presets from JP Vine for the animation storyboarding I've been doing this year. (I love it -- highly recommended!) For these illustrations I used 2 presets from the pack: [BLACK] PENCIL and GRAPHITE POWDER.  The rest was drawn with the good ol' Photoshop pencil tool.

 So here's the line art, just drawn with that brush preset [BLACK] PENCIL (7 pixels).  Loose, gestural, imperfect, and zoomed out at 50% for most of it.

 On a layer below the line art, I used the pencil tool to roughly trace the interior of the figure with some color.

On a layer above the color layer and below the line art layer, I used the [BLACK] PENCIL brush preset (after increasing the brush to 80 pixels and selecting a warm gray color) to add some shadows.  I kept the brush strokes large and a little abstract, trying to mimic what I do in my sketchbooks with the Pentel pocket brush pen:

 Next I added a layer above the color and shadow layer but still below the line art called "texture".  I used the GRAPHITE POWDER brush preset (increased to 1300 pixels) to add some texture all over the illustration.  Then I set the layer mode to "color burn" so it only affected the colored areas and the background stayed completely white.

Ta-da~~~~