Posts Tagged ‘Illustration’
Bicycle Girl Illustration
ENTRY DATE: Friday, December 4th, 2009
Close-up showing the linework close to actual size.
Full illustration. Click on the image view it large.
Here’s an example of an illustration style I’m trying on. I drew the outlines with one No. 2 pencil and many sheets of tracing and layout paper. To get the detail in the face and bicycle parts I worked large, breaking the drawing into parts. I then scanned the parts in, reassembled them in Photoshop and brought in a few textures from a texture library I’ve been building over time. After I added the color blocks, I spent a good while tweaking the color palette and finessing the layer transparencies.
Color-wise, this could easily have been a springtime or fall scene (or a winter one if not for the flowers and sundress) but I ended going with a warm, golden, end-of-summer look. Which is nice to reminisce about when the frost on our deck is barely melting during the day.
Textural Vector Illustrations
ENTRY DATE: Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
Building on the theme of my last post, I decided to try out a new technique combining textural elements with gradients in Adobe Illustrator. The wood grain element and grainy Popsicle texture are auto-traces of a couple of scanned images, whereas the Popsicle’s shading is achieved with Illustrator’s gradient mesh tool, a powerful way to add a dose of realism to your artwork.
I also incorporated transparency and ink effects to mimic glazing techniques often used in oil and water color paintings. The resulting illustration is somewhat complex and would likely need to be converted to a different file format for printing. But I think the visual effect is interesting, and I plan to explore simplified combinations of textures and gradients in some upcoming illustrations. And as always, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, feel free to comment!
The Joy of Hand-rendered Vector Art
ENTRY DATE: Thursday, October 15th, 2009
One of the beefs I have with a lot of vector art is that it often looks like, well, vector art. Too “computer-y”. In the right hands, the gradients and other flashy tools provided by programs like Adobe Illustrator can be used to great effect, especially for information graphics. But these tools also make it easy to create overly decorated work that lacks the warmth of a hand-rendered illustration.
Fortunately, Illustrator also provides tools that help you turn your napkin sketch into vector art without digitizing the life out of it. I sketched this spot illustration with a marker brush, creating large-stroke drawing for the bird plus a batch of pencil outlines for the color blocks. I then scanned the pieces and outlined them with Illustrator’s Live Trace tool, using different settings for the thick brush strokes versus the thin color outlines.
After combining the resulting vector outlines, I was able to play with color until I developed a palette I liked. To me this is one of the major benefits of vector art. I can explore and change color quickly, testing ideas and keeping multiple copies of variations I can go back to later. And if a client needs a change, I can work more quickly and efficiently with a vector file, without having to go back to the napkin.
A cleaned-up version of the brush drawing.
Final spot illustration.
Outlines for the color blocks.