Gramps

I felt like tooling around in Illustrator. I sketched with the pencil tool with the stroke color well set to a light blue (since apparently CS3 and CS4 regressed from being able to apply transparency effects on the go to the pencil and pen tools). I then used the a calligraphy brush to “ink” the pencils.

I double-clicked the brush icon to adjust the tool preferences and left the “edit selected strokes” option checked. This can be greatly irirating to use since when starting a new stroke near a selected stroke, the selected stroke may disappear. The keyboard shortcut command+shift=+A deselects all artwork in the document so when drawing with the “edit selected strokes” pref checked, keep your non-drawing hand on the keyboard.

After the basic inking, I created a custom artbrush (football shaped) and applied it to the strokes, adjusting the weight of some.

I imported the whole shebang into Photoshop and added some color and texture.

The Bugs of Christmas

My wife wrote a series of short stories for a Christmas present. I whipped out a few illustrations in CS4 to include with them. Here are three excerpts which I quickly colored in Photoshop. Merry Christmas!

Watercolored Matron

Yeti in a Snowstorm

Sketched in pencil, vector inkedin Illustrator, colored and textured in Photoshop.

The Prisoner

I began with a free flowing action line that I thought was going to be a guy jumping and clicking his heels together. When I got to the arms however, the prisoner idea became more clear.

Family Digital Quicksketch

I thought it would be fun to attempt to corner various members of my family and sketch them using my wacom tablet and Illustrator. Mmmm, digital media. As much as I really want Illustrator to work out as a tool, the workflow is not always conducive to an organic approach. This is one more attempt to be playful and work with speed.

Crash Landing

I got inspired to do a rapid “cover-image-like” drawing with my Niji. I did 3 quick 1-inch thumbnails to work out the scene, inking the favorite.

I redrew a more detailed image and inked it.

I thought it would be fun to color the scene with rudimentary flats, but instead of coloring in Photoshop, I overlayed a sheet of layout paper on the inked final and colored with pencils.

I assemble the two pieces of artwork in Photoshop, setting the inked artwork above the colored layer, blending mode set to multiply.

Finally, I messed around black and white layers set to multiply and screen and added a few color fixes.

The whole process took around 90 minutes.