Illustration Friday meme: Space!

 Songbird

Bluebird

I made sure to leave a lot of space around the birds so they'd stand out. :)
Just working with simple shapes and colors.  Ever see any of the Ed Emberley drawing books?  As a kid I loved how he could create anything from a horse to a pirate ship with just the simplest shapes. :D

Adobe Illustrator CS2

Illustration Friday-- Mail

Adobe Illustrator CS2
Tried my best to just use simplified shapes and concentrate on design, color, and composition. :)

Illustration Friday-- Sneaky

Moroccan Mark/Adobe Illustrator
This man looks like he could be a little sneaky. :) Actually, this was a friend's Halloween costume, and inspired me enough to draw a caricature of him. :)

Big Boss Man

For Illustration Friday's Unbalanced. Usually the old man gets a little crazy around mid-week, but Nerble takes it in stride.
Adobe Illustrator CS2
Adobe Illustrator /PhotoshopWeathered version: I exported the Illustrator file as a tiff, then opened it in Photoshop. I opened a photo I'd taken of a cracked asphalt sidewalk, then dragged and dropped it onto my illustration. I blended the texture into the main illustration using the Multiply filter, then manipulated the transparency until the illustration still dominated but the texture showed through just enough.
I changed the background into a layer, then added a layer underneath the illustration layer, and turned the color to brown. I erased some of the illustration layer to let the brown background show through. Then I created some additional distress drawing cracks, highlights and shadows the Dodge and Burn tools. :)

Sweating the Small Stuff

I did this piece as a flyer for a Sunday morning Bible study I led. Unfortunately, I didn't get it to the printer fast enough (Yet another lame attempt to fit the Illustration Friday meme. This week it's Fast).
Adobe Illustrator CS2
I really enjoy the look of super-tight comic book inking, say, along the lines of The Art of Comic Book Inking volumes 1 and 2 by Gary Martin. Some of the examples in those books stagger my mind as far as tightness, getting the perfect balance of light and dark, and making all the lines work so the image comes alive, not just putting down lines however you feel like it. Another awesome book about inking is Rendering in Pen and Ink by Arthur L. Guptill; a big tome of a book that's worth every hour to read it.

The figure came first; the background and text came later. First I sketched the figure in pencil, scanned it into Illustrator, then traced it with the pen tool. I did all the blacks first, working out shadows and forms until it stood alone as a solid black and white illustration. I then started applying flat colors: 4 shades for the armor, 3 shades for the gold-lighted glass (I didn't know how many layers of color I would use originally, that's just how it worked out).

All the little tapered lines are, for the most part, blended triangles, shaped to fit whatever form I needed. I'm not a big fan of outlines. I do wind up using them here and there, but I'm trying to get out of the habit. I try to think more in terms of light, shadow, and dimension, trying to figure out how to make 2D pop out like 3D. :)

8th Wedding Anniversary Illustration

Canon Digital Rebel XTi, 3D Max, Photoshop, Illustrator. :) Here's a submission for Illustration Friday's Drifting.

Desert Hawks --"Sandstorm"

Adobe Illustrator CS2
Starting an illustration for myself I don't usually have any plan, just an idea of something I want to draw. This piece turned out to be an exercise in curvilinear perspective.

I drew the robot first. I then added the car, man, and road, then realized I'd better do this in correct perspective if I want it to look right. I eyeballed where I thought the horizon should be drawing lines from the car to see where the vanishing points would hit. One hit well inside the picture, and the other way off to the right outside the frame. Without really thinking about how I'd do the rest of the picture, I fixed the perspective on the car according to these vanishing points. I realized quickly that my poor choice of the left-hand vanishing point location would distort everything to the left of that vanishing point, a big Mechanical Perspective 101 no-no.

Unless I wanted to move the vanishing point off to the left (what I should have done in the first place had I been thinking) and redo the car with the correct perspective (NOT a happy thought), the only other solution was curvilinear perspective, keeping the left vanishing point as the center point, sort of like 1-point perspective, and manipulating the perspective in a circular fish-eye lens fashion, much closer to how the humans see things as they turn their heads from the pivot point of the neck and look around. Not a problem really, but more work than I'd considered putting into this drawing. Turned out to be a decent solution, though, as the rest of the illustration fell into place after that. Nothing amazing, but it worked in a fix.

The colors are mostly brown and bluish-green, basically color compliments, with some yellow and violet added for drama and contrast. :)