Rise of the Red Skull

I provided the pencil work, then my friend Tom inked over the pencils.  I scanned the inked artwork and colored it in free-to-download Gimp.

Finished art

Finished inks

Pencil layout

Portraits and House Pen & Ink Illustration

    I did this pen & ink illustration of my friends with their house. I used:

• 11x17 bristol vellum
• Higgins Eternal black ink
• Winsor & Newton #2 and #3 brushes
• Hunts crowquil 102 and 107
• Microns
• gum eraser
• Daler Rowney Bleed proof White
• X-acto knife

Finished Illustration

Framed and Mounted

Adventure Time-Inspired Caricatures

Adventure Time-Inspired Caricatures

      I had a lot of fun with these two illustrations, based on two co-workers and influenced by an overdose of 10 seasons of Adventure Time.  It doesn't take much to inspire me to create, just the right impetus.

     Adventure Time uses a lot of flat colors, and simplistic, abstract shapes.  They use lighter colors to represent lit sides of the forms, and darker colors to represent shaded sides, which gives the characters and objects some dimension.  The art style -- with minimalistic, wiener-limbed characters and primitive-looking, detailed backgrounds -- has an original, iconic, and instantly recognizable look.  I had to work within the parameters of the style so the viewer would recognize the style I drew the illustration in.

     I started off with Post-It© drawings of the two gentlemen I had in mind.  I had just watched the first guy's prog-rock trio, Flock of Walri, in concert at a local venue.  The band members all wear matching pink flamingo shirts.

Post-It© Drawing

    I photographed the drawing with my phone and Blue-Toothed it to my computer.  I realized my co-worker plays right-handed, so I had to horizontally flip the picture.

     I opened the drawing in Adobe Illustrator and traced the outlines with the Pen Tool.  I selected the outlines and used Pathfinder / Add to Shape Area to combine all the outlines into one shape.  Then I manipulated the nodes to finish off the shapes.

    I struggled to get the three-tone shading on the dreadlocks right.  I used dark, medium, and light shades of gray.  I kept the light source in front of the face, which helped me place the highlights and shadows.

     The black outline of the dreads took the most time.  I set the Keyboard Increment to something very small, like .001 inches (Preferences / General / Keyboard Increment) so I could move the nodes in small increments with the Arrow Keys.

     I used shapes with Transparency for the blue shadows on the shirt so the lines and flamingos showed through.

     Making the illustration look Adventure Time style proved the hard part.  

 Adobe Illustrator CS2

 Pink Flamingo

Post-It© Drawing

    It took me a while to get the forms and shading of the cliffs to look how I wanted, using just four colors and a handful of flat, abstract shapes.  I found the right kind of off-kilter balance the show masters so well only after a lot of node poking.

    The background: I wanted a warm desert background, so I made the sky yellow and the other objects with colors tinged with yellow.  I used less contrast between colors, and no dark colors, to create atmospheric perspective and make objects appear further in the distance.

    The foreground: the figure and guitar have darker colors, some black, and more contrast between colors.  I used cooler complementary blues and greens to separate the foreground from the warm background.  The complimentary colors, contrast, and darks help the objects in the foreground look closer to the viewer.

    I used a right-hand light source, with the sun out of the scene to the right.  The objects have shadowed areas on the left side, and cast shadows fall onto objects behind lit objects.  A hint of blue behind the cliffs represents reflected light.

    I had to do some thinking and reworking to make the cracks in the desert ground look right.  I made the crack in the foreground bigger, and the other two smaller as they recede in the distance, giving the impression of depth and perspective.  The middle crack sits closer to the rear crack instead of exactly in between the top and bottom cracks, adding to the illusion.

    I muffed the clouds in the illustration below, which I didn't realize until after I posted it.  Adventure Time has rounded clouds.  The clouds below look more like flat Chuck Jones-style clouds.

Adobe Illustrator CS2

 Peavey Cirrus

Commissioned Cartoon Concept

    A friend hired me to illustrate this project for their customer who had an inside joke they wanted to be printed on t-shirts.
    I sketched the rats while sitting in a dentist's lobby waiting for a friend. I scanned the rats into Photoshop, opened the file in Illustrator, and did all the blacks as vector art. 😁

Something I decided to ink for #inktober on facebook.  Inspired after looking at a lot of Jack Kirby art, I decided to depict a character from a little story I'm messing with, and employ some Kirby dynamics.
Pencil/Microns

Anniversary Illustration

Eva and Shadow

     For an anniversary present for his wife, my friend commissioned me to illustrate a picture of his wife and their recently deceased kitty.  For reference he sent me a phone cam pic he just happened to catch when the moment happened.
     I opened the jpg in Adobe Photoshop, and YIKES!  Very small and pixelated! (He warned me of the pic quality ahead of time).  Pretty much a small, dark, fuzzy 72 ppi jpg.  I forget the original dimensions, but my friend had asked for an 8.5" x 11" illustration.  Using Photoshop's Image Size functions (Alt-Ctrl-i) I increased the dimensions as far as I could without losing too much detail so I could work on top of the photo.  I could only increase it to about 8" x 10".
     Since I would print the final result, I set the Image Mode to CMYK (Alt-i-m-c).
     Dark rooms and phone cam pics without a flash don't mix, and so the photo had muddy colors and hard-to-see details.  Adding new Adjustment Layers (Alt-l-a) I adjusted the Levels and Hue/Saturation until I had a brighter, clearer photo.
     I created four layers:
--a background layer which I filled with white (Alt-Delete fills the layer with the foreground color, Ctrl-Delete  fills the layer with the background color),
--the photo layer,
--a color layer I would use to paint under the inks,
--and the inks layer.
     The inks layer: switching between my Wacom Intuos 4 and the mouse, I went for a kind of pen and ink graphic design stylization that kind of comes naturally to me, .  Using lines, dots, simplified shapes, and some Franklin Booth-inspired hatching, I drew over the photo.  I made some of the contours more geometric, and worked to capture the essence of the details with minimal shapes and strokes.  With the white background layer I could make the photo layer invisible (clicking the eye graphic next to the photo layer in the Layer Window) to see just the ink layer and check my work.

Inks Layer

 

     Painting in the color layer underneath the inks layer, I used the Eyedropper tool to pick colors from the photo layer.  I continued rendering with geometric shapes.  I kept the curtains, pillow, and shirt colors flat to keep the focus on the cat and woman's face.

 Color Layer

Detail

 
     I printed the illustration at the local Fedex/Kinko's and sent it off so it would get to my friend in time for their anniversary.  Afterward they both told me they like it and will get it framed and hung as soon as possible. :)

Adobe Photoshop CS2

Jimmy Freckles, the Asteroid Boy--Character Design meme

Line art: drawn and inked in my trusty dusty sketchbook, scanned into Photoshop, cleaned up and detailed.

 

Background turned into a layer and turned to Multiply.  Created another layer and placed underneath to add color.  Created the title in Illustrator and copied/pasted into Photoshop.