Illustration Friday: Rain

Nothing too exciting, just a little spot I had to do at work. This is from a little adjective type activity - wet and dry. I have to do little spots like this all the time. Done in photoshop. And so you get the matching set: Dry!

The Crook Book

bigger version

So have I mentioned lately how much I like Flash? Here are a few illos from a little book I recently finished. All the drawing and color was done in Flash. (It is so fast and slick to draw in there.) I basically drew everything with the pencil tool, did some flat fill style coloring, deleted all the outlines, and then exported the finished pic to Photoshop. (Export image as a .png)

Here's what it looked like coming out of Flash:



Once in Photoshop, all I did was add a few layers of textures, just to spice it up a little. A long time ago I had used a toothbrush to splatter india ink all over a piece of paper. This scan has come in pretty handy over the years. The first layer of texture is of the black splatters, and the layer property is set to Overlay. Then a second layer, in which I've changed the black splatters to white splatters, is set to Soft Light. The third layer is from a scan of a piece of fake black velvet paper - I think it's for scrapbooking or something. I increased the contrast, created a channel that got rid of the white, and changed the black to a nice tangeriney orange color. This layer is set to Soft Light as well, and all the blues change into these nifty purples and raspberry colors.

Close-up of the textures:



And a couple other pages from the book:
(d'oh! I just noticed his hand is backwards in the second one down - I'll fix it later... heh... or maybe it's a special crook lock-picking tool attached to his wrist. Yeah! That works!)

Chicken ball

I was looking for some files, and stumbled across this on my hard drive. Whatever this was supposed to be for, guess I never finished it. Anyway, thought it was funny in its randomness, and so I'm posting it in celebration of the World Cup. Here's to hoping the ol' US team steps it up a bit this weekend. :-)

Pop-Up Book

About a year ago I did two flap/pop-up books for Reader's Digest. Looks like Simon & Schuster is selling the Backpack one, can't find the Closet one anywhere... Anyway, I kind of forgot about them, and when I got an email from the art director about another possible project, they were surprised I'd never seen the final product. It took some digging, but my copies were found with my rep, and now I've finally seen what they look like all put together with the pop-ups and flaps working. Kind of fun.



This project was a little different. The art director had made really tight comps for me to follow since there was all that die-cut business to worry about. The final spreads were the most fun - the paper engineer sent me a template with all the pieces already figured out, I basically just had to draw inside the die-cut lines.



Sorry about the bad photos, but those are supposed to be little happy maggots on the chocolate bar. That was a fun project - got to draw stinky fish heads, maggots, slugs, moldy sandwiches, slime and lots of other gross things.

Stop it!

Can't believe I haven't posted for over a month. Ooops. Been doing lots of miscellaneous things lately, both at the day job (I work at a software development company) and with the freelance. I thought I'd show what we're working on at the moment at the ol' job. We're illustrating these little readers called Decodables and are budgeted to get three pages done a day. I went a little over on this book - I was averaging about 3 to 3 1/2 hours a page. (I have horribly unsteady hands when trying to draw clean black lines, so I'm a little slow at it.)

Everything is done in Photoshop. Since I knew I wanted some items to have different line colors, those lines are each on different layers - that way I can just turn the Preserve Transparency on, and fill the lines, faster than painting them. The solid filled-in colors are on separate layers, with just a tiny amount of shading here and there. One of the benefits of those clean black lines, I can use the magic wand tool to select an area, and then up in the Select menu, choose Modify > Expand... and expand the fill area a few pixels, then on a lower layer hit Alt + Delete to fill in my color with hardly any touch-up.

It's fun to whip out these little books, but I wish we had just a *little* bit more time to spend on them!