Shiny Happy Faces

Just thought I'd post what I've been doing for the past couple days. These are from a little computer activity. I drew everything in Flash first, then exported the lines to Photoshop to do all the coloring and shading. I'll put together a better tutorial later... I had lots of fun making everything as shiny and obnoxious as possible!

Illustration Friday: Sacrifice

Um, okay, maybe a stretch for the theme, but look at the people willing to sacrifice all their monetary assets for the chance to have that really cool bike. Or maybe... it's the girl, sacrificing the possibility of having all that cash for the sake of loyalty to that crazy red bike. Or maybe it's all about the fountain pen the monocle guy is holding: giving up its lifeblood, its very ink, so the man can write a check.

But ultimately I think it's all about me: because I had to sacrifice some good sleeping time to get this done!

I've already posted some other pages from this same little book: What a Bike! I didn't explain much by way of a tutorial, but I illustrated The Crook Book in much the same way, if you're interested in tips and tricks.

What A Bike!

I haven't done much by way of any illustration the past couple of weeks. I work inhouse at an educational software place, and I was the chair of this year's committee for the annual Vision Conference. Tons of work, never done anything like that before, but lots of fun in the end. My favorite part was the Urban Challenge - a big kind of Amazing Race/Scavenger Hunt/GeoCache monstrosity we put together. I kinda want to do it again next year.

But I digress, I try not to ramble on too much about non-illustration stuff in this blog, cause really, who is really all that interested! ;-) I'm trying to get myself back into a illustration frame of mind, so I thought I'd post a couple pages from my most recent Decodable. This one is called "What A Bike!"



This one was done basically the same as the Crook Book - done almost to completion in Flash, then imported in to Photoshop. I did a little bit more fussing in Photoshop with this one, which meant I imported layers so I could do a little shading on each of the sections. Like with the one above, the flowers and the girl-on-bike have a bit of Drop Shadow added from the Layers Options. And then there is a texture over the top of the whole thing, again, just like the crook book.



These books are all about shortcuts, so it was pretty handy to be able to just copy/paste and transform the girl and bike for this book. Only had to draw the bike once, and for the girl I think I ended up with two poses (a side view and a front view) that I tweaked for each page. Another fun little project. And it made me unreasonably happy to have lederhosen and a Kaiser helmet in there... heh...