Ahoy Ye Scurvy Thieves!

Arggggggggh... Just in case you forgot, a friendly reminder that today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

I gots no piratey drarwin's to be showin' ye today, but I've got a bit o' Treasure to share. (From a project I did this summer - above is just a little piece of the whole treasure chest.)

Fair winds me buckos!
-Red Mary Bonney

tiki tiki

Finished these up this morning. Spent way too much time on them. Lots of trial and error trying to figure out the style and process. Finally bagged all the imported lines from Flash, and did everything by hand in Photoshop. Sore cramped hand by the end of doing all those black and yellow lines!

Doctor Doodle

Just a random little doodle I liked, so decided to throw some color on it. Sketch and color done in photoshop, just using the standard round brushes.

Particles are your friend

Play Quicktime version - Warning: It's Loud

To rid this blog of the bad aftertaste of the bitter disappointment, I think I'll kick off the weekend with some happy fireworks. This was a fun little project I did earlier this week. Quick background painted in Photoshop. The fireworks were made in Particle Illusion. Had to figure out how to use Particle Illusion first, but it was pretty straightforward. Then I added some sound in After Effects, and here 'tis. Happy 8th of September!

Bitter Disappointment

I really haven't started planning yet for this year's Halloween festivities, but I had stumbled across this test tube thing online, and thought - that would be so cool. It arrived today, and I've been whining to everyone who has had the bad fortune to get within conversation distance to me. It really isn't all that cool after all - no actual rising bubbles, no moving dials, and lots of cheap looking plastic. Although, I do commend the photographer for making me want to buy it. Guess I'm just gonna have to figure out how to build the real thing....

Monkey Time

Hey! Two posts in a day! Since I apparently was sucked into a black hole for the month of August, I figure I should try to make up for it. Here's a quick little character I drew for a design meeting. My next game is all about the Tiki. It's gonna be fun. So naturally, gotta have a monkey in it.

I drew him in Flash, and then exported the solid shapes as .pngs. Once he was reassembled in Photoshop, I turned on the Preserve transparency, and did some quick shading using a dry brush sort of brush I made from one of the Spatter brushes. You just need to adjust the spacing and the angle jitter in the brush palette.

Unfortunately he didn't pass muster - "too young looking" - since it's a game for tweens. I'm not sure I quite agree, but I might tweak his face a little so he's not so "sweet."

"Inking" in Flash

More Decodables! Here are a few pages from my latest little book - The Toy Robot. These things are all about trying to get something half-way decent-looking in as little time as possible. The finals for this one were done in Flash.

The process is pretty straightforward. I have a sketch imported from Photoshop to use as reference, and draw all the lines using the pencil tool. Then with the little ink pot tool I go and change all the line widths for thick and thins. Then I convert the whole thing from Lines to Fills (you can do this in the Modify menu), and I clean up corners and edges to make the transitions between line widths nice and smooth. Then I used the paint bucket for fills, and the paint brush for the little highlights (the robot is supposed to be Gold Foil.)





This next book is done in a similar way, but there's some photoshop work at the end. After cleaning up the black lines in Flash, I export the lines as a .png at 300dpi and open that up in Photoshop.



Since the lines are so nice and clean, I can use the magic wand tool and select the areas I want to fill in with color, then I go up to the select menu and choose expand, and expand the selection by 2 pixels, and then on a layer below the lines, I hit alt+del to fill in the color.

I wanted to spice it up a little bit without having to do much shading so I brought in some patterns I got from wallpaper samples. After making a selection (and expanding it) I go to the layer with the wallpaper, and hit the mask button (it's at the bottom of the layers palette - it's a little gray box with a white circle.) I suppose you could just reverse your selection and delete the extra wallpaper, but this way, you can unlock the mask and move the pattern around and make adjustments.



I only have these two done so far. The rest I've sort of been stalling on because it means I have to try to draw a fishing boat. Ugh.

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...

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!

Illustration Friday: Under the Sea

Another letter of the alphabet - this time O for Octopus. (B was posted earlier.) I guess I was thinking of old Mary Blair illustrations and vintage Golden Books when I did this. Done all in Photoshop, I made the textures by making a custom brush. I started with a Spatter Brush (my favorite brush, and it's in the default palette.) Then I adjusted the spacing and played around with the jitter stuff and you get a brush that has a kind of chalky dry brush effect.



Here's a close-up of the effect. This ended up being a super fast way to do some shading. I had a lot of fun coloring this.

Egypt and China: Flash/Photoshop Mutation

Finally, got around to posting another tutorial. This is basically an extension of a previous tutorial I posted in January - just a bit more detail, and a bit more redundant rambling. But who knows, there might be something worthwhile in there.

Click on the images to go to EGYPT



or CHINA



I've been a little slow answering the emails lately, but please feel free to ask if you have any questions, I'll get back to you... uh... eventually!

Fabulous Flash

I have a new favorite tool - the paintbrush tool in Flash! If you have a Wacom tablet, the paintbrush tool does a pretty good job with pressure-sensitive thick and thins while drawing. Flash 8 also has the added feature of a Smoothing setting (in the Properties panel), so you get really nice smooth clean lines.

Since we are going to be using Flash a lot more at work, we spent all of last week training. I sorta did the teaching the first three days, and then we had a real trainer come - Ryan Simmons. He taught us some great tricks for character animation. Check out his site for some fun animations, tutorials, characters you can download, etc.

The rabbit started out as one of many silly doodles while we were practicing using the different drawing and coloring tools. Then I ended up using it when we were learning some lip syncing tips. (Click on the rabbit to see the animation - you'll need Flash Player 8 if you don't have it already.)

The robot was from earlier in the week when we were trying out different motion tweens. Never got around to finishing it - I wanted to have the arms moving, and lots of other stuff, but we moved on to other things. Jim, one of my co-workers, looked over from his menacing-looking robot that ate ball bearings and said - "You live in a happy world, don't you..."

Illustration Friday: Monster

Click on the Swampy guy to go to the Monster Flipbook!

I'm actually working on a Frankenstein illo tonight, but I thought the flipbook would be more fun to post for Illustration Friday. This is for a little computer game, you can pick to build either a monster or a robot. (Those glamorous buttons are obviously temp.) So you get Robots too - extra special bonus!

Survey Says!

Finally got back the results from the character survey. We sent it to schools here in Utah, some in California, and even to one school in Japan.

Style 3 was the clear winner 2:1 over style 2. Style 1 hardly any votes.

The kids also picked natural skin tones over the wacky colors, by a landslide. (I was a little disappointed by this - I like the rainbow skin colors!)

The survey was 12 pages of questions and choices. Overall, pretty interesting to see what kids actually like vs. what we adults *think* they'll like!

Illustration Friday: Insect

My ever most favorite insect would be the fabulous Bee. Dunno why, but there ya go. I was supposed to do a little animation for the letter V, but after some whining and bribing, got to do B. I'm not going to post the movie, but basically, Bear swipes at honey, Bees swarm from hive and chase poor hungry Bear as background pans, and then after Bear runs off screen, big letter B made of Bees pans on.

There were some actual sketches buried in the photoshop files. I think I was trying to figure out a watercolor type look, that I gave up on and decided to go with what I knew since I had a tight deadline. I also found another quick sketch for figuring out how the pan would work here. Gives you an idea of sloppy I am at the start of a project.

I decided to draw the final background lines on actual paper. Since the pan was so wide, it just was a little easier to handle, plus I like the softer line you get with a pencil. I usually draw with a blue or red Colorerase pencil (I like the texture), and convert it to grayscale after scanning.

The next step is about the coolest photoshop trick ever. Open the Channels palette. At the bottom are a few icons - click on the dotted circle - this will select the WHITE. Go back to the Layers palette, make a new layer, then INVERT the selection. Then fill the selection with Black, or whatever color. This will give you your lines, in beautiful grayscale, on a transparent background.




Now that your lines are on a transparent layer, you can turn on the Preserve Transparency button (it is the little checkerboard near the top of the Layers Palette) and color and shade your lines.



When coloring this background, I had a ton of layers. I like to fill in a solid color for each different area - for example a tree trunk layer, pine tree layer, foreground grass layer, midground grass layer. I turn on the Preserve Transparency, and then shade away. Next, I go to the Line layer, and color the line to match the shading below. Then I usually have another layer above the Line layer for fixes and touchups.

The bees and the bear were drawn directly in Photoshop using default brushes. I turned on the Drop Shadow in Layer Styles on the Bee layer to make it pop a little from the background.