“Major Change”

United States Military Officer saluting with cigar - Major Change cartoon illustrationA recent project, “Major Change” was developed for a Canadian client looking for a cartoon character mascot for a promotional campaign. Interestingly enough although it was a Canadian client, they preferred to go with a United States military officer for the iconic quality. Kind of a bummer to think that when people think “military”, they think “United States”. I guess for some people that’s a positive thing. And before this post gets too political…

For some reason I had it in my mind from the initial discussions that somehow the character was to be a gruff bulldog chomping on a cigar, General Patton-style. The cigar remained, but I was set straight on the proper direction early on. Another reason to make sure you have plenty of dialog with your client before starting projects.

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Illustrator CS3 Tip: Create A Color Group From Selected Artwork

A great quick tip, from the excellent design blog BittBox, to create a color group of all the colors in an Illustrator document: Select all the art in your document, go to the Swatches fly-out menu and choose “New color group” – you now have a color group folder of all the colors in the artwork. Very cool!

Since color groups are a CS3 feature, this tip is Illustrator CS3 only.

via BittBox

Cartoon Art & Halftones Tutorial: From Inkjet Printer to Photocopier

Halftone cartoon comparisonA cartoon illustration & design project for a friend’s party required the resulting art to be suitable for reproduction on a photocopy machine. After some trial, error, Google search, trial, error, Google search, trial, error I discovered the magic combo that allows you to create a halftone in Photoshop for an image and print it out on your inkjet printer so the art will be perfect for photocopying.

This technique is perfect for flyers, newsletters or any other short-run printing needs you have where the cheapness of a photocopy is desired, but so are grayscale images.

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The Girl In The Moon

Sexy pinup Girl in the Moon cartoon illustrationI recently updated the “Girl in the Moon” artwork (while drinking some Miller High Life beers, of course). I had initially created a version of her a few years back, and while I thought it was good at the time, lately I have been wanting to update her as she was my first attempt at a pinup style illustration. I have been working towards a certain look/style for the pinup girls, including some devil girl pinup art and others and felt I was getting closer to that vision as of late.

I thought it only fair to go back and update the original. A request to get that original art in t-shirt format prompted me to start work on the new version.

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Digital Coloring Tutorials by MAD Magazine cartoonist Tom Richmond

MAD Magazine cartoonist Tom Richmond digital coloring tutorial screenshotIf you aren’t familiar with cartoonist Tom Richmond, make yourself familiar. This guy’s work is absolutely amazing. Very much in the style of Mort Drucker from MAD Magazine — only taken to the extreme. Not only is his cartooning & caricature style excellent, but his color work is also phenomenal. Tom graciously has taken the time to outline exactly how he digitally colors his artwork in Photoshop in a juicily-detailed three-post tutorial/how-to series on his cartooning blog.

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Productivity Tip: Floating, Transparent Reference Images Using Screenshots & Free Software Afloat

Afloat transparent window software for Mac OS X - screenshotEver need to temporarily reference another document while working on something – this may be an image, or instructions, or a PDF file. Many times you want it floating right on top of your current document so you can refer to it while you are working, and not have to switch back and forth between applications.

I do this a lot when working in Illustrator, especially working from reference images, but also the occasional email message or PDF file sent by a client.

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Color Theory Resources

Color Wheel artwork

Primary, secondary, tertiary, complimentary, analagous, brightness, hue, value, saturation, tints, shades… do these words mean anything to you? They should.

A post by cartoonist Matt Glover points out ColorFAQ – very basic web guide to color theory. It got me poking around on the internet for some other sites with some more depth on the subject. Sometimes I forget how much I use color theory every single day, it’s just something that sometimes goes on autopilot and is an easy topic to forget to recommend to others.

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Tip: Increase Productivity Using Adobe Illustrator’s Layer Masks

The excellent Illustrator blog BittBox has a nice Adobe Illustrator Layer Mask tip/walkthough on how to use this highly useful, productivity-enhancing (and fairly obscure) feature of Illustrator CS and higher.

Layer Masks are basically clipping masks that apply to the entire layer (Layer masks need to be sub-layers, and the top-most one at that). The best feature is that they can be locked, and they are not tied to one specific object, or cause an entire group of unrelated objects to become “grouped” as they are when applying a clipping mask to them. This allows you to work normally with all the other objects on other sub-layers while still getting that clipping mask effect.

Head on over to BittBox and read the full post: Improve Your Illustrator Workflow with Layer Masking