Just stumbled across these handy – and free – Photoshop plugins which should be a huge time-saver for comic artists who ink & color their pages in Photoshop. A process also known as ‘flatting’.
These have to be a huge productivity booster to any artist working with coloring line art in Photoshop, not just comic book artists and the like.
I can already envision many applications for these in my workflow, even though I am primarily a vector artist.
I recently finished up this ‘Theology On Tap’ cartoon character mascot/logo project for a youth ministries client.
The client is a youth ministries minister, and his new program is focused on bringing discussions of theological matters into more casual settings to try and reach additional young people.
The artwork is intended to be used on various advertising and promotional materials, as well as a t-shirt design.
I thought it odd at first, but I suppose there’s nothing really wrong about talking about religious matters in a bar, right? And I suppose a minister knows the deal. My only concern was to create a great illustration for him and his project.
Anyways, read on for an in-depth overview of the process to create this cartoon character mascot/logo from start to finish, including unused sketches created along the way.
I finally got around to getting one of my favorite personal cartoon pin-up illustrations — the ‘Girl In The Moon‘ — available for purchase over at my Zazzle store.
I have been meaning to get more artwork up there available for purchase, but recently client work has been pretty much taking up all my hours in the day.
Already available are some devil girl pinup illustration t-shirts, stickers, keychains and other items.
Cartoonist Mike Foran has a couple of cool number 2 pencil Photoshop brushes – free to download – that I stumbled across the other day. For some time now I have been on the casual lookout for a Photoshop brush that mimicked a regular-ol’ number 2 pencil. Seems Foran was on that line of thought as well.
Foran’s brush has a nice line quality, varied from thick to thin based on your Wacom tablet pressure, and has a slight angle similar to a flat-worn pencil tip.
The brush also has a nice light feel at light pressure, and darkens quickly with pressure added. The texture and look of the brush marks/pencil lines is perfect.
This Animator’s Survival Kit DVD set from Oscar-winning animator Richard Willams looks like a great resource for those animators out there. Personally, I do not have the patience for animation, but it’s fascinating to me.
This DVD set is a companion to Williams’ highly-rated Animator’s Survival Kit book. The site doesn’t seem to indicate if the book is included with the DVD set, but it seems not to be.
Richard Williams was awarded two Oscars for the animation on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit“. He directed and designed Roger Rabbit, Jessica Rabbit, Baby Herman and all the new characters for the Walt Disney/Steven Spielberg production.
The set isn’t cheap at £634.04 (or about $1,252.42 for us U.S. folks as of the date of this post).
I recently completed a concert poster design featuring a fez-wearing cartoon genie mascot character for Nashville, Tennessee roots-rock jam band Vinyl Soup.
I have been working with guitarist Andrew Hooker for some time now with t-shirt designs, a logo redesign, concert posters and other promotional materials for the band.
Recent gig poster design work for Vinyl Soup had started to go down a path of design-only work. Andrew initially contacted me for a t-shirt design for the band, and his initial interest was in my cartooning/illustration work.
Starting out on concepts for this poster, I was again working on a solely design-oriented approach, and before I got too far along I dropped Andrew an email to see if going back to an illustrative style would be cool with him. It most certainly was, so I set about to work up a theme for the poster.
A rough sketch of a cartoon pinup girl with American flag & mobile phone. This was drawn for a project I am currently working on for a client, updating their existing mascot character art to be used with the company logo and other branding. It was rejected due to not being the kind of pose the client wanted for the woman.
She has potential, but there are a few things proportion-wise that I think need to be reworked, particularly with her face — the lips are a bit low on the head, and the eyes are a bit off. These are all things that would have been tweaked in the revision stage.
At this point I wanted to get the general idea over to the client for feedback before I went too far, and in this case it was the smart thing to do since I will need to start from scratch with her.
“Average Joe” is a recent cartoon character mascot I created for a client. The project specs were pretty straightforward – two cartoon characters, one being “Average Joe” who would become the company mascot, and for this particular illustration he would need a sexy cartoon woman wrapped around him.
This project had a very tight deadline, so I got to work immediately on the sketches. The initial rough sketch was created to get the general idea down and to start the conversation. Being a tight deadline, I sent out a sketch that normally I would have refined a bit before sending. In this case, I needed immediate feedback on the direction so I sent this rough concept to get the client’s OK on the overall posing of the characters and the general look.
This cartoon character drawing was created for a friend’s upcoming party, which will also be doubling as a U.S. wedding reception for our friend Setty, who just got married over in India.
Setty is obsessed with the drinking dice game “Left, Right, Center”. He’s also notorious for exclaiming “Shots!” when out drinking, therefore the shot glass.
The friend who requested the art suggested creating it in the Odd Rods/”Big Daddy” Roth style which I am known to emulate from time to time.