illustrator

“Liberty Girl” Cartoon Character Pinup Sketch

| George Coghill

Cartoon pinup girl sketch

This sketch was for a client that went MIA after we got started on the project. The theme was for a “USA” branded pinup style girl — the draped fabric was to be a United States flag.

I think the drapery was coming along nicely, but I know I was dreading making all the Stars & Stripes read realistically enough. Probably wouldn’t have been as hard as I imagined though.

She’s been sitting in my hard drive long enough and I liked how this was coming along so I thought I would share.

Cartoon Ogre Mascot Character

| George Coghill

Humorous cartoon character illustration of an ogre creature.

Working color vector art for a mascot character project. The ogre will be used as a mascot for a video game portal website. We needed a prop and I suggested a video game controller, the client wanted to go with an old-school Atari 2600 controller, which I think looks great. it’s such an iconic design it really reads well, which is important for smaller sizes.

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Bodyguard Cartoon Mascot Character Illustration

| George Coghill

Illustration of cartoon-style bodyguard character with key & briefcase.

This character was created for a company providing online, off-site file backup solutions. They wanted a character that would embody the idea of safe, secure and encrypted. Hence, the big key, the secure briefcase handcuffed to the character, the binary code reflected in the sunglasses “Matrix” style.

I knew from the outset that I wanted to go with a “bodyguard” or “secret service agent” look to the character, and that he needed to be big and tough to an exaggerated degree. Read on for more info on this project as well as some insight into the sketching process…

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Adobe Illustrator Video Tip: Quickly Add Smooth Transition Anchor Points

| George Coghill

In this video, I am sharing with you a vector path creation technique to speed up the process of creating curved paths by adding intermediate anchor points after your corners have been created. I used to create my anchor points as I was following the curve of the shape I was tracing. Instead, with this technique the anchor points are added to your vector path after your corners have been created, allowing Illustrator to approximate the length of the curve handles for you with much greater accuracy the first time around.

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Flattening Transparency Properly When Using Layer Appearances in Adobe Illustrator

| George Coghill

flatten-transparency-effects

For longer than I can remember, I have been flustered with the Flatten Transparency feature in Adobe Illustrator CS3 and CS4. Very often I use the excellent Layer Targeting feature introduced into recent versions of Adobe Illustrator, however I found that when using the Flatten Transparency feature, it seemed to ignore the attributes of the Targeting, which forced me to find lengthy workarounds to solve this. Turns out there was an approach to solving this that I had overlooked…

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6 Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts For Illustrator Users

| George Coghill

photoshop-cs3-iconHere are a few handy keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop for those of you out there like me who spend an inordinate amount of time in the Creative Suite primarily using Illustrator. These are not keyboard shortcuts that you can use in Illustrator, but rather are keyboard shortcuts providing methods of doing things in Photoshop that you are used to doing in Illustrator that at first it might seem isn’t possible, like click directly on an object to select it, drag to a new layer, etc.

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