A couple Illustrations

"Good Dinner Tonight"

This turned into a far more elaborate Illustration than the original scribbles. In general it's good to create a set of backgrounds that can be used with various drawings. You can modify a couple things to make it look different. I think of it as having a set of building blocks. As your collection grows you get more possibilities of what you can "build".

"German chocolate cake story"

I kept this as simple as the original sketch. I made this with a stylus and the blob brush. Was making pretty good time until I got to the cake part and got hung up on details and ended up making a second version of it.

Got lazy with the plate... but was pretty happy with the cake and especially the cherry.

The style didn't go with the rest of the Illustration so I just kept it as a separate piece.

"Catburger"

I've been really busy with work and other stuff lately and didn't have time to keep up with this blog or any other little personal projects like say finishing up the snake game. I'm guessing I won't be able to get my hands on it sooner than mid January. The game itself is done I just gotta polish it - add levels, sounds, main menu and other little stuff like that.

I've been looking into Visual Studio Express 2013 for Web and I gotta say Microsoft did a great job with it. I mean I love my PHP Storm from Jetbrains and that's what I do work in still but I'm seriously considering switching to VS for good. This is on the side-note I am hoping to make a full post on this subject after I look more into it. One of the many things I loved about it was that Bootstrap was already added to the projects. 

Next couple posts until mid Jan will probably be sets of illustrations like this post. Happy upcoming holidays :)

Improving drawing skills with a stylus

I can draw okay for the most part but I do feel a need to improve on that. I can pull it off better when I have a pencil in my hand. It's much easier than controlling the stylus pen in some ways. You look on the screen instead of right where your hand moves, the space is a lot more limited than when drawing on paper, etc.

So for building graphics in Illustrator I prefer placing a sketch drawn with a pencil as a template layer and building graphics with the Pen tool. You get all kinds of flexibility and precision but it definitely requires more time.

Besides, for other programs like Animate stylus drawing is the way to go for the most part - partly because it's a lot quicker... for people who are good with it.

I don't believe in such a thing as talent. For me it's all about putting time into something. Anybody can get really good at anything if they clock in hours and hours of work. The trick is not to get discouraged with bad results. Chances are when you start something you are going to be bad at it especially if it's more of a physical thing - drawing, playing an instrument, singing, martial arts etc. It's easy when we are kids because there is all kinds of spare time and no work / responsibilities. So, I came up with this little plan.

Every evening before I go to bed I draw a very small picture with a marker on a dry erase board. Then I take a picture of it with my phone. Next day when I have time to kill I place the photo on a template layer and use a stylus to trace it. Sometimes I skip it - and let those sketches pile up a bit. Since they are very small and simple it doesn't take much time to re-create it. And it's easier to work with a template rather than drawing with a stylus from the get-go. I don't try to fix any flaws of the marker scribbles - the exercise is just to train my hand. Later if I feel like it I can color it and add to it. I use the Brush tool in Illustrator, set its size to vary from 1pt up to 10pt depending on the line thickness.

It's a long shot. The improvement will come slower than if say you put in 5-6 hours into it daily. But it's a lot less demanding, and easier to stick to. It doesn't really matter what the subject matter is. You can pick a couple characters and just keep drawing those in different positions or doing different things. I usually base it on something funny that happened that day.

Another thing that might help stick to it is if you sort of do it for another family member - a spouse, a child, or a parent. That way it's easier to come up with something cute and funny every day as you have context and can make inside jokes. Also you will get feedback which is extremely important with creative work. And if it's a family member they will be happy about it, they will look forward to it. Here's a couple I did:

Oct 21

Oct 22

Oct 23 - kicked myself in the eye with my knee while doing an ax-kick. It really hurt but was very funny.

Oct 24 - I realized I needed a haircut after I continuously zipped my hair into my boots on accident for a couple days.

These were the first 4 that I made. I will post more once I color the rest. For coloring I use a blob brush and draw behind mode as it's fun to do and it's another thing stylus is really well-suited for.

A couple illustrations

Here's a couple more stuff I've made with Illustrator:

This is from "How to Draw New Retro-Style Characters" book.

I just built it in Illustrator and colored it.

 

Gallifrey at night. I'm a "Doctor Who" fan so I recolored and modified my previous artwork a bit :)

Evil girl. She looks more annoyed than evil though. 

These 2 are from the same book. I'm going to keep adding more parts and keeping them in separate ai files. This way when I need to build a character in this style it will go very quickly.

 

the balloons are semi-transparent. and I can easily change color for when I need to quickly make a birthday card of sorts.

 

This is hand-drawn. Goofing around.

 

 



 Anyway. This is it. Last day of April, so a good place to wrap up with Illustrator. I do have one more post planned but it won't apply directly to Illustrator, so I'm wrapping up for now. I still have a lot to learn and do in Illustrator and I will return to it at some point but for now I'm putting it away.

 

I've gotten Animate from Toon Boom and shifted my focus there completely. It's an excellent tool for 2D Animation for those who don't know. Next post is going to be about that.