hips to kill

a mississippi mermaid that eats too much buffet and gumbo...
just a doodle on a foggy Friday night.

program design

Just trying to come up with a little design for the wedding programs. I'm thinking about coloring these with watercolor and then scanning them back in...we'll see how it goes =)





And here it is colored in.

it's much too big!

his only friend - IF - "Voices"

dreams

Just a little starry night design I began.
We can't see too many stars here tonight in Mississippi, there is a very thick fog in the way of the view.

Rambunctious

So I decided to start submitting illustrations to "Illustrations Friday". The topic is for the week is "rambunctious" so what is more suitable than an actual ram, getting his poor tail yanked on by an ornry and rambunctious raccoon!?
This is just the scanned version...i'll be working on it more today and tomorrow in order to submit it in time! =)



Uploaded into Adobe Illustrator and Live Traced.

After that...Live Paint...then create a background! While I was creating the very simple background, a silly idea popped into my head. Stay tuned to see what is going to be added to the image!


...and here is the finishing touch!




....I hate this illustration. Don't you hate it when you work really hard on a project, and you think the finished product looks like something that was constructed by a 4th grader on heavy medication!? hah...I'm still getting acquainted with the tools...that is my excuse. =)

ding dong

Experimenting with scanning sketches, then continuing with digital illustration.

Step 1:
Just an old fashioned hand drawn quick sketch of concept.
Materials used: trusty old mechanical pencil

Step 2:
Rough sketch scanned in
Materials used: HP scanner...nothing fancy about it.


Step 3:
Open the .jpg image your lovely scanned image into Photoshop. I use Photoshop CS3, but you can use any version of Photoshop to edit your illustration.
All I did was go in with the eraser tool, and clean up some of those sloppy stray lines that my eraser couldn't entirely pick up. You may choose to leave some of the stray lines to create a sort of Da Vince sketch look. I'm sure your sketches look MUCH better than Da Vinci's, don't they. Of course they do!
After you are finished erasing lines, you may want to go in with the paint brush as I did here and fix some of the lines that don't visually make sense.
I did my best to achieve a "coloring book" image. The reason for this is because Adobe Illustrator is a very CLEAN program that can't understand the "sketchy" look. "Vector" images are very different from the "raster" images. You will see what I mean in the future steps. The goal in photoshop is to create super simple line than can be easily interpreted by Adobe Illustrator. Be sure to KICK UP THAT CONTRAST!!!!!!
Materials used: Adobe Photoshop CS3

catching up!

It's about time that I start a blog just for illustrations...what took me so long!?