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.
Continue reading 'Cartoon Genie Concert Poster'
by George Coghill -
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SneakPeek Pro is a QuickLook plugin fro Mac OS X 10.5 (”Leopard”). In a nutshell, it extends file previews in both QuickLook and the Finder to previously unsupported file types such as Adobe Illustrator .ai files and EPS files.
If you aren’t familiar with QuickLook, it’s a pretty awesome new feature of 10.5 which allows you to quickly preview a good number of core file types — PDF, JPG, PSD, Word docs, movies, text files and more — without actually opening an application. One just needs to tap the spacebar with a file highlighted in the Finder, and a floating bezel-type window opens up with the full image, document or movie. Even works with multi-page documents as well. It’s just plain awesome.
Continue reading 'Illustrator File Previews: SneakPeek Pro QuickLook Plugin For Mac OS X'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
A hit-or-miss resource I always forget to check, the Adobe Exchange has a decent amount of downloadable resources for use with just about every piece of software they offer. In particular here I am focusing on Illustrator section of the Exchange.
The Illustrator Exchange has actions, brushes, styles, swatches, plug-ins, scripts, templates, tutorials and symbols to browse or search, and there’s a 5-star rating system as well to hopefully help you sort the good from the not-so-good.
Continue reading 'The Adobe Illustrator Exchange: Great Resource For Illustrator Actions, Brushes, Scripts and More'
by George Coghill -
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Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
A good, informative post over at TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) comparing low-cost vector software applications for Mac OS X by indepedent developers. The review is specifically comparing tools and techniques available in Adobe Illustrator CS3.
The comparison covers four applications: DrawBerry, EazyDraw, Lineform, and VectorDesigner. I have demoed all of these at one point or another, and found each to have their stregths and weaknesses.
Continue reading 'Mac Vector App Showdown'
by George Coghill -
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After an engaging exchange on Twitter with illustrators: Garth Bruner and Von “Vonster” Glitschka, who are constantly Twittering about their frustrations with being forced to switch from Freehand to Illustrator after Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia, things reached the point where all involved thought that we need a way to band together and get some feature requests implemented in the next version of Adobe Illustrator.
Continue reading 'The Beziér Artist’s Liberation Front: Adobe Illustrator Feature Requests'
by George Coghill -
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James Demsey over at design blog The Creative Mac (formerly The Creative Guy) posted some additional issues with Adobe Creative Suite 3 and Mac OS X 10.5. Seems in addition to the Open/Save/Place issues I mentioned earlier, copying vector art from InDesign to Illustrator has issues, as does hiding InDesign.
Continue reading 'More CS3 Problems On Leopard'
by George Coghill -
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James Dempsey’s illustration & design software tips and tricks blog The Creative Guy has been retired, and rising from the digital ashes is The Graphic Mac. Looks like all the previous GC content has been migrated the TGM. James mentions that the big reason for the big change was to switch from WordPress to Drupal so he could implement more community features like message boards and the like.
Continue reading 'The Creative Guy Is Now The Graphic Mac'
by George Coghill -
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Although not yet even an actual product, the Alien Abduction UFO lamp is quite possibly the coolest lamp of all time, at least for geeks.
Artist Lasse Klein created the concept art for the UFO lamp with computer graphics software.
The artist mentions on her website/blog that the more people who sign up for the flying saucer lamp mailing list, the more likely she will be able to turn this into an actual product.
via Laughing Squid on Twitter
by George Coghill -
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Just stumbled across these handy Mac OS X software applications to help designers and artists simulate the effects of color blindness on-screen: Sim Daltonism and Color Oracle.
Sim Daltonism works as a floating palette which converts an area under your mouse cursor to the selected type of color blindness — it works similar to the Apple Digital Color Meter sampling utility. There are 8 different types of color blindness to test. Color Oracle works as a menubar item which converts the entire monitor to the selected mode of color blindness, but only offers the three most common forms.
Continue reading 'Color Blindness Software Tools for Artists'
by George Coghill -
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A quick overview comparing the two new image editors Pixelmator and Acorn by designer John Whipple. I would have to agree with most of his points. The one thing I really, really like about Acorn is the handy resizing & cropping keyboard modifiers: hold Option and drag to resize, hold Control and drag to crop. It’s a very clever and very handy way to do things quickly. The zoom slider at the bottom of the window is nice as well. Oh, and the integrated screenshot tool.
Continue reading 'Pixelmator & Acorn: Quick Comparison Review'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
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