Sharon Steuer’s free ”Zen Of The Pen” PDF is an excellent introduction to the inner mysteries of the vector pen tool in Adobe Illustrator.
The pen tool is one of those obscure graphics programs tools that everyone tries once, and then gets so confused by that they never get any further with it. And understandably. It looks like a fountain pen, but it doesn’t act like one. Click and “draw”, you get weird “handles” sprouting out from a dot. Ignore that, and some annoying rubber band line gets stuck to your pen tip, all distorted out of — not even a straight line! Right there most Illustrator users think to themselves “this program sucks”.
But they couldn’t be further from the truth…
Continue reading 'Zen Of The Pen'
by George Coghill -
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I stumbled across this very informative tips for freelance illustrators blog post by illustrator Nate Williams. He gives a nice overview of the process he uses not only on the business side of things, but also on the creative side.
Continue reading 'Tips For Freelance Illustrators: Nate Williams'
by George Coghill -
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Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
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.
Continue reading 'Monk/Friar With Beer Keg - Cartoon Mascot Illustration'
by George Coghill -
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A great quick tip, from the excellent design blog BittBox, to create a color group of all the colors in an Illustrator document: Select all the art in your document, go to the Swatches fly-out menu and choose “New color group” - you now have a color group folder of all the colors in the artwork. Very cool!
Since color groups are a CS3 feature, this tip is Illustrator CS3 only.
via BittBox
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
It’s going to happen you you eventually — a client who doesn’t pay their bill. And unless the project was for a significant amount of money, the unfortunate truth is that many times it isn’t worth the cost of suing. The legal fees can very quickly outweigh the money you’ll get, and that’s the positive side!
Because of this, I make it a standard practice to ask for a 50% deposit for all work before starting a project. But this only covers you so far. I also do not transfer any high-resolution or vector art until the final balance is paid, but sometimes this doesn’t cover your butt — for example, the client may only want to use the art on their website, or may have no clue about proper printing resolutions and will go ahead an use the low-resolution JPEG preview images you’ve been sending them.
Continue reading 'Avoid Non-Paying Clients With Watermarks'
by George Coghill -
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If you aren’t familiar with cartoonist Tom Richmond, make yourself familiar. This guy’s work is absolutely amazing. Very much in the style of Mort Drucker from MAD Magazine — only taken to the extreme. Not only is his cartooning & caricature style excellent, but his color work is also phenomenal. Tom graciously has taken the time to outline exactly how he digitally colors his artwork in Photoshop in a juicily-detailed three-post tutorial/how-to series on his cartooning blog.
Continue reading 'Digital Coloring Tutorials by MAD Magazine cartoonist Tom Richmond'
by George Coghill -
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We’ve all been there - tight deadline, or too many projects at once, or even good ol’ fashioned procrastination. Whatever the cause, you need to finish something and the ideas (and graphite) just aren’t flowing. What to do?
Continue reading 'Ten Tips for Cartoonists to Overcome a Creativity Slump'
by George Coghill -
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Arrrrrggggghhhhhh!!!!!!
You just fine tuned a custom action in Photoshop to, say, convert an image to CMYK, resize without resampling to 300 dpi and save as a .psd file, to like, save a bunch of time.
Then, to your dismay, Photoshop crashes because of the 7,492 Dashboard Widgets and shareware doodads you have running simultaneously (even though you know better).
And your custom Action is GONE.
Continue reading 'Quit Photoshop to save your custom Actions'
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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