Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration

For all you Photoshop brush junkies out there, here’s a Mac OS X Quick Look plugin to preview Photoshop Brush Files (.abr) in the Finder.

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

A quick note that as of the posting date, there are a handful of plugins not yet available for the Creative Suite CS4 applications.

The list for me so far includes: all font activation plugins for Linotype’s Font Explorer X, “Select Menu” for Illustrator CS4, Canon’s Scangear CS plugin to access your scanner from within Photoshop’s Import menu, and plugins from developer Worker72a such as the ‘Zoom To Selection’ plugin for Illustrator.

Continue reading 'Creative Suite CS4 Plugin Availability'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

This post is a bit off-topic, but seeing as how I found a fix for an issue that seems to be affecting a lot of WordPress users, and I find many a solution to my WordPress issues on other blogs, I thought I would post.

If you are finding that activating certain plugins on your self-hosted WordPress installation is breaking the Visual Editor, this may be the fix you are looking for.

Continue reading 'Fix For WordPress Visual Editor Conflict With Certain Plugins'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Just stumbled across these handy – and free – Photoshop plugins which should be a huge time-saver for comic artists who ink & color their pages in Photoshop. A process also known as ‘flatting’.

These have to be a huge productivity booster to any artist working with coloring line art in Photoshop, not just comic book artists and the like.

I can already envision many applications for these in my workflow, even though I am primarily a vector artist.

Continue reading 'Free ‘Flatting’ Photoshop Plugin For Comic Artists'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

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.

Adobe Illustrator plugin Phantasm CS offers in-line embedded image editing, color checking and separations, duotones and vector halftones, filters and live effects color adjustment. Looks like a pretty great plugin for Illustrator users who do a lot of bitmap image placing.

Personally I do any layout work in InDesign, and not much of my work requires having bitmap images in the Illustrator file outside of placing a template for tracing. However, the halftone and separation features look like they might be really handy. 

Continue reading 'Adobe Illustrator plugin Phantasm CS Studio Offers Duotones,Vector Halftones, Filters, Live Effects Color Adjustment & More'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

A plugin that I always forget to tout, since the functionality it provides seems so intrinsic to Illustrator once it’s installed, I forget it’s a third-party enhancement.

Select Menu for Adobe Illustrator (Mac and Windows, free) from Graffix Software is available for every version of Illustrator from 8 on up to CS3. It adds additional selectable items under the Select -> Objects menu.

This plugin really comes in handy at the production stage of prepping your art, allowing you to find all sorts of items that you need to preflight. It especially comes in handy after flattening transparency, such as when you export art to an older version of Illustrator. I find lots of klunky and open paths all over the place after flattening transparency, and I couldn’t imagine how much of a pain in the neck it would be to clean up art without Select Menu.

Continue reading 'Essential Adobe Illustrator Plug-in: Select Menu'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

I just picked up a great new plugin for Illustrator, Zoom to Selection (Mac only) from the Adobe Illustrator plugin coder known cryptically as Worker 72a. Zoom to Selection does exactly as it’s name implies – allows one to zoom (maginify) in and out of an Illustrator document using the currently selected object as the centering point of the zoom.

Continue reading 'Must-have Adobe Illustrator plugin: Zoom to Selection'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.