After various random rounds on Twitter lamenting the demise of Macromedia Freehand, cartoon-style illustrator Garth Bruner decided to do something about it. He’s started posting an ongoing series of YouTube video screencasts demonstrating key differences between Freehand and Adobe Illustrator. He highlights how he created vector art in Freehand, then jumps over to Illustrator to attempt the same task, comparing tools, techniques and workflow.
Continue reading 'FreeHand & Illustrator Comparison Video Series By Illustrator Garth Bruner'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
Another quick Adobe Illustrator tip over at design blog BittBox, this time a quick overview on using the Reshape tool. In short, the Reshape tool helps keep the overall ‘feel’ of a vector path without having to manually tweak individual anchor points.
Continue reading 'Quick Overview on Adobe Illustrator’s Reshape Tool'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
Just saw this over at design blog BittBox: when drawing with the Shape tools in Illustrator (rectangle, circle etc.), holding the tilde key (the squiggle key to the left of the 1 key on U.S. keyboards) and then dragging the mouse will result in lots of duplicates of the shape following the trail of your mouse pointer.
Continue reading 'Adobe Illustrator’s Tilde Key Trick'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
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.
A cartoon illustration & design project for a friend’s party required the resulting art to be suitable for reproduction on a photocopy machine. After some trial, error, Google search, trial, error, Google search, trial, error I discovered the magic combo that allows you to create a halftone in Photoshop for an image and print it out on your inkjet printer so the art will be perfect for photocopying.
This technique is perfect for flyers, newsletters or any other short-run printing needs you have where the cheapness of a photocopy is desired, but so are grayscale images.
Continue reading 'Cartoon Art & Halftones Tutorial: From Inkjet Printer to Photocopier'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
Icon artist Dirceu Veiga over at FastIcon.com has a nice little video screen capture showcasing his technique of creating cartoon characters as vector art in Illustrator for his icon creations.
The video isn’t really a tutorial or walkthrough, but it’s kind of nice seeing the approach to building the vector objects and adding shading and highlights. You’ll have to reverse-engineer some of the techniques, but sometimes just seeing something done can be helpful in itself.
Continue reading 'Cartoon Character Icon Video Tutorial at FastIcon.com'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
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 -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
I just discovered these free PDF downloads of Inkspot, the Australian Cartoonists’ Association’s official magazine. The current issue feature über-caricaturist Mort Drucker. The publication is about 24 pages and contain interviews and news. I haven’t delved into the complete issue just yet, but looks to be a great resource.
Lots of interviews with cartoonists and other informative cartooning and cartoon industry resources in each issue.
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
Primary, secondary, tertiary, complimentary, analagous, brightness, hue, value, saturation, tints, shades… do these words mean anything to you? They should.
A post by cartoonist Matt Glover points out ColorFAQ - very basic web guide to color theory. It got me poking around on the internet for some other sites with some more depth on the subject. Sometimes I forget how much I use color theory every single day, it’s just something that sometimes goes on autopilot and is an easy topic to forget to recommend to others.
Continue reading 'Color Theory Resources'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
The excellent Illustrator blog BittBox has a nice Adobe Illustrator Layer Mask tip/walkthough on how to use this highly useful, productivity-enhancing (and fairly obscure) feature of Illustrator CS and higher.
Layer Masks are basically clipping masks that apply to the entire layer (Layer masks need to be sub-layers, and the top-most one at that). The best feature is that they can be locked, and they are not tied to one specific object, or cause an entire group of unrelated objects to become “grouped” as they are when applying a clipping mask to them. This allows you to work normally with all the other objects on other sub-layers while still getting that clipping mask effect.
Head on over to BittBox and read the full post: Improve Your Illustrator Workflow with Layer Masking
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
