Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration

This sexy bail bondswoman cartoon character design was created for—you guessed it, a bail bondswoman. The client wanted a woman character design that was sexy, but not too sexy, and had to be professional-looking as well.

Continue reading 'Sexy Bail Bondswoman'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
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In this video, I am sharing with you a vector path creation technique to speed up the process of creating curved paths by adding intermediate anchor points after your corners have been created. I used to create my anchor points as I was following the curve of the shape I was tracing. Instead, with this technique the anchor points are added to your vector path after your corners have been created, allowing Illustrator to approximate the length of the curve handles for you with much greater accuracy the first time around.

Continue reading 'Adobe Illustrator Video Tip: Quickly Add Smooth Transition Anchor Points'

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

Another brief video in my series introducing some great new features in Photoshop CS4 for artists, cartoonists, illustrators and anyone else who sketches or draws using Photoshop.

This video features the excellent new keyoard shortcuts that allow you to drag-resize the size of the brushes using the mouse pointer.

Continue reading 'Video: Photoshop CS4 Drag-Resize Brush Keyboard Shortcut'

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

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

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.