Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration

What an awesome project to work on—creating cartoon Frankenstein artwork for a custom hot rod 1971 Barracuda. This project started life when Murray Pfaff of Pfaff Designs contacted me to create the artwork as part of a custom hot rod design he was working on for a client.

Continue reading 'FrankenCuda'

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

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
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Working color vector art for a mascot character project. The ogre will be used as a mascot for a video game portal website. We needed a prop and I suggested a video game controller, the client wanted to go with an old-school Atari 2600 controller, which I think looks great. it’s such an iconic design it really reads well, which is important for smaller sizes.

Continue reading 'Cartoon Ogre Mascot Character'

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

I recently created an in-depth Adobe Illustrator tutorial for the Go Media graphic design and illustration blog GoMediaZine. The tutorial covers the creation of a cartoon character mascot from sketch to final vector art. The character art is a fun Twitter blue bird cartoon character, and the vector art files as well as icons for use on your own website or blog are available as a free download as part of the tutorial.

Continue reading 'Tutorial: Create A Vector Art Twitter Bird Character Icon In Adobe Illustrator'

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

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.

For longer than I can remember, I have been flustered with the Flatten Transparency feature in Adobe Illustrator CS3 and CS4. Very often I use the excellent Layer Targeting feature introduced into recent versions of Adobe Illustrator, however I found that when using the Flatten Transparency feature, it seemed to ignore the attributes of the Targeting, which forced me to find lengthy workarounds to solve this. Turns out there was an approach to solving this that I had overlooked…

Continue reading 'Flattening Transparency Properly When Using Layer Appearances in Adobe Illustrator'

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

I recently finished up the first round of a series of custom avatar illustrations for the Cleveland, Ohio convention and visitor’s bureau Positively Cleveland. The initial set of avatar illustrations were for the “web women” of Positively Cleveland — the main online team for their website.

Continue reading 'Custom Avatar Illustrations: Positively Cleveland'

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.

I recently needed to explain to a client the basic differences between Raster and Vector graphics, and came across this handy Raster and Vector Graphics overview at Mike’s Sketchpad.

While the explanation there is a nice summary, I would recommend any Adobe Illustrator (or other vector graphics software) users out there do a bit more research into vector art.

However for a quick explanation for a client or a non-vector graphics friend, the overview linked above pretty much sums it up as much as a non-vector art geek wants to know about the topic.

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

I recently created this pinup Santa girl illustration for a local company that produces home-brewing beer kits. The client was developing a special holiday/Christmas blend, and wanted to also include an incentive in the package — in this case it was to be an empty 24 oz. beer bottle with a pinup Santa girl silkscreened on to the bottle.

Continue reading 'Santa’s Helper'

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