Geek Retreat ad

The latest illustration I created for Geek Bar Chicago is a promotional ad for their "Geek Retreat" food and drink special. Running Tuesday thru Friday, the specials are based on a deity each day of the week is associated with-- Ares, Odin, Thor, and Freya. The visual suggested was the gods and goddesses sitting at a table drinking and playing the card game Fluxx (with Thor being female, as a nod to the recent gender-switch of the comic book character).

Once again, I used the program Mischief to generate the lineart, since I knew it was potentially going to be printed. I tried going for a style that harkened to the heavy, chunky line of artists like Jack Kirby, Michael Avon Oeming, and Darwyn Cooke. I brought the drawing into Photoshop, opting to give each deity their own color to emphasize how each one stood for a different day and special (and also unconsciously referencing the way the gods were depicted in Disney's "Hercules" movie). I then took it into Adobe Illustrator to lay in the text:

 

I feel like this is a fairly different style for me; looking at it now I think it looks like something one might find in a storybook, which could be a useful thing to add to my tool belt.

Pew-pew continued

Here's where the raygun rendering stands currently:

I added the little targeting sight thingy, and refined some of the detail in the grip. Next step is to take it into Photoshop and add some texture.

Here's what the underlying mesh looks like:

Original reference photo here. (Remixed as allowed per Creative Commons 2.0 (by-nc-sa))

Raygun work-in-progress

Here's a new gradient mesh illustration I'm working on:

Pew-pew!

Still rough around the edges, but I'm liking the way meshes work with metallics...

Original reference photo here. (Remixed as allowed per Creative Commons 2.0 (by-nc-sa))

Marble mesh

Thought I'd try my hand at using gradient mesh for something made out of glass. I like the way the swathes of color turned out, kind of painterly.

Finished apple mesh

Here's the finished apple created with gradient mesh, with some texture added, all done in Illustrator. It's not a picture-perfect copy of the reference photo, but it gets the idea across. The original pic is actually pretty grainy/pixellated, so it's a decent trade-off.

Vector apple WIP

More gradient mesh practice, fruit seems to lend itself to these kinds of exercises.

Apple mesh work-in-progress

Without texture it's looking a little tomato-ish...

Adventures with Gradient Mesh

Gave the gradient mesh tool a go in Adobe Illustrator CS5, and I think it turned out pretty decent:

(Original photo taken by benjamint444 and used per the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license)

Not a total copy of the original photo (all the little details would have been incredibly tedious to re-create, but I've certainly seen others go to those lengths) but I think it gets the point across fairly well. Eventually I'd like to make a face with gradient meshes, but hey, baby steps... There are also a couple things I'd like to try to create some original illustrations with it. Let's see where the road takes us.

Another robot head

I've had this story-- or at least, the barebones of one-- bouncing around in my head for the past month or so. I started up a notebook to jot down all the various ideas I sketch concepts down whenever I get the chance. I'll scan some of those doodles in soon, but for now here's a drawing of a robot head I done did with a Wacom in Illustrator:



The look isn't all that much different than drawing with say, a Rapidograph and some India ink, but it has the advantage of being easily editable and scaleable on the fly, which is nice. I'm not entirely sold on its use yet, but it's growing on me.