Geek Bar Lounge Friday ad

For my latest Geek Bar assignment, I was tasked with creating an illustration for their upcoming Lounge Fridays, "ultra-casual friday nights at Geek Bar, when patrons are encourage to wear their pajamas." The image suggested was having bar folk hanging around in pop culture-inspired accoutrements, with mugs in their hands. I was also given the request to "specifically include a blonde figure in a pokemon cap and baby blue bathrobe, and pink haired figure in a yellow captain kirk bathrobe." Sounded like fun.

Having people stand around in costume was pretty much the same idea I had for the Nerd Year's Eve ad so I decided to change it up a little, by skewing the perspective to suggest lens distortion. I scribbled out a quickie thumbnail in Sketchbook:

Once I determined that was the direction I wanted to go, I created a more comprehensive sketch in good ol' pencil and paper:

I got this reply: "This is awesome! I wonder about having everybody standing on a lounge day, but it looks so cool I don't want to mess with the artistic process. If there is any way to make a few people sitting that might be neat."

D'oh! Right, lounging. Got it.

I added a couple of people seated at tables on the ends, and we were off to the races. I created the lineart in Mischief, then took it into Photoshop. Because of the description, I knew the illo would have to be full-color. I started with a layer of base colors, then used Levels adjustment layers with masks to pull out the lights and shadows. I also used another adjustment layer to vary the saturation on the characters depending on their foreground/background placement, to help establish dimensional hierarchy. I then applied a low-density Photo filter layer for a little color harmony. And since the characters were in a cel-shaded style, I added some texture to the background to provide some visual interest:

It didn't occur to me until some time after I'd submitted the final art...
How is Boba Fett supposed to drink with his helmet on?
Ha! Oh well, that just makes the illustration funnier.

Another illustration under my belt, and I'm satisfied with how it turned out. I'm told they'll be re-using the ad monthly, and the concept was proposed to make slight modifications for each iteration, if I was willing. It's an interesting idea, having it be an evolving illustration, so we'll see how that turns out.

With Mischief in mind...

So lately I've been messing around with a vector drawing/painting program called Mischief, and it's really interesting. Because the program is vector-based as opposed to raster, filesizes are small, and you can work within what they term an "infinite canvas". Mind you, even though the artwork is vector information, it's a proprietary technology (which is referred to as Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields a.k.a. ADF) that isn't handled the same way as Adobe Illustrator with splines and bezier curves, and as such can't output files useable by Illustrator. What you can do, however, is output layered Photoshop files at just about any size and resolution you want, up to a max width and height of 20000 pixels-- at 300dpi, that would translate to about 67 inches! I did notice that outputting a piece of art really small, say an inch high at 72dpi, introduces some odd artifacts, but I'm more likely to output a file bigger than smaller so I don't consider it an issue.

I've never really been comfortable drawing lineart with Photoshop, because I had problems with the quality of the linework. Mischief offers a freehand curve smoothing feature that takes care of that rather handily; I find that I genuinely enjoy drawing within the program, especially on a large Cintiq with multi-touch. It feels natural, it's just a really smooth experience overall.

Painting with Mischief, on the other hand, is still something that I think could use some work. The toolset is pretty barebones, and kind of reminds me of the early days of painting on the old homebrew app Colors! for DS. But I have no doubt the developers will get the program up to speed sooner than later.

Here's an attempt to create an illustration fully within Mischief:

Still a bit rough around the edges, but with a lot of potential, I'm really digging Mischief. At only $25 for both the Mac and PC version, it's definitely an affordable drawing and painting program worth checking out.

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.

Nerd Year's Eve ad

A new Geek Bar Chicago illustration I created was for an event entitled "Nerd Year's Eve" (tickets still available!). The project as described "should focus on dressing up in your fanciest geeky outfit possible, and the open beer, wine, and appetizers."

I drew up a thumbnail in Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile on my Galaxy Note II, depicting Elsa from Frozen sharing a toast with a Next Gen-style Klingon while Darth Vader looks on, and Batman chats it up with a lady in a Dalek dress in the background:

I took the thumbnail into Mischief, and created a clean line art version. Knowing the ad was also intended for use in printing, Mischief was perfect for the job; being vector-based, I could size the image as big as I wanted without any issues with pixellization. It's a beautiful thing.

I then took the image into Photoshop to do the coloring. I could have done it in Mischief, but the program currently lacks a lasso tool, which I usually depend on for shading (the developer said a lasso tool is in the works, so I'm looking forward to that implementation). I opted to go with a monochromatic palette for ease of rendering, since this piece required a quick turnaround time. I shaded it in grayscale, then used a gradient mask adjustment layer to colorize it.

Another fun one, with an easy-to-manage production flow.

Hogwarts Holiday Feast ad

I've been helping to create some promotional images for a local business, Geek Bar Chicago. It's a restaurant that caters to geekdom of all shapes and sizes, and I thought creating some illustrations for them would be a nice way to contribute to their cause. They've been mostly cartoony-style pieces, for use as web ads and flyers, and have been really fun to make.

My first illustration for them was an ad for their Harry Potter-themed "Hogwarts Holiday Feast" event. The visual suggested was "a single frame illustration of some wizards in Geek Bar, sipping drinks and being festive, with the event details all to the righthand side of the image." Here are some ridiculously rough thumbnail sketches I whipped up (messy, I know):

Depicting two angles of the bar, with different framing devices for the info text. The target resolution for the finished piece was supposed to be 1200x628, so I opted to go with the camera angle from the second sketch, since the focus was tighter. We chose the scrollwork as the better option for the info background.

I'd been exploring a new vector painting program called Mischief that had just recently come out with a new update, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to test it out. I used it to digitally ink the artwork on a Cintiq, and I LOVED it. I'll talk more about the app in another blog entry.

Here's the finished illustration, inked in Mischief and colored in Photoshop:

All in all, a fun way to flex my design and cartooning muscles.