Mira's Bear in a Tutu

My daughter Mira asked me to cut out a crayon drawing that she did of "a pink teddy bear wearing a tutu" which I thought was fantastic:

I loved it so much that I had the urge to embellish the drawing, with Mira's permission, along the lines of "The Monster Engine" illustrations by Dave DeVries. I painted it up in Autodesk Sketchbook for Android on the Galaxy Note II with a Wacom Bamboo Stylus feel, and I'm pleased with how it turned out:

It was a fun exercise, one that I'll have to do again in the future.

Urban Cyborg

Whenever I take the bus home from work, I get the urge to doodle these urban cyborgs. This guy looks like he's in need of an upgrade...

Sketchbook Mobile app on the Galaxy Note II with a Wacom Bamboo stylus feel

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.

Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile

Autodesk just released their latest version of Sketchbook Mobile today, and what better way to commemorate a new drawing app than with a cyborg portrait?

I really appreciate all the new additions to the program, they've genuinely elevated the utility of my Galaxy Note 2 as a portable digital sketchbook. Things like selection tools, smudge brushes, gradient fills, and guides are warmly welcomed. Unfortunately, even if you already own the previous app Sketchbook Pro, you'll have to pay to upgrade Sketchbook Mobile in order to access its full feature set. Still, it's only a few bucks... For the cost of a comic book, I can't ask for much more.

At any rate, great app, available on iOS and Android.