Galaxy Note 8 setup

Not too long ago I bought a slightly used Galaxy Note 8 off of eBay for surprisingly cheap, and have since been using it to do preliminary sketches and comps for my Geek Bar assignments. Combined with the Wacom Bamboo Stylus feel and an Otterbox Defender case with stand, it's a very comfortable and portable digital sketchbook setup.

The 8-inch screen offers a decent amount of real estate, most definitely when compared with the Galaxy Note 2 (which remains to be great for on-the-go sketching). The soft rubber nib on the Wacom stylus combined with the surface of the Otterbox's built-in screen protector makes for a drawing experience that feels like working with natural media; I'd say the closest analog might be felt tip markers. Good stuff, y'all.

Geek Bar Nerd Lurve Valentine's Day cards

For my latest Geek Bar Chicago assignment, I was asked to create a set of small Valentine's Day cards for their "Nerd Lurve" event, reminiscent of the cheesy cards kids give each other in grade school. I was given bits of text to work with, with a few suggestions for visuals. I sketched ideas out on my Note 2, then laid them out in Illustrator:

 

I decided to build the illustrations in Photoshop, using layer effects to apply texture and shading to simulate the look of cut paper, to give them a handcrafted look. I think they turned out just like I pictured them in my head, which can be a rarity:

Pretty fun!

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.

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.