Jesus Book Cover

This is a commission that I did for a book cover. I had a lot of fun with this one.  The author of the book had the idea of using a series of caricatures to depict the way people perceive Jesus Christ.  I modified the idea a bit so that it was one single caricature being drawn of the real Jesus.

I put together the image below which shows the steps starting with the concept sketch and ending with the complete illustration with the added title and credits.

Shrimp Sketches 2

So waaaaaay back in June I posted some sketches that I did for a freelance project, I was doing, in which I was designing a shrimp mascot for a clothing line.  Anyway, I did quite a number of sketches to get the look of the shrimp down.  This is the last three rounds of sketches.

With these five sketches I was attempting to make the shrimp have more of a cooked shrimp shape, based on the request of the client.

 The cooked shrimp idea was the right direction but it needed to be a little more stylized. It needed to be a little simpler too, so that it would work well on clothing.  The client decided that they liked the one with the Popeye style arms but wanted me to work on improving the face a bit.

So, I came up with these final five designs and both myself and the client agreed that #1 was the best.

Next time I will post the final Illustration of the Jumbo Shrimp.

Eustace Consulting: Anna

I Just recently finished a brand new character for Eustace Consulting based on their newest team member, Anna. You may or may not have seen the previous set of characters Right here. This illustration is, of course, done with the more detailed rendering much like the previous characters. I'm definitely getting more comfortable with that style now. It also helps that I've upgraded my version of Adobe Illustrator which allows for transparencies on gradients and therefor makes blending them together, much easier.

Eustace Consulting

This past month I was hired by Eustace Consulting to produce a series of cartoon illustrations of each of their team members.

Chris

They wanted me to do some more detailed rendering on each character. Usually, my coloring work is flatter than this. It was a bit different for me but I was confident that I could produce the results that that they were looking for.

Jenifer

 I had done illustrations with more detailed rendering and gradients before but it was usually in Photoshop using various blending options and brushes.  You can do the same sort of things in Adobe Illustrator but it's a bit more challenging because each color or gradient is a separate vector shape.  It's a lot different than Photoshop in that respect.

Anthony

Most of the challenge comes from trying to make the gradients blend together in a seamless fashion.  In Photoshop you can can use gradients that fade from a foreground color to transparent. There's ways to do that in Illustrator and I have used them before but I like to avoid it as much as possible just in case the client or their graphic designer is using software that can't render the transparent layers properly.

I think I might look into using transparencies and blending options some more. It would make the process simpler and we're getting to the point with technology and software that it might not be an issue  anymore.

Ari

By the time I got to Illustrating Ari I really had the process figured out and a lot less time was spent experimenting with the gradients to see what worked.

You can see all the characters together in the header image of the Eustace Consulting Fan Page.

Fantasy Illustrations

A while back I did a post about some fantasy illustrations I was doing and showed the creation process from one of them. I had refrained from posting the other illustrations and giving too much information as to why I was doing them because they were involved in a Christmas surprise. Well Christmas has come and gone so I can reveal to you what it was all about!

My cousin Kelly, who is a very talented writer, decided to collect a bunch of short stories she had written into a nice book and give them away as Christmas gifts to the family. She asked me if I would like to contribute some illustrations to the book and of course I said yes. And The Mists Of Kalador was born...
Below are all the illustrations I did for the book excluding the one that I posted previously, which you can find here: http://jeffmorin.blogspot.com/2010/11/trying-something-different.html






Something I learned in my early days when I illustrated an album cover, was that when something is printed it always comes out darker than it looks on a computer screen. So, with these illustrations I made sure not to make my shadows too dark, knowing that they would be darker when they were printed in the book. Because I kept this in mind they came out just how I imagined in the book.

Color Planning

When creating an illustration, I have a bad habit of not planning my colors out in advance. Usually, I won't begin thinking about my color choices until I'm ready to color the image in Adobe Illustrator. This can be a bit of a problem because I wind up spending a lot of time trying to figure out what colors work well together and constantly tweaking them as I go. This is especially time consuming in Illustrator because every block of color or gradient is it's own separate shape with it's own properties. After all this extra work I usually wind up with a color pallet that is a bit different than what I had originally imagined.

So in order to put a stop to this waste of time and remain more accurate to my original visions, I've decided to start using Photoshop to plan out my color pallete. Photoshop makes it really easy to quickly lay down color with the Brush and Fill tools. It also has a lot of Adjustment features making it simple to change hue, saturation, color balance, and many others. Here's how I did it...


Using my pencils as a guide, I start by blocking in the shades. For an effective composition it's important to keep the shade of each color in mind. Each major shape should be distinguishable against the others. If the image reads clearly in black and white then the composition works.


I knew this illustration was going to be a night scene with some cool colors. Since I had already laid down the shades, this was a simple matter of colorizing the image. I did this by using the Hue/saturation option in the Adjustments menu and checking the colorize box. With the slighty warmer colors on the vampire and wolf, I did the same thing, moving the hue slider around to make the colors a little warmer.

Now, I can just save the image as a JPEG and place it in the illustrator file and use the eyedropper tool to pick my colors.

In the end this method of planning helped speed the process along and made the coloring process much easier.

Takes The Cake

On occasion, My pal Nick makes custom decorated cakes. I think about a year ago he started doing it with more frequency and he decided that he'd like to make it into a little side business. So, he commissioned me to create this mascot/logo for use on business cards and the like.

Nick wanted a cartoon version of himself in full chef garb running with a cake. This would go along with the name of the business, Takes The Cake. A clever name indeed.

Usually it takes quite a few different sketches before I really nail a design, but in this case I got it with the first one. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't come up with anything I liked better than that. But just to give Nick some options I did one more little sketch. Then I sent the sketches to nick and indicated to him that I liked the top one best, and he agreed. Since the sketch turned out so well I really didn't want to redraw it and risk stiffening up the pose too much. So, I decided to use the thumbnail sketch for the final illustration and make any necessary changes or tweaks in illustrator.

Trying Something Different

Recently, I've been working on a personal project of sorts. I don't want to get into too many of the details right now because it's a bit of a surprise for a select few individuals. Basically, for this project I had to do a bunch of fantasy based illustrations. I decided to take the opportunity to experiment a bit with some techniques I've been wanting to try.

Generally, the work I do mostly consists of very cartoony illustrations done digitally. For these Illustrations I wanted to create a marriage of digital and traditional mediums. On top of that I wanted to take the opportunity to practice my inking with a more semi realistic style. I've drawn in this style before but I haven't done it very often using actual brush and ink. (or in this case, an amazing Pentel Brush pen).

My plan was to give the colors a painted quality. I've seen a lot of other artist do this using a flat painted texture and overlaying it on the colors in Photoshop. When done properly, that method can work quite well, but you can still tell that that painted texture was added later. I decided to do something similar but instead create a painted texture exclusively for each illustration.



Oddly enough, I was somewhat inspired by the recent work that KC Green was doing on his webcomic Gun Show. Apparently he used an ink wash to create the gray tones on his comic then inked the line art over that. I thought it gave it a very nice classic illustrated look. I'm not quite as brave as Mr. Green so rather than do it all on one sheet of paper, I traced my line art on to another piece of paper and used a charcoal gray water color to create the gray tones.



Once I had both images scanned in I combined them in photoshop, keeping each one on it's own separate layer. I made sure to set the layer blending options to Multiply that way the white areas would be transparent so my colors would show through. When adding the color I used some of the texture and scattering options on the Photoshop brushes to maintain the painted look. For the most part, the coloring stage was rather quick since most of the work had been done by creating the water color shades before hand.

In the end, I learned some new things about inking, painting, and digital coloring techniques. And I wound up with about 2 or 3 portfolio worthy illustrations.

After the surprise is revealed, I will do another post featuring all 7 Illustrations that I created for this project.

Update 12/29/10: Check out the rest of the illustrations here: http://jeffmorin.blogspot.com/2010/12/fantasy-illustrations.html