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.

Ask The Motherboard

Do you know what today is? It's Mothers Day but it's also the launch of a brand new website called Ask The Motherboard.  It's a tech blog for the whole family, but more importantly it features this illustration crafted by myself.  It's a caricature of Danielle Vello, the websites creator and author, and her infant daughter.  Danielle wanted to go with a sort of 1950s feel for the design.  She suggested making her cartoon avatar look like a classic 50s housewife while still maintaining some traits that were uniquely her own, such as the sunglasses on top of her head. And of course, we included a modern day computer.

The website's design is still a bit of a work in progress but today is it's official launch. So, go check it out and maybe ask her a question or two to help get the ball rolling.

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.