I have always since starting out owned a copy of Aldus Illustrator, or more commonly now known as Adobe Illustrator. I just never had time to go in to the depths of using it. I found I spent most of my time in Photoshop with my work. Now I am getting the hang of it and at last making up for the cost of buying it. I haven't as yet gone too far into the new bits of version 10 but I'm sure it won't make too much of a difference. Here is a work colleague I caricatured recently :
I guess the cool part of this is being able to import to Flash and then animate the caricature as well. A huge bonus if you're doing multimedia type stuff. I could have worked this drawing up a bit more but I like the simplistic style of it. Reminds me of early cel type animation.
this is nice... a departure from your usual style?
Yes it is a little different to my usual style. I need to find another more illustrative style geared towards the magazine industry. They tend to go for more colourful and crisp images. This image does no justice to the EPS vector file I have.
Jay Ward studios had a good influence over me and the comic book industry as well. This is a combination of both the basic Jay Ward "K.I.S.S" theory and the more well known thick outlines made from comic book artists many years ago.
More recently there has been an increase in the number of artists emplying this thick outline to their art. My only cause for doing it is it makes the image clearer for the internet. Also looks better bunched up with text on a page in a Mag too.
Glad to see you've got a blog too! I'll be dropping by.
Oh I know all about that "thick outline" business. Every cartoon character on Cartoon Network these days has thick black outlines. Hey we've also done this style to death ourselves! :) Anyhow, the K.I.S.S. theory always works! Good luck!
I can't get cable to see Cartoon Network but from what I see in the printed media, yes there are many around using the thick outlines. Doesn't mean it's a bad thing but canbe overused sometimes.
Welcome to the vector club Lee. For years now I've mostly used Macromedia Freehand to output cartoons..originally, because of the sharp lines, ability to print at any size without loss of definition, small file sizes, superior text manipulation and editability. freehand is even more integrated with Flash for animation, because they come from the same stable.
lastly, Freehand has always had the facility of directly accepting scans, so you can scan your roughs and trace into vector objects without having to have photoshop as the middleman.
Oh..it's built-in auto-trace has always been as good as adobe's stand-alone Streamline as well.
Finally,I swear I have no financial interest in the fortunes of Macromedia!!