Finally back!
I knew when I started that I’d have trouble finding the time to keep this up properly. The only really good blogs are regular ones. Still, I don’t think there’s much point to posting just for the sake of it. The only reason someone might want to read this is for some useful information. I’m on spring break from my teaching this week and no pending freelance deadlines, so I swore to myself I’d get something posted here in between doing my taxes and painting my bathroom!
I’d like to start by answering a question I’m frequently asked: Why do I use Painter instead of Photoshop for my illustration work?
The answers are:
A. – Painter is the first program I learned to use on a computer, so I have a long familiarity with it.
B. – I like the interface that comes from traditional artist’s materials rather than photography (as I do!).
C. – I prefer the brush customization interface, and the pressure-sensitive paper texture feature.
D. - I often like to use Painter’s vector Shapes feature or import vector art from Adobe Illustrator. I prefer the way Painter handles this to Photoshop.
I know that much of what you can do in Painter you can do in Photoshop, so to each their own, but for me it’s Painter.
I’m a “jack of all trades” kind of illustrator, but my favorite things to do are cartoony humorous illustrations. Like many a little boy, I loved drawing monsters and rocket ships and the like. Like many an illustrator, I’ve never quite grown up. So I still love these things.
Here is a piece that’s actually posted elsewhere on this site in the ADAPT Expo gallery. I did it for a proposed show a friend of mine was trying to get off the ground. Since it was not a “real” job, I took the time to document the creation for possible teaching use.
I’ll share it with you here over the next few days.
The way I’ve made this piece is basically my favorite way of working in Painter. It’s not for everybody, because it’s rather indirect, labor intensive, and creates large files.
The style is what I’ve come to call “rendered cartoon”. I’m not really a great natural draughtsman, really more a designer. I need to carefully shape and plan things. If I have any gift it might be for color and lighting. So I love to take the stylized world of the cartoon and shade it into a sense of rounded form. I’m highly influenced by animated cartoons and often imagine I’m creating my own little self-contained scene from one when I’m making a picture such as this.
All my work starts with traditional drawing – lots of struggle with thumbnail sketches to find what I’m after – I like to paraphrase the writer Dorothy Parker by saying “I don’t like drawing, I like having drawn”. I work hard to get all the things I want right in the line drawing stage. I just use lots of sketching and tracing paper and go through lots of revisions, finally making a careful drawing in hard red pencil on vellum paper. I use this kind of pencil because I like the way it feels better than graphite. None of this has much to do with being “digital”, although I do use the computer at this stage to find reference, and to re-size and distort parts of drawings on occasion. I scan the finished drawing into the computer.
Once I have this, the real fun for me begins, because while I mostly “think” my way to this point, I “feel” my way through the color and light. And even though my approach is pretty technical, I still find it intuitive. I really enjoy making the image “come to life” with color and texture. This is what I love about Painter.
Next I’ll start the step by step of how I do this style. Hopefully I’ll get these up in a regular fashion.