Coffee & Tea Show

For my Digital Illustration class we had to create a poster for an event. Browsing the web I found this "Canadian Coffee and Tea Show" which I thought sounded amazing! I would absolutely love to go! And who knows, maybe I will, since it's still about a year away.=)

Anyhow. Here's my poster process below. I'm not wholeheartedly satisfied, but working predominantly digitally is still fairly new for me and I have a ton of other work to do too. =)

1st came the thumbnail sketches, which I'm not posting and shall remain a mystery:)

hand drawn line work, afterwards live traced and digitally inked with the pen tool

playing around with the colour palette

Adding some background textures and stuff

rethinking the colours...

experimenting with patterns...

rethinking some stuff

That's it!

Used my own texture resources +

Credits:

Grungy Coffee Rings and Stains: by onthinair
Coffee Stain Brushes: by korn-field- 102
Texture: Tea Stain I : by frameofthoughts
Paper Pack 5: by dierat
Garton Font: by David Rakowski

Happy Sunday!

Epic Celtic Keds

So, for our 3rd Surface Illustration project we had to design a pair of keds-shoes using the PRO-Keds shoes from Zazzle.com.

I decided to create a fiery Celtic bird-of-prey motif=)
We also had to order the shoes we created, and so I can't wait till mine arrive in the mail!

side profile

tongue

heel accent

Linework:

These designs were first hand drawn. Then they were Live-Traced in Illustrator, and then they were Live painted in Illustrator:)

Soon to be available to the public purchasing on Zazzle. I'll keep you posted:)
Happy Friday!

Surface Illustration: Electrical Boxes

So for the latest Surface Illustration class assignment we were to design/illustrate a visual that might have been potentially chosen in a competition to beautify some of downtown Vancouver's electrical boxes. My design didn't win, but I was happy with it=)

Essentially I created this pattern that would repeat and wrap around the box:

 And here are the individual characters:

These were done in Illustrator, but I originally started with hand drawn sketches like these:

Happy Thursday!

Best of Both Worlds

Of digital and traditional illustration techniques that is:)

Firstly, I have to say that I think that it takes tremendous amounts of talent to skillfully utilize both the traditional media and digital tools. Both have their value and neither is inherently (for no obvious reason) better than the other. And when both digital and traditional techniques are applied together, wonders can happen! Yes, yes they can:)

Now, I'm not implying that the following pieces are the wonders I spoke of, but I think they're pretty good examples of digital and traditional techniques can have a happy marriage.

So, for this project we had to make "Greeting" card type of patterns.
To create a uniform feel for my vine shapes I decided to first quickly draft out their basic outline in Illustrator, and they looked like this:

I then traced over these shapes and filled them in with my design. (Sketches of this step will be added sometime later)

I then coloured my patterns with waterproof coloured inks and they looked like this:

I then scanned these and brought them into Photoshop where layered and blended them to make my patterns which ended up looking like this:

Art Nouveau inspired style and colouring

So, in the end they have a hand drawn appearance yet they are still fairly similar and the vine outlines aren't tremendously crooked. Not to mention - I didn't have to paint dozens of microscopic identical flowers:)

Happy Thursday!

Dessert Time!

So, for my Digital Illustration course the first assignment was to create 8 icons - 4 simple vector ones, and 4 corresponding more detailed digital ones. I like colourful desserts so I decided to go with that theme.

First I did my sketches:

(this was the easy part)

Then I decided to go and do my vector icons:

Then I transferred my sketches into Illustrator and live traced them to create my contour lines. I then decided to print them out and colour the pictures traditionally (using watercolor paints).

I then scanned those and did the live trace again. I tweeked some things here and there and I ended up with these guys:)

Happy Sunday!