Ever since i drew the first ‘Cuddly the Cuttlefish’ my girlfriend, Leonie has been obsessed with cartoon cuttlefish. It was meant to be a one-off exercise, i kinda picked a random subject: the cuttlefish, and i drew it. The first few i drew from reference pictures (gotta love google images) were fairly realistic, but it leant itself to a nice cartoonization (if i may use that term) so i went ahead and made the original ‘Cuddly’ below.
This week both Leonie and I got a cold, nothing life threatening, but many many tissues were used. So, after repeated requests at drawing more cuttlefish, the cold became the impetus for the most recent Cuddly. (or should it be Cuttly?
And just for giggles: this is the sketchwork behind the ‘finished’ piece. (if you could call it finished, since it really is just a sketch in and of itself). All this was done on the wacom pad, in illustrator (cs2, dont have 3 yet) with the simplest round brush, 3 point diameter, and a 2 point pressure variation. I have sorta come to like that setting for most everything. (after much tweaking. it gives me a nice range of sizes, and allows for some nice flowing strokes, but without going too big). Since i mostly like just using pencils on paper when i am going analog, i find this nice minimal setting to be similar in simplicity to pencils. I rarely use anything else on the wacom (when drawing in any case, once the piece is drawn, then i might go back and fiddle with stroke weights and go in a micro-manage the points, but for the initial drawing, all 3-point round brush for me)
Here is todays sketch, it is Cuddly the Cuttlefish! The original pencil sketch is there, and the digital re-draw. I dont use live trace or anything like that (although i have in the past, and it is really cool.) Instead i place the jpg of the pencil sketch into illustrator, then trace it with the paintbrush to get the outline right. With the wacom i can use the pressure and get some nice organic outlines.
For the colors i went to this cool site, and typed in ‘fish’ into the palette search and found a zillion nice sea-color-palettes.
Since I have been doing more illustration lately ( a blast form the past, tho i have missed it) i decided to start in earnest to try and exercise my art muscle. In that vein i am trying to do a sketch of something or another every day. And the online ‘contests’ help with inspiration. One of those is Illustration Friday.
This is my first entry into the very cool Illustration Friday contest. I dont really hope to garner any notice from it, but i think that the idea behind IF is to force you to draw. And that is what i did. I drew so many little whorls and loops and ‘twists’ not to mention there are faces, at least one Cthulu, lots of spiders, a panda, a bunny, a cat, a bunch of DNA and many many other micro-sketches.
I did this on my brand-spankin-new Wacom intuos 3, which is pretty badass. I have been the king of teh mouse-drive pen-tool in illustrator for years now, and i would never have done a piece like this one without the wacom. it took me a long time, but the i think that the diversity of the shape and width that i got automatically from the wacom really helped make the doodles look nice as a background texture. Had i used the mouse and the pen (or brush even) like i normally used to do all my illustrator work, it would have taken me ten times as long, and looked worse because all the lines would be the same width.
anyhoo, yay! wacom intuos 3!
This is my first entry into the very cool Illustration Friday contest. I dont really hope to garner any notice from it, but i think that the idea behind IF is to force you to draw. And that is what i did. I drew so many little whorls and loops and ‘twists’ not to mention there are faces, at least one Cthulu, lots of spiders, a panda, a bunny, a cat, a bunch of DNA and many many other micro-sketches.
I did this on my brand-spanink-new Wacom intuos 3, which is pretty badass. I have been the king of the mouse-drive pen-tool in illustrator for years now, and i would never have done a piece like this one without the wacom. it took me a long time, but the i think that the diversity of the shape and width that i got automatically from the wacom really helped make the doodles look nice as a background texture. Had i used the mouse and the pen (or brush even) like i normally used to do all my illustrator work, it would have taken me ten times as long, and looked worse because all the lines would be the same width.
anyhoo, yay! wacom intuos 3!
