benbritten.com

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!

I still work with the great guys at Spydercam, and i was also lucky enough to be around near the inception of the company. One of the riggers at the time had a good idea for a logo, one night out at dinner, and he drew it, literally on the back of a napkin. using that sketch as a rough guide, i shot some reference photos of the arri 435 film camera, and used that as the main subject of the logo, then added the legs and the prominent matte box.

This logo was one of the very first illustrations that i really did. Previously i had used my mad skillz to do simple stuff for web site designs and font treatments, but nothing that i would consider 'design'. The spyder logo was done about 7 years ago.

strange things happen sometimes. I havent really done much 'real' illustration work, but recent i have gotten a few illustration gigs, so i decided to wander back through all my electronic doodles and put some of my work up, it turns out there is way more than i remember.

In this and the following few entries, i am gonna put up a bunch of the ones that i liked the most, and were the most fun to work on.

This is one of my very favorites, it is the logo for the very creative duo at Fatlab Music. These guys are good friends of mine, and when they redesigned their site last year, i offered to redesign their logo. We came up with their new logo, three very simple lines that are (IMHO) very expressive.

So, i find myself doing more illustration lately. mostly it has been for application icons. like those little buttons on the toolbar that look like arrows point various different directions, or a little house, or whatever. For those i mostly use Illustrator.

However, recently i have had some people ask for some more sketchy-drawie type stuff. Now, back in the day (way back in the day) i used to be quite a decent illustrator (or cartoonist depending on who you asked) back before the web was king (in high school and college for me) I used to doodle and draw all sorts of things from realistic still-life scenes, to portraits, to silly cartoony bits. Anyone who has done this kind of art (and i suspect other types of creative things as well) knows that the more you do it, the better you get. but the converse is also true, the less you do it the more your pencil muscles atrophy and die.

This is where i was last week when someone offered to pay me some cold hard cash to draw some illustrations for them. I decided to take on the very modest project and work overtime to get my draw muscles back in shape, at least enough to draw a few nice things for my 'client'. It was kinda frightening really, since i havent done any real pencil-to-paper sketching in a loooonng time. Anyhow, the whole point of this post was supposed to about my creative process when designing a sketch character, but it has turned into more of a history of my drawing skill.. so...

What i meant to write here before i got off on a ramble, was about how i design a new character (or picture, or whatever) i do this with my icons too, tho the process is usually much shorter with them because of the size and simplicity. When i was younger i had all those drawing how-to books where they start with a few circles and ovals and flesh it out into spiderman or some anime character. That is all well and good, my final products bear some resemblance to that method, ie light pencil shapes, darker pencil details, then finally a nice 4B or 5B final hit, then the ink. But how to you get to the final product? The picture here is a few steps in that process for one of the characters i am doing, which was simply a request for 'a pig with wings'. the bottom pig is near to what the 'final' sketch will look like (presuming the client picks that one). I did about a half dozen different shapes and styles, (and even more wing types, astute readers will notice the wings are both slightly different styles) so we will see which one they like.

After they pick one or two they like, i will finalize the sketch, and then move it into illustrator to put the final touches on it and make it a vector art piece.

(note: thie is cross posted on FTO)