Gracie

I’ve been working almost exclusively back on Illustrator for the past month. I always loved it, but I encountered a few frustrations with it in the past in being unable to achieve the depth or shading or texture that I really wanted to achieve. When I finally migrated over to Photoshop on the Cintiq, I found that I really missed the absolute control and precision that vector lines give me. To me, the pen tool in Ps just isn’t anywhere near as intuitive nor as clever as in Illustrator. Pathfinder is the tool of Gods! There is nothing I can’t create or get as close as is humanly possible to with my shape and line using Pathfinder.

My old frustrations with the lack of depth and variation in line and form in illustrator have been largely solved with new techniques. I like to ‘draw’ my lines more openly in Ai now. I rarely ‘close’ the shapes any more. Instead, I prefer to leave the lines open as they would be in a pencil drawing, add my brush to each one and tinker with it until I get the shape that I want, then use pathfinder to tidy up and get rid of my scrappy bits and leftovers. It’s a long and sometimes tedious process, and the outcome is a completely different aesthetic to what I would normally paint over in Ps – but I am more and more pleased with the results. 

Since I’ve been trying to work on more character design lately, I went for more pin-up practice this month. I decided to import my vector work into Ps for some touch-ups here and there and simple masks (mostly because I was feeling too lazy to get out the tablet and actually hand-draw any shading), and I kind of like the results. Here is a close-up:

And here are some of the process stages from beginning to end. I decided to add a removable skirt on for posterity (since she was originally designed to be wearing a sort of 1950’s prom dress).

 

 

I based the  digital on this original pencil line drawing, but afterward I changed the proportions significantly, especially the size of her head and hands.

I’ve discovered that looks vaguely Betty Boopish on paper looks a little bit like Alien Vs. Predator in the cold hard light of Vector. That was it for this week. Hopefully I’ll be more productive next week 🙂