A few weeks ago, I posted an initial character sketch, and said I would follow up with the digital version later. This started as a custom illustration for a client, but as I got further into this project, the illustration started to look younger than what was needed for the client. Although I ended up going in a different direction for the final graphic, this digital illustration was still a step in the process.
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Earlier this year, I came across this tutorial for creating buttons in Photoshop, and bookmarked it for future reference. I also found a tutorial for creating buttons in Illustrator, but thought I’d give it a try in Photoshop first (since I’m a lot more comfortable with PS). It took me a little while to get the original button template to look how I wanted (about 30 minutes), but after the template’s created, it’s easy to duplicate the button template & clip different pictures into it.
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Looking for tutorials for the daily design challenge, I came across this fun tutorial for a disco ball. This project took a little bit longer than some of the other challenges, I spent about 45 minutes on the disco ball. I also ran into some difficulties with the tutorial, which may be due to the tutorial author using a different version of Adobe Illustrator than I was using (I have Adobe Illustrator CS4). If you’re interested in creating your own disco ball, read on for some of the discrepencies I found…
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I like sketchy fonts but only have a couple of them in my font book. So I was excited when I came across this tutorial & saw that you can turn any font into a sketchy one (and it’s simple)! This took me about 15 minutes to create & I used three different fonts. I used the font LondonTwo for “making” & “font”, the “a” is Courier New and “sketchy” is the Vintage font.
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I’ve always liked the look of color spectrums, but I figured they were complicated to make. However, after finding this tutorial, I discovered that they’re quite simple! The most time consuming part was picking out the colors to use in my spectrums. It only took 15 minutes to complete all three of these spectrums!
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I’m working on a custom fictional character for a client’s manuscript. This is an initial pencil sketch I did today in about 20/30 min. It’s pretty rough – guess that’s why I like to stick to digital graphics; digital graphics erase smoother, there are no smudges, you can turn pen weight on/off and shape duplication is easier! However, now that it’s time to move on to the digital stage of this illustration, I’m not looking forward to that pen tool…
I need a lot more experience to become comfortable with the pen tool in Illustrator & with using my Wacom tablet (I just have the Bamboo tablet for now). So my original idea was to start with an illustration series and draw all my daughters’ pet shop animals. However, after spending 2.5 hours on the first animal, I decided I needed to do some simpler tutorials in Illustrator – maybe I could work up to drawing a pet shop animal in 15 minutes.
I had some variety this first week with my daily designs, here’s how it went…
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