Illustrator

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#4 of 33 Art Projects: Ryukyu Star Spring Issue Cover

For the Ryukyu Star, a publication created by and for JET Programme participants in Okinawa, Japan, I made a cover using this issue’s theme, the rainy season.

1. The penciling and inking: It took me longer to come up with the concept actually drawing it! I had to look at different pictures and paintings with rain and spring. Finally, I decided using an Arriety-style character with a larger-than-life flower instead of a typical umbrella. The inking was done within 20 minutes.

rsspring20142. Tracing and Base Colors: After I scanned the image into Illustrator, I did an image trace (Illustrator traces the image and makes it into a vector) and painted in the base colors.

rscover_spring2014b3. Photoshop: I took the image to Photoshop in two different layers. One layer was the transparent black-and-white image on top of the base-colored image. The rest of the coloring were sandwiched as layers between the top black-and-white image and the colored one so that I wouldn’t end up coloring over the lines.

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4. Coloring: If I were drawing or painting this image, I’d start with the lighter colors and work into the darker colors. I took the opposite approach and started with the dark colors and build up to the light colors.
rscover_spring2014d5. Final version: With the coloring done, I transferred this image to InDesign (since I always get the sizing wrong when I do it independently). I added a blue background, the magazine title, and lines.

RS_Winter2014_coverI’m still getting the hang of digital coloring, but it’s good to see that my art schooling be used more constructively.

 

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#2 of 33 Art Projects in a Year

#2: The Ryukyu Star Winter 2014 Cover

I’m the visual editor for an online magazine for Japanese Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET Programme) teachers in Okinawa. I’ve decided to completely change the design of the magazine to make it more efficient as a magazine. To commemorate this change, I took the skills I learned on Photoshop and used it to color this mediocre inking of a horse.

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This horse was drawn without any preliminary sketches. I wanted to keep it fun and a little messy by just going at it with a Copic multiliner pen.

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Next was tracing it in Illustrator and ignoring the whites.Image

I transferred the image to Photoshop and used many layers underneath the vector to color it.

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Since I was using InDesign for designing the layout of the magazine, I decided to put the final product in InDesign. I always get the cover sizes wrong, so it’s just easier and cleaner.

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New Year, New Skills, New Profile Pic

My husband showed me a tutorial on coloring images, and I decided to try it out since I’m trying to transition from traditional media to digital media.

ImageI sketched out a random picture of myself on a crummy piece of notebook paper (see edges). Then I used a sepia-colored School-G Tachikawa pen to outline it.

profile2 Cleaned up the pencil marks with a plastic eraser.

profile3Went over the outline with the same pen and darkened some areas.

profile4Put the file into Adobe Illustrator, traced it, and colored it with base colors.

profile6Took the image to Adobe Photoshop, made a transparent layer, used the “Lasso” to pick the highlights, and brushed and smudged the colors for the face.

profile7Finished my first Photoshop mini-project (and my new profile pic)!