I'm going to be a vendor at a local craft and gift show in a few weeks and I've been trying to come up with Holiday card designs that I can print on my inkjet printer. I've been so busy getting stuff ready that I had decided I would skip 'Illustration Friday' this week, but then I began thinking of ways that I could combine a Christmas image with this week's word which is "Sneaky." What child hasn't thought of sneaking out of bed to spy on Santa putting out presents? If caught, I'm sure their parents would tell them that they were being sneaky. I tried to make my illustration look like it could have come off of a magazine cover from the 1950s or early 1960s. I was going for a graphic look, with a minimal color palette. I created the shapes in Adobe Illustrator, saved the layered file as a photoshop file, then opened it in Corel Painter where I added some line work. I then saved the file again as a photoshop file and finally opened it in Photoshop where I ran it through a Mister Retro Permanent Press filter to give it the look of an old image that's gone through a printing press. I then did a variation of it where I further restricted the color palette and added some text.
At the bottom, you can see my original digital pencil sketch, that I drew in Corel Painter.
