Illustration Friday - Transportation

Another week, another 'Illustration Friday' challenge, this week the word is "Transportation." My first thought was to do something with futuristic cars and monorails, but then another thought popped into my head, and that had to do with bicycles and dogs. The original idea was to have a bicyclist transporting a little dog in her bike's basket. But as I thought about the idea, I began to embellish it. I thought it might be funny to have other dogs chasing after the bicycle. Then, I thought it would be even better if the bicyclist were carrying two dogs, one riding up front, the other in a basket on the back of the bike. The dog in the back basket would have a self-satisfied look on its face, as if it were taunting the dogs that were chasing it. The last two things I decided to add were extra little details - a small puppy watching from the window of the building and an upset cat, hissing at the dog parade below while balancing on a balcony railing.

Here is my original pencil sketch. You can see that off to the left of the building, I had originally intended to add some stylized clouds and the edge of another building, but in the end, I decided to eliminate those details, keeping it simple with just the suggestion of some tree shapes.

I created the image in Corel Painter and primarily used the digital watercolor brushes, especially the New Simple Water brush and the Coarse Mop Brush which gives a nice fuzzy bleed effect after you've applied the stroke.  For the details I used a couple of Painter's pen brushes - the Smooth Round Pen and a modified version of the Leaky Pen.  I colored the bike rider's hair and most of her clothing, as well as the bicycle baskets with Painter's gouache brush. In the screen shot to the left, you can see where I've begun to color in the background.

I used a lot of layers so that it would be easier to make changes. In this screen shot, you can see the list of layers that I set up. When you have this many layers, it becomes very important to name them so that you know what is on each layer.

In this last screen shot, you can see a close-up view of the little dog in the window and the hissing cat that I added as background details.

One of my inspirations for the style of this piece, especially as far as the background goes, was the artwork in Disney's 1961 animated "One Hundred and One Dalmatians." That film's sketchy drawing style, brought a big change to the look of Disney's animated films.  It's my understanding that a new technique for xeroxing the artist's pencil drawings directly on to the animation cels, is what gave the film its unique look. But even the character design and coloring of the backgrounds was unique to a Disney feature, it had more of the look of some of the mid-century modern cartoons that were being made at UPA studios than the romantic classical backgrounds of previous Disney features. If you're interested in this subject, I highly recommend the book "Cartoon Modern" by Amid Amidi.

Illustration Friday - Slither

I've always had an interest in patterns - everything from vintage fabrics and wallpapers to contemporary wrapping papers, fascinates me.  I particularly love patterns where you need to look hard to find the repeat. I recently purchased a book from Taschen publishers titled Decorative Art 50s and I've been pouring over the section on textiles and wallpapers studying the various depictions of mid-century modern fabrics.  


When I learned that this week's word for "Illustration Friday," was 'Slither,' I decided to try and do something different - I would attempt to interpret the word by creating a pattern. After some initial trial and error I finally discovered that in Corel Painter, by going to the Pattern palette and selecting 'Define Pattern,' the program would tile what ever it was that I was drawing. For example - any shape that I drew that ran off of the bottom edge, would reappear in the appropriate spot at the top edge so that the image would automatically be lined up for tiling (I still had trouble getting Painter to save my patterns, but that's another story). After creating a few sketches, I would save these as tiff files and then place them in an Adobe Illustrator file where after transforming them into vector shapes (using the 'Live Trace' option) they could easily be turned into pattern swatches that could be used for filling shapes.  I still have some problems with seams showing, but that's a problem I'm sure I can figure out.  Anyway, I did a few different designs using snakes (to go with the 'slither' theme) and here are my favorites.

First, here is one of the original digital pencil sketches.

Next, is a quick test in Illustrator to see how the elements look in a pattern fill. I was really happy with the way this looked because I felt that the repeat wasn't too obvious.

Here is a colored version, where for some reason, the repeat is more noticeable - you can see a grid formation formed by each element block.

Here are a couple of other experiments that I did, also using snakes as a motif.