Illustrations

Art dump

Late November and early December has been super busy for me. Lots of projects at work to get wrapped up and plenty to do outside work to prep for the holidays. The busy work schedule recently is excellent as all the creative works are very rewarding to get finished. However, I often find myself drained of creative energy by the time I get home, which is all well and good until you start to feel restless from not working on any personal projects in a second. So lately, I’ve been trying to set aside around an hour each afternoon to listen to music, brush up on my skills, and make new artwork.

My major focus as of late is creation new illustrations in illustrator. I stumbled upon an old sketchbook of mine from college and was excited to breath new life into my old artwork. Most of the images I chose were small doodles but they were just the right size for a collection of quick creations.

Besides reworking my personal time to allow for more art, it’s also been wonderful getting to try out some new tips and tricks in illustrator. For the longest time I felt compelled to export to photoshop to apply textures instead of directly in illustrator. While many graphic designers are staring in horror at that sentence my reasoning was vectors and pixels not mixing well. Which is true to a point. If you know what dimensions you’re working with for the end goal, pulling a texture jpeg into illustrator and using an overlay layer to add texture to a shape works great. This has been an excellent opportunity to try some new functions and see what works and what doesn’t. Needless to say, after some trial and error, this has increased my workflow substantially!

The hope is to keep pushing myself with each of of these creations to speed up my workflow in illustrator even more. Currently we have 12 drawings finished and 46 to go!