And… done. Illustration of subprime crisis. What with all the talk lately of the markets going to hell, I thought it would be an interesting thing to illustrate. Illustrator and Photoshop, actual size 8.5×11 300dpi. RGB version shown, CMYK seems to dull a bit due to the intensity of the greens.

I guess anyone who hasn’t been asleep under a rock for the last couple of weeks is well aware of the trouble some of the major banks are going through. It seemed like an interesting thing to illustrate, so I did up a sketch. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. Maybe a bit too funny for the situation. But on the other hand, sometimes laughter is the only thing that keeps us sane through the tough times. Will do it up shortly.

Got a new computer and installed CS3 on it. Tested out Illustrator and Photoshop. Spent couple of days getting everything back up and running. Still not too sure about all the new stuff, but I think it’s been configured to do what I need it to do. Wacom pressure sensitivity still drops in Photoshop; relaunching stills fixes it. Not sure why. By the by the girl was supposed to be in a chair, but I didn’t feel like rendering that out. Looks like a teacup to me!

Newsarama did a nice interview with my friend Sonny Liew about the upcoming Liquid City comic anthology. It’s a good read, so check it out! My husband and I have a story in the anthology (a whole 17 pages!). The tome is going to weigh in at over 300 pages I hear, but it’s a great collection of rather unique viewpoints from artists and writers mainly from Southeast Asia, so hopefully the size and price aren’t going to put off anyone later! Book comes out in November.

(By the way, the art above is the cover art, by Shelly Wan)

The Speakeasy Illustration show was a blast! I had a great time. It was really tiring standing till midnight, but it was worth the sore feet. A whole lot of people showed up and there was some great artwork on show. I took some photos, you can check em’ out on my Flickr account.

For more information check out Speakeasy’s website at: [link]

4 Sep 2008
8pm-Midnight
The Gladstone Hotel
1214 Queen West, Toronto
“Pay What You Can”

pencil sketch for illustration

So like everything else that gets finished, The Hunted started out as a pencil sketch. Since this was a test, I sketched it straight onto my Stonehenge paper. Which is a bit silly because it’s nice expensive paper that, like all nice expensive papers, is prone to lose some of its niceness due to erasing, which is pretty much inevitable if you’re not doing a prep sketch.

But since I’m a bonehead - oh well. I did the sketch in blue pencil and then went over it with a HB. At first I was trying to make the lines look good, to see how the pencil would react with the paper. Ultimately I knew I was going to ink over it anyway so it really didn’t matter, and you can see that halfway through I decided to just rough out the outline (towards the bottom). Scanned it in before I inked it.

color rough

Here’s the color rough. It was was my own reference so I just did a really messy job with throwing in the colors I wanted to use. The paper texture was also dropped in to see how it would react with the colors. It did a really good job. I saved a small version of the file so I could easily pick the colors for reuse later.

inking the artwork

Here is the inking in progress. I used a brush pen, as well as india ink with several brushes, and a dip pen. I probably could have done it all in brush, but again I was testing how the paper reacted with the various things. It did too good a job (to me) of soaking up the liquid from my brush pen, but it had a nice bite for the india ink, so I’ll probably use a brush next time with this paper. The dip pen didn’t do so great, maybe I need a more fluid ink or something, but it just wasn’t flowing right.

final illustration

After the inks were done it was back to the scanner. Scanned in the inks at 600dpi, reduced the file to 400dpi and added the colors and textures. I did another pinkish version (see previous post) but this is really closer to what I wanted to achieve, so I guess I’ll settle with this as the final version.

Hope it was a fun read!

The Hunted. Pen, india ink, brushes, Photoshop, custom digital brushes, some scanned paper, Stonehenge paper, and a few backaches. Not sure which I prefer. Top is a variant, bottom is the original.

Ink test painting on Stonehenge paper, with Photoshop color tweaks afterwards.

The Dove ‘Pay Beauty Forward‘ site has been launched! I did the illustrations for the backgrounds and small elements like the plants and fish. It was an interesting project that was quite technical despite it’s simple looking finish - a lot of the elements were on separate layers to facilitate the scrolling that was programmed in later. Hope you like the site!