Javen Blog

The Winchcombe: There Will Be A Tomorrow

javen — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:00:11 +0000

Check out the new episode of The Winchcombe:

THERE WILL BE A TOMORROW

Episode 3 comes to an end as Henry Decker reflects on opening night.

I won’t be publishing a comic next week as I’m still writing Episode 4. Hopefully, I’ll only need a week. Guh.

Thanks for reading!

Support The Winchcombe by shopping at Amazon.com!

Click here to go to Amazon.com and buy some junk.

You’ve just supported The Winchcombe. It’s as easy as that.

You’ll get your stuff, I’ll get a kickback. Everyone’s happy.

The Friday Cool: My true motivation for making comics

javen — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:00:50 +0000

Links

You Are In Demand If You Can Draw (Cartoon SNAP!)

Creating a woodworker logo from start to finish

javen — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:00:00 +0000

Fascinating look at Illustrator Von Glitschka’s logo creation process.

Many times an agency will mock up a design direction in order to get a client to sign off on it. Once they have it approved they’ll approach me with their rough idea and want me to flesh it out into it’s final form. This type of project usually means I’ll be leveraging both my design and illustration skills to pull it off.

This project will take you through the entire creative process I used to pull off this illustrative logo design, from shooting my own photo reference material to refining my vector artwork with precision.

Links

Logo Illustration

The Winchcombe: She’ll Be Back

javen — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 11:00:49 +0000

Check out the new episode of The Winchcombe:

SHE’LL BE BACK

Dorothy looks back on her first night of work.

Yes, I know it’s taken months of real time to get through one NIGHT of Winchcombe time, but as I might have mentioned before, I’m approaching this series as a television series.

Next week’s strip will mark the end of what would be the second episode of the WInchcombe television series.

Support The Winchcombe by shopping at Amazon.com!

Click here to go to Amazon.com and buy some junk.

You’ve just supported The Winchcombe. It’s as easy as that.

You’ll get your stuff, I’ll get a kickback. Everyone’s happy.

Some interesting Adobe Illustrator scripts I’m going to maybe use soon

javen — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 11:00:18 +0000

I think there might be one or two things in this collection of Illustrator scripts that I could use in lettering my comics.

I think the Divide Text Frame would be useful when working with sound effects or shouted dialogue.

With this script you can divide multi-line text fields into separate text frame objects, making it easy to separate lists, navigation items, and more.

Speeding up the chopping up of a block of text could come in handy.

Another on that might cut down on some fiddling and CMD-Zs is the Metaball script.

This script will create connecting arcs from shapes you have drawn. Very useful when connecting basic shapes to create more complex shapes for logos, icons and illustrations.

I can see using this to create a more organically shaped balloon, much like the final balloon this week’s The Winchcombe strip.

But I like these scripts. Seeing stuff like this always makes me wish that I had learned how to do this myself when I had more free time.

By the way, I think I got this link from a post on Art Geek Zoo a while back. Check it out.

Links

10 Free and Extremely Useful Illustrator Scripts(vectips.com)

Art Geek Zoo

Swooshy Winter Olympic vector effects in Illustrator

javen — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:00:01 +0000

An interesting tutorial from Layers magazine:

In this tutorial we’re going to explore the graphics created for the Olympic Winter Games recently held in Vancouver, British Columbia. Throughout the winter games, they had a continuing graphic theme of very stylized vector art. Here, we’ll achieve a similar effect using only Adobe Illustrator and a PSD file of a snowboarder. Follow along below to learn more about vector graphics.

It’s sometimes strange to realize that, despite the fact that I live in Illustrator for making my comics, I really only use a small portion of the application.