Digital Portrait

Earlier this year I was asked to do a digital portrait as an anniversary gift for a best friend's parents. I was given a photo reference, and after several hours in photoshop, this was the result. I was excited to have the opportunity to recall my days of figure drawing and work on a realism piece, as typically I draw things a bit more on the whimsical side. You know, like cats with mustaches.

Jep: Photoshop Lines vs. Illustrator Lines

HEY GUYS! LOOK, A PUPPY! This is Jep, our Shepherd/Chow mix. I have been searching for new line art techniques, so I decided to try converting Photoshop lines to vector in Illustrator. Adobe Photoshop and I have been in a pretty committed relationship ever since I switched over from Jasc Paint Shop Pro back in the early 2000's, but Illustrator has a lot of great qualities that I am really growing to love for traditional art, like the Blob Brush tool. These are great options when you want to resize your graphics at a later date.

Below is a side-by-side comparison of my Photoshop line art vs. Illustrator line art. In this particular case I used Live Trace to convert my lines, and after some tweaking I was pretty happy with the results. I've created smooth, scalable lines with minimal quality loss. That is a success in my book! You have no idea how many hours I wasted scaling my recently vectorized lines up and down, completely in awe of their beauty. (Roughly .003 seconds, but in my mind it was a lot longer.)

Fennex Fox Doodle

Here in Indiana it has been exceptionally toasty this summer. As a result, I drew these desert-dwelling Fennec Foxes. May their cuteness bring you joy while you are sweating profusely outdoors!