Convincing Clients

Got a client that needs “educating”? Here’s a pretty comprehensive article that leads you through the various approaches you can use to convince them that you know what you are talking about and have their best interests in mind.

Celtic Knot

This design is a Celtic knot created in Illustrator for the iPhone game I’m helping out with. The programmers gave me the design and I recreated it in Illustrator with a little web research. It’s a fairly straightforward technique, but requires a bit of patience. I’ve added an ‘exploded’ example to show how the under/over illusion is created. Note that the topmost stroke has rounded caps to overlap and hide the ever-so-slightly-visible seams beneath where the paths have been cut apart and butt together.

Type and Illustrator

Illustrator and type go hand in hand. But the wealth of options available for using and abusing type within Illustrator is daunting to say the least. Here is a good look at nearly all of those options.

Cloning

Having done a bit of cloning in my time, this link is a pretty good guide to getting started with this invaluable Photoshop tool.

Baroque Pattern in Illustrator

The artists at Wiz Studios will be a bit busy for the next couple of weeks, so we’ll be linking to a few tutorials like this one, that we find interesting and useful on the web tubes. This short tutorial shows how to make a pattern like the one shown below.

Illustrator Quick Tip

10 Tips on Drawing Better Cartoons

1. Thumbnails

Use thumbnails to noodle out the composition of your cartoons before you start. Thumbnails are a good way to ‘step back’ from the details of the drawing and see the balance of dark and light and work out the placement of the various elements. It also is a good way to explore different versions of the same concept in a short period of time.

2. Be Yourself

When you are learning to draw cartoons, it’s natural to copy another artist’s work that you admire. But eventually, with enough practice, your own style will develop and emerge. Recognize this and work toward it. Imitation is flattery until it becomes plagiarism. Yes, originality takes a lot of hard work, but when you draw with your own ‘hand’ and use your own creative juice to design, you’ll stand out and get much more satisfaction from it.

3. Emotion and Passion

Be excited about your art. Not every drawing you make will inspire you to the greatest heights, but when inspiration does manifest itself, you simply won’t be able to hide it. Conversely, if you don’t have a passion for your art, that will show too. One way to find that passion might be to experiment with a new technique, different media, or a new software program that forces you to approach your work from a different angle.

4. Visualize

Just as a professional athlete visualizes his performance on the field before a game, imagine yourself drawing and going through the process before you actually sit down at the drawing table. There will be many times when you don’t have your sketchbook handy, or situations when it simply isn’t practical to pull it out and bang out a quick sketch. Doodling at a funeral for example, might be frowned upon. In that case, a mental sketchbook comes in handy.

5. What and Why?

Cartooning is about distilling an image to the bare essentials. So when you are designing a cartoon character, it’s always helpful to ask yourself a lot of ‘what and why’ questions. Why is he standing in this particular pose, what is he holding in his hands, why does his expression look this way, why is he skinny or fat, tall or thin, a nearly endless series of questions that you should be asking and answering as you draw. When you put a mark on the paper, there should be a reason. If there isn’t reason, then that mark doesn’t belong on the paper.

6. Consistency

Give a professional feel to your cartoons by maintaining a consistent tone and style. There is nothing that screams ‘amateur’ more than inconsistency. Unfortunately, if you are searching for a shortcut to accomplish a consistent look to your cartoon work, there just isn’t one. Practice, practice, practice. The more you practice cartooning, the more consistency will creep into your work through both muscle memory and from building your own personal cartoon vocabulary.

7. Relax

It’s important to loosen up and relax before you get down to the serious business of cartooning. If you’re tense, upset or stressed, your cartoon work will very likely suffer for it. So to help yourself relax, you might want to put on your favorite music CD, have a cup of tea, or take a few moments to close your eyes and meditate. Once you’ve shaken off the tension, doodling and thumbnailing are good methods to ease into your drawing and wake up the muscle memory in your arm for the fun to come.

8. Readability

One goal as a cartoonist, is to make your images ‘readable’. If your character is designed well, it will be recognizable and easily ‘read’ from many perspectives and sizes. Look at just the outline or silhouette and see if you can understand what is happening with the character using only that information. If you can, the readability is high. If not, perhaps you should rethink the pose or the character design altogether.

9. The Right Tools

A poor craftsman may blame his tools, and while they are not an excuse for shoddy work, inferior tools do make for more work. As a cartoonist, if you are drawing and inking on paper that is not the correct weight and tooth for the job, you are creating a lot of cleanup time and effort for yourself in the latter phases of the project. Choose the right tools for your workflow to minimize wasted creative energy, simply by using the appropriate materials.

10. Say When

When is a drawing finished? When adding more will not make it better. It’s a difficult decision to make sometimes, mostly because we are too close to our work. When I near the end, and when time allows, I will leave the drawing on my table where I can see it as I walk back into my studio. Later, I step into the middle of the room without looking at the table and then glance quickly at the drawing. In that first moment, if something not quite right with the artwork, I’ll spot it. Maybe a hand at the wrong angle or some perspective out of whack. But if it still looks good to me, I’m done.