March 2012
11 posts
February 2012
9 posts
I really adore your Pele illustration! umm, in the description the modern spelling would be Makole though, I think, considering the modern Hawaiian alphabet no longer carries the 'R' sound. Anyways, who was the text for?! This is super rad, we never had stuff like this when I was in grade school.
Aha! That’s good to know— I’m just going off the info the book company gave me, they spelled it as “Makore” for whatever reason. :P All of the content and the layout/sizes of the panels was given to me too, I just filled ‘em in with illustrations!
I was asked not to share the name of the textbook, since it isn’t published yet, though these comic pages are for the 4th grade reading section in it. :)
Thank you, glad you like the illustrations!!
January 2012
18 posts
If you've been asked these questions before, I apologize in advance, but what program do you use for most of your work and what brushes do you use? I love the the textured edges you create.
Thank you! I have answered questions like this in the past, but you’re not the only one who has asked me recently, so I’ll summarize some of my answers here!
My medium (for everything): Photoshop CS5 & Intuos 3 wacom tablet.
Texture/brushes:
I used to only use the standard photoshop hard-round brush, with the size set to pen-pressure. That’s what I used for the Amtrak kid’s book I did, and most of my pieces that came before that.
I added texture with scanned textures that I layered on top of my images in different opacities and layer modes like ‘overlay’, ‘multiply’, ‘color burn’, ‘soft light’, etc. Besides scanning/creating some yourself, you can find a lot of wonderful hi-res free textures at http://lostandtaken.com/.
Then I started experimenting with making my own custom brushes and using brushes I got from other people— these free Chris Wahl brushes are really great: http://chriswahlartbrushes.blogspot.com/ Now I use a lightly textured custom brush for pretty much all of my drawings, which creates the slightly textured edges.
I still use scanned texture layered on top of my images, and I’ve also started using some brushes as texture ‘stamps’, like the free brushes you can get from BittBox: http://www.bittbox.com/category/brushes
It’s fun to experiment with creating your own custom brushes, and easy to look around on the internet— there’s a bunch of sites with free, helpful content out there!
Typing “juicy tomato” in image search makes me realize what inane things I search for as illustration reference sometimes. But dammit if I’m not going to make this tomato look baller.
