Not long ago I came across the excellent hand lettering of Fiodor Sumkin. I love the intricacy with which he fits characters and shading to various shapes. [Via]
In particular, his drawing of these hands got me thinking about the enveloping functions in Illustrator. Click this image for a quick overview of how to fit type to shapes:
Using these techniques, I set out to emulate Sumkin’s work. First I traced the outline of one of his hands in Illustrator, then blocked out a number of regions. The Pencil tool works well for this, as does a Wacom tablet. The result was a skeleton for the next steps:
Then, needing to turn each region into a solid object, I copied and pasted all the paths into Flash, broke things apart, and then used the paint bucket to block them in. I probably could have used the Illustrator Pathfinder tools and/or the new Live Paint features, but old habits die hard, and I knew I could get what I needed from Flash:
At that point I copied and pasted everything back into Illustrator, then picked a font that seemed likely to fill the shapes nicely–in this case Adobe’s 60’s-style Mojo. Using the text “Word Hypnotize” and the enveloping technique described above, I got… this (click for a larger version):
Hmmph–it’s nothing like Sumkin’s lettering, and were I to try harder to emulate it, I think I’d fit each chunk of text to an envelope mesh, then use the various mesh, path, and warp tools to deform it as necessary. But you know, I kind of like the sinuous, abstract quality that resulted–a bit as if Slim Goodbody dipped his hand in an inkwell.
So, there’s my little happy accident o’ the day. Software generally makes it pretty easy to repeat the same steps over and over, so I’m glad to experience a little serendipity & creative destruction now and then.
By the way, Sumkin’s lettering reminds me a touch of Marta Monteiro’s, and for more cool lettering, you might check out Rodney White (overview/gallery). Oh, and tangentially related (at best): the look of the hand I made slightly reminds me of WWI-era Cubist ship camouflage. [Via]
Category Archives: Illustration
Illustration sensations, vol. II
- TechVector.com shows off the work of Reggie Gilbert. “All vector work is created 100% in Adobe Illustrator,” he writes. “No Photoshop ‘touch-ups,’ no 3D rendering software.” Outstanding. [Via]
- Veerle Pieters highlights the work of Paul Rogers, whose illustrations nail the look of classic poster art. Love, love, love the Incredibles and Dos Equis pieces, to name just two. (His Strange Cargo design could have worked well for Photoshop 5.0–a.k.a. Strange Cargo.)
- Chris Rhoadhouse points out Real Trace, the work of Takashi Morisaki. What Takashi pulls off with the gradient mesh is completely out of hand. (The actual cat on my lap looks comparatively crude.)
In Dust we Trust
Sometimes you just know you’re among your people. A few years ago, when I was new to Adobe San Jose, someone parked & more or less abandoned a car in the West Tower parking garage. After a few months the car’s windows had grown almost totally opaque, coated by the unending flow of construction-related dust. And so, in classic Photoshop style, someone had drawn in the dust a little tabbed palette with a slider marked, “Opacity: 80%.” Yeeeah, thass’ my geeks…
I thought of this when seeing the work of “dust artist” Scott Wade. Scott makes his filthy Mini into a canvas for reproducing everything from da Vinci to dogs playing poker; check out a gallery of his work. [Via] Maybe now I can convince my wife that I’ve been prepping my once-blue Jetta to be an artistic medium, not just letting it go to seed…
[For more on impermanent works, see previous entries on artists working in packing tape and chalk.]
Illustration sensations
Photoshop Illustrators Gone Wild: Frodo & Mo'
- On The Photoshop Experiment, illustrator Cory Godbey walks step by step through his creations in Photoshop. (More of Cory’s work is here.) I love seeing the pieces move from the simplest of sketches to richly toned paintings. [Via]
- Vishal Pawar checks in from India with a terrifically detailed portrait of Frodo Baggins. [Via Mike Downey]
- Fantasy vehicles & creatures come to life in the work of German artist Daniel Simon. Daniel starts traditionally with pen and marker, then applies digital airbrushing. [Via]
- My old Agency.com colleague PJ Loughran brings a great sense of color and texture to his illustrations, combining brush and ink with Photoshop composites. His work appears in print, on the Web, and even on Burton snowboards.
Photoshop Illustrators Gone Wild: Frodo & Mo'
- On The Photoshop Experiment, illustrator Cory Godbey walks step by step through his creations in Photoshop. (More of Cory’s work is here.) I love seeing the pieces move from the simplest of sketches to richly toned paintings. [Via]
- Vishal Pawar checks in from India with a terrifically detailed portrait of Frodo Baggins. [Via Mike Downey]
- Fantasy vehicles & creatures come to life in the work of German artist Daniel Simon. Daniel starts traditionally with pen and marker, then applies digital airbrushing. [Via]
- My old Agency.com colleague PJ Loughran brings a great sense of color and texture to his illustrations, combining brush and ink with Photoshop composites. His work appears in print, on the Web, and even on Burton snowboards.
Manga Zoomlines for Illustrator
Plug-in maker GraphicXtras has released Zoomlines, an Illustrator utility for making the focus/zoom lines often seen in manga and other comics. The interface is a bit inscrutable, but for $12 a lot can be forgiven. Just don’t stare too long a the vibrating centers of your creations, lest they induce a seizure. [Via]
I dig this kind of little single-purpose tool: quick, affordable, and built to solve a particular problem. We do need to make it easier to modify Adobe authoring tools to encourage this kind of development, and we’re working on that.
The images created by Zoomlines reminds me of some fun I’ve been having in Illustrator lately, trying out ideas for this blog. I was kind of taken with the album art for Volante, so I experimented with techniques to make something similar. In case it’s useful, I’ve illustrated the steps taken to create the basic artwork that became the background for this page. I think it’s got kind of a Soundgarden/Rollins Band thing going on.
15,000-layer Photoshop file
‘Tis the season of gigantic PSDs: Digital painter Bert Monroy sees Kevin Hulsey’s work and raises him a couple of gigs. Bert, a former matte painter at ILM and elsewhere, has been pushing Photoshop since v1.0, and at Photoshop World he unveiled his latest creation: a monster painting that’s 1.7GB (when flat!), comprised of some 15,000 layers, 500 alpha channels, and 250,000 paths. Man… what a testament to Bert’s artistry & commitment to his craft. [Via]
Photoshop handles tasks from creating sub-1KB Web graphics to wrangling files of basically unlimited size, and that makes it tricky for us to ship the app with settings that address all scenarios optimally. The Support team publishes some tips on optimizing performance (Mac/Win), and we’re looking at ways to make it easier to tune the app.
[Update: Tobias Hollerich points out that the site has been “dugg,” making it slow to load. The Digg.com entry lists some mirror sites & links to videos of Bert in action.]
720 hours in Illustrator; Painting with light
Mind-blowing design portfolio
Oh my God… Who is this Dave Werner guy and what kind of government lab built him? Simply put, this is the most effective portfolio site I have seen in years. Dave makes outstanding use of Flash video to tell the story behind each of his featured projects, ranging from print to Web to furniture design, filmmaking, writing, and game creation–sometimes all at once. As I browsed from the scrolling treasure map (see Illustrations) to “Ninja birds with Katana blades” (in “Cadence”), I felt my eyes re-open to the possibilities of technology & storytelling, much like they did when encountering From Alice To Ocean back in ’93. Damn. I just hope he doesn’t take a shine to product management… [Via Core77]
Math rock in Illustrator, Josh Davis-style
Adobe.com features a new profile on Joshua Davis and his work that brings together Illustrator with scripting to create generative art. The work combines known building blocks (sketches scanned & vectorized in Illustrator) with algorithms that introduce chance and chaos. Josh presented a great lecture on this work at the Adobe Ideas Conference earlier this year–a bracing, whirling blur of charisma, tats, code, and f-bombs that lit up an otherwise sedate gathering.
I’ve been thinking for quite a while about ways to make our tools freer, to tap into what my friend Matthew calls the “math rock kids”–the sort who make and use experimental apps like Auto-Illustrator (no relation). People can build beautiful, freeform interactive drawing pieces in Flash, so why can’t we use them in Photoshop or Illustrator? Why not make it easier to create offbeat interfaces that leverage these deep imaging engines in new ways? And could we combine that power with the linear animation chops of After Effects? Let’s be less predictable, more playful, more absurd.
[Adobe.com link via Branden Hall]
[More from Joshua here and here.
He’s also contributed a chapter to John Maeda’s Creative Code: Aesthetics + Computation.]