Alrighty, I have done a fair amount of paint blogging. I have shown some digital vector stuff, but have not ever talked about how I go about it. SO I figured I’d show a couple pieces I have done over the past few weeks. One’s more involved than things like that space man one a few posts back.

If you are interested, you know what to do.

Ok. So 9 times out of 10 when I do digital work, I use Adobe Illustrator. Which is vector based. And if you dont know, the 2 main formats for 2-d digital work are vector and raster. Raster uses a set number of pixels to produce work. This is fine if the work never needs to get bigger than what it was made at. Vector uses math to produce shapes. This means things look the same regardless of how you scale them. This also keeps file sizes down.

Why I prefer vector? I like the amount of control you have over shapes and lines. Since it is all math based you can tweak it endlessly without much risk of muddying something up. It is far more precise than raster.

Anyway, here is the work:

The first Image is titled: Circus.

**You can click it for a larger version

The second is called: Lamer than You.

Now for a little about the process.

First there is the sketch, which is scanned in.

This one is a couple sketches combined in photoshop, with some extra elements drawn in, in the computer.

This is another sketch, as is, straight from my sketchbook. This bears a striking similarity to a paint-sketch thingy I posted last week. The two are related, vaguely.

The sketches are then brought into illustrator and traced. Then fine tuned, detailed, and colored. For an idea of the number of individual shapes made and tweaked, I’ll include both images in outline view. This is a view that shows the outline of all the shapes in black, as opposed to what they look like colored and layered. All of this was done with a mouse, creating shapes and tweaking bezier (I dont know if I spelled bezier right. Probably not…) curves till I vomit.

Circus

Lamer

Anywhoooo, that’s a bit about the ‘ol vector work I do.

I think that’s it, unless someone wants a more technical explination of something.

Oh yeah, and the titles of the pieces are a mere formailty.