Here are a few examples of my illustration style for you to take a look at. I've been illustrating professionally now for over fifteen years and finally overcame the techno-anxiety barrier and started working on the Mac around four years ago. Up to that point I'd been producing gouache paintings and was looking for a digital method of replicating the style I already had established, albeit more efficiently. After a period of trial and error (oh yes, plenty of error) I settled on the vector programme Freehand as my software of choice.
My technique still involves plenty of traditional drawing. Pencil sketches - on paper I'm afraid, there's still no substitute - are followed by brush pen drawings which are scanned into Photoshop where I clean them up and make any small corrections that might be required. These bitmaps are then run through Streamline ( blink and you'll miss it on a new G3 ) and emerge as tiny vector files which can be opened up and worked on in Freehand. I like to draw at around 150-200% enlargement which means that most illustrations, particularly the comic strips, have to be scanned in instalments due to the A4 constraint imposed by my scanner. The various elements are then assembled, jigsaw-fashion, on screen and grouped and layered as required. Freehand makes this process incredibly quick and easy. Colour is then added along with speech balloon text in the case of a comic strip. It's impossible to over-emphasise the impact that even this simple advance - being able to type a hand-lettered font straight into your speech balloons - has had on cartoon making.
The completed illustrations are then converted to whichever file format the client specifies. Another great advantage of working with vectors is the final file size of even very complex-looking pieces. Full-page, full-colour comic strips with multiple layers and text regularly come in at well under a MB. Once compressed they travel in a matter of seconds as Email attachments and the client often has the finished work on screen in front of them within minutes of it being completed. The days of sending carefully-packed flat artwork by post to be kicked around in the back of a mail van until it arrived at its destination bent double seem like a distant memory.
I've included one comic strip in its native FH8 format for anyone who has the means and the inclination to open it up. Feel free to deconstruct and investigate. The rest are pict files for ease of viewing.
