I was mourning the loss of Patrick McGoohan last week and decided to finish the Prisoner DVD series I bought a while back. It brought back a lot of memories watching it as a kid. It was WAY ahead of it’s time. So much so it only lasted 1 season. In memory of Patrick and a salute to the show I made some new Prisoner art. All done in Illustrator CS4! Check it out in my fan art gallery.

The Village Map is based on the map shown on the DVD and the paper map that came with the set. I spent a lot of time recreating the penny-farthing bicycle in color. The detail doesn’t show up on this wallpaper but I plan on doing one with just the bicycle and the prisoner type. Speaking of type. The type I used was the Village font based on Albertus, but while doing the artwork I noticed the Village font had really messy vectors and didn’t quite match the inter-titles from the TV show. I ended up redrawing the font from screenshots I took from the DVD to match the shows credits.

During research on for the art I found out that AMC is producing a new Prisoner Mini-Series starring Ian McKellen! Hopfully it will live up the the original.

I just posted a few lace pattern swatches to go along with the lace pattern brush I created. These are a lot of tedious work but they save lots of time once you turn them into a pattern. You can check them out in my Tutorials and Resources gallery. Both created in Illustrator CS4 and saved as version CS2.

One thing bothered me about the Emily Pinup piece. The lace patterns were simple scans that I masked in Photoshop. I wanted to create a real vector lace pattern. Live Trace wasn’t an option because it was too complex and the results looked horrible. After 3 days of painstaking tracing and trimming I uploaded a new lace pattern brush for use in Illustrator. I created it in CS4 but saved it as CS2 version so I can share it with others. Included in the file is the original trace with stroked lines. After the drawing was complete I copied and reflected it so I could create a seamless pattern brush.

I outlined all the the strokes and combined it into one object so I could trim the edges and add a stitch pattern as a border. I have two versions. One is the plain one color version and the other has and added offset path with a different color. The one with the offset path leaves a telltail seam at the junction points but it still looks good for most uses.

Now go make something cool with it. I’ll add it to Emily soon.

I always wanted to do a pinup piece. Since I had some free time over the holidays I dove in and gave it my best shot. The big challenge for me was the hair. The pen tool and a lot of patience paid off. I think it came out great! Check it out in my fine art gallery.

I finished up the Zoovolution project. It was so much fun and with the money I got from that one job I finally took the plunge and upgraded to Adobe CS4 Design Premium

I also picked up Corel X4 mainly because it works with the Securidesign plugin I have for creating guilloche patterns.

My wallet is a lot lighter now but I have a huge smile on my face.

I just started playing with this last night. It took forever for CS4 to install but that might mean I need to defrag. After getting it loaded I was struck how much faster applications load and how nice the updated interface is. The tabbed windows took me back a little but I think it’s an improvement. I played with Illustrator’s new blob brush. It will make freehand drawing in Illustrator a whole lot of fun. I also checked out the new gradient tool with interactive sliders and transparency! Very,very cool. I love the new appearance pallet feature where you can turn on and off visibility of effects. It was a long time coming for Illustrator and boy is it nice.

Photoshop Extended is going to be a real treat for me. Having the animation and 3D tools built in is going to be a lot of fun.

I can’t wait till the Christmas break to sit down and make something cool with it. I want to upgrade Camtasia Studio too so I can make a few tutorials later. My old version broke when I upgraded to Vista .

Whew! What can I say. I’m in art heaven now!

I just posted 3 more pieces in my Zoovolution gallery that got approved this week. I really like how the 50 Zoukos came out. I’m really having fun with layouts and creating my own custom brushes, patterns and accents for these pieces. I could have taken some shortcuts and bought some royalty free scrolls and brushes but I like my art to be …well, my art!

I love working with the Todd and Chris at Web and Circus. They have been very helpful and encouraging.

Two down and 2 to go!

With the money I get for this I plan on buying Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium. My NAPP membership gives my a hefty discount and I need it. It’s got every art tool I’ve dreamed of. I’m really excited about the new features of Illustrator and Photoshop Extended and I’ve always wanted to dabble with Flash. I can’t wait to get my hands on them. Mordy Golding has a great writeup on the new features of Illustrator CS4. Oooh it looks like a whole bunch of my wishes came true.