I added a few new brushes and graphic styles I’ve been working on just for fun. You can download them in my Tutorials and Resources section of my gallery.

Last week I was listening to Deke McClelland’s Martini Hour podcast. Have you ever had one of those revelation moments? The kind where you smack your forehead and think omg! ..or maybe a big DuhHuh?

I had never really thought of using a raster image as an opacity mask in Illustrator. To get Photoshop-like grunge effects in Illustrator I usually placed a grungy image I made in Photoshop and then live traced it in Illustrator to give me a clipping mask and a basis for an opacity mask. Mordy Golding’s method is a hell of a lot easier and much more flexible. Check it out now!

Wowee this is fun to play with!

I usually don’t post non-art related stuff here but I had to tell you about the Rise Against concert I took my daughter Lauren to on Monday. Last year I contacted their manager about getting my daughter back stage passes to meet the band. I couldn’t believe when I heard back the same day. She got to meet them last year and they were so cool. They actually sat down and listened to her and were very gracious and polite.

Since they are on tour again this year and were coming to my area, I emailed their manager again. She set up a meet and greet before the concert and Lauren gave them a picture wallet of their previous meeting and a letter she painstakingly wrote for the band. They talked to her and posed for pictures. It was so wonderful of them to do that for her. The highlight of the evening was when the band dedicated their last song “Ready to Fall” to Lauren. I thought she was going to jump out of her wheelchair!

That makes me a Rise Against fan forever!

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.