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.