My Illustrator Workshop Class In Review
Just before the beginning of the Fall 2011 quarter the School of Cinema and Interactive Media in DePaul’s College of Computing and Digital Media acquired the graphic design department from the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. This development has provided a slew of new courses for us. I’ve always wanted to take Adobe Illustrator and learn more about vector graphics to accompany pixel based Photoshop. It’s a freshman level course but it’s one I can imagine using in a variety of ways in my future animation projects.
Our lecturer for this course was Chris Kalis. Although one of his specialties is graphic design this wasn’t a graphic design course, just a basic “how to class”. We learned some important basics such as masking, creating our own character fonts and learning how to create abstract shapes with the line and circle tools. We got a lot of good work in with the color tools too.
Chris didn’t let us off the hook just because it was a beginner class though. We applied design and composition principles to our projects with the layouts he assigned using a variety of techniques. On our first major project he took our head shots, we turned them into silhouettes and then got creative blending it with our initials in a variety of ways. Here’s one of mine.
This is the reason I took the class. To learn how to draw in Illustrator. For this exercise we found a picture of an interesting object and traced it. After Placing (sometimes preferable to Importing an image) the picture on the art board you lower the opacity to make it more opaque but not completely transparent. Then the line tool is used to draw the contours of the object. In the end the closed spaces can be filled with color. The file below was my boat project which included a labeled diagram.
This is my final project, my re-imagining of a Donald Byrd album cover. It is a process book layout of one of his jazz album covers. The objective for the final was to pick an album cover, create a few stylized versions of it, including the logo, and then picking a color pallet to use as inspiration for something unique in the end. This exercise gave us more practice on learning about fonts and duplicating them as closely as possible. The PDF flip book will let you leaf through the pages of my final.
I learned more than expected from this class, especially creating custom fonts that I can use in any animated situation. Christ is a great instructor. This is Chris’s personal site. If you’re a student of animation or graphic design I definitely recommend that you take a course from him. And if you need a vector based alternative to the pixel based PhotoShop you should definitely fire up Illustrator and start playing around with it.
What I Learned About Tom Nguyen’s Style of Inking At Chicago ComicCon 2011
One of the best parts of Comic Con is the hourly information presentations you can attend on all sorts of comic related subjects. One particular subject I wanted to learn more about is inking and D.C. Comics inker Tom Nguyen is one of the best in the industry. I got a chance to sit in on his session “Tom Nguyen’s Style of Inking” Friday afternoon at Chicago Comic Con 2011. Don’t know what an inker is? That’s the second person in the creative process of making a comic book or graphic novel. The penciler draws all the panels and then they hand it off to the inker who makes the dark outlines, shadows and backgrounds. The letterer handles the lettering including thought and speech bubbles along with effects lettering and the colorist finishes it off to bring the page to life.
Tom shared a lot including the tools he uses and his daily routine. One of the cool process things he taught us is the fact that comic artists never create at comic size. Everything is done on an 11 X 17 Bristol pad. When each artist has done their part the Brystol is reduced to comic page size for publishing. The Brystol page has a cardstock type of texture. That’s probably because it’s going through so many artist’s hands before reaching the publishing stage.
Some inking tools include Micron pens which come in a few different sizes. He said Sharpies are good to use for concept art but not serious inking because you can encounter bleeding issues and the tips get blunted with use. He also noted that technical pens are good for drawing mechanical objects and borders.
Tom prefers to use brushes (size 1 or 2) with India ink though. Windsor and Newton is his favorite brand but he said it’s not necessary for a beginner to use a top of the line brush like that while learning the craft. He mentioned that some inkers like to use crow quill pens because they give you great control over line variation but they’re not for him as the tips wear out so quickly. He also uses brushes for black fill in. When working digitally he fills in the blacks with the Photoshop fill bucket. White-out pens or thinned white acrylic paint are commonly used to correct errors.
The final tool in the inking process is the prep work to pass it on. That requires a scanner and Tom uses a large format Epson scanner. After this point the pencilers and inkers usually work out personal agreements on how to split the original art. Sometimes they keep it for themselves and other times they sell it. Inks are actually some of the coolest for sale work in artist alley at the convention.
It was also good to learn about his daily routine and personal journey into the profession. He makes it his goal to complete one page a day and while he’s working he likes to listen to music or documentaries. Not watch documentaries, just listen to them (LOL).
Tom got into the field at the age of fifteen by working with D.C. artist Doug Mahnke in Minnesota. A few years of that was enough to get him started full time at the age of nineteen. His answer to the question “what if you don’t know anyone in the industry to get an internship” was to attend conventions and show your work there. You can ask for critiques from the pros on the spot or online. People asked lots of good questions and Tom made lots of other great points during the session.
He capped it off by giving us a demo of inking in Photoshop with a quick Batman sketch. Using his digital tablet and stylus he mentioned that he uses the default brush settings. He doesn’t bother with creating his own. The most interesting technique pointer was that changing line width when you encounter a change in direction on the shape or character makes it look more dynamic (he said to think “thick-thin, thick-thin” while working) . Techniques like that are what makes the inker more than just a tracer of the penciler’s original work.
Another cool part of his Photoshop demo was the way he used the lasso tool to make corrections. Most of us who use the software only think to use the lasso to delete a section of a layer or to move the lassoed section to a new layer. He used it to reposition a couple of sections of the Batman face and edited it back together using the eraser or clone tool (I don’t remember which) and then redrew where he needed to reconnect the shifted parts of the face.
It was a great choice of a first session for me and I walked away with some ideas that I can immediately apply in animation school this fall and going forward in my career.
Tom isn’t a one dimensional artist. Among other things he’s an accomplished photographer as well. Check out his photography site here. Also keep up with Tom’s projects on social media via his tweets at @tomnguyenart.
Read MoreBehind the Scenes of My Interview With Illustrator, Animator and Logo Designer Russ Cox
The interview you’re about to watch was one of the potential subjects of my final project during the Spring 2011 quarter at DePaul University’s College of Computing and Digital Media (The CDM Baby!). The task assigned by my DC489 “The Big Picture” course professor Dan Pal was to interview someone in the entertainment business. Russ Cox, owner of Smiling Otis Studio was one of two artists I contacted who agreed to a live interview.
I contacted him through LinkedIn. That won’t surprise those of you who know I am huge believer in the power of social media for networking. I don’t exactly recall how I came across Russ’s profile, probably a LinkedIn group, but two things caught my attention. First was his profile picture with one of his characters popping out of the top his hat but also his hilarious bio (read the funny Summary section). His summary is so well written that I rewrote mine in narrative form as he had done. I realized it’s O.K. to use humor in your profile even on a forum as professional as LinkedIn so my Summary isn’t stiff like the original version.
At any rate that was the impetus to formally connect our profiles then I messaged a request for an interview. He was happy to help an emerging fellow artist and we worked out the details. Take a look at the interview and I’ll continue with the backstory on the other side.
The method I arranged for was a recorded Skype interview via the VOD Burner system. VOD Burner is a downloadable program that connects to your Skype video call and records it. You can then save and edit the video conference in a variety of formats. I’m a Skype pro but this was my first time using the recording program and I had a couple of issues that I needed to work around.
Although Russ and I were able to see each other and converse through our computer cameras VOD didn’t record my half of the video portion. It processed my audio just fine but you’ll notice in the two panel layout that the left side is green opposite Russ’s video on the right. My face should be where the green is. Somehow it didn’t work out. Don’t know if I didn’t have the settings correct or if the program flaked out but it called on my sense of creativity to make it work.
I initially imported the VOD Burner files into Adobe Premier Pro, my favorite film editing package. For some reason Premier Pro and VOD were not agreeing with each other (I won’t bore you with the time wasted on figuring out how to process the VOD interview footage into a useful format). For some reason Premier Pro garbled the QuickTime files. Never had that problem before, nothing but a headache this time. Adobe After Effects wound up being the tool for the job.
Since my smiling face was nowhere to be seen I inserted a series of images into the left panel and used the green as border for each of them. In the middle segment you’ll see a transition to a single screen. I simply moved the dual panel to the left centering Russ’s face on the screen and inserted black layer over the green panel. Then it switches back to the dual screen layout for the last part of the interview. This forced technical adjustment helped me to give the interview some additional visual interest. Plus, I now know how to do multiple video layouts within a film intentional for future projects.
The other adjustment that took some time figuring out was how to adjust the VOD default frame rate (30 frames per second OR fps) to the standard 24 fps that I’m used to. Didn’t know how to change it on the VOD side and neither Premier Pro nor After Effects could adjust it after I imported the files. These differing settings resulted in the audio and video being out of sync.
I finally figured out that I had to use two copies of each segment as individual tracks, one track for audio only (by turning off the video) and the other track for video only (by turning off the audio). This allowed my to slide the audio track ahead of the video by a few frames in order for words and mouth to match up again. Five frame seemed to do the trick. With all manner of audio visual trickery I finally got it to where it needed to be. Such is the life of animators and film makers. Obstacles sonstantly present learning opportunities to get the job done.
I hoped you enjoyed the interview and learned a lot from Russ as I did. And if you’re an Adobe software user be sure to save this post for reference in case of future problems of your own. Leave comments, tell me what you learned or tell me what you thought of my aesthetic choices and workarounds.
Read MoreAbout The Artist
Martin Lindsey is a Master of Arts animation student at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois and an engineer turned blogger here on The Animated World of Martin Lindsey. I’m blogging with the press corps at the 2012 C2E2 April 13-15.
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