stuff I forgot to post: isa's birthday portrait

Earlier this year I did a birthday portrait for the lovely and talented Isa Chandra Moskowitz, vegan cookbook author extraordinaire and all-around super awesome lady. It was commissioned by her boyfriend John (whose blog header will be featured in a later post since I also forgot to put that up when I did it) and was a lot of fun to do. Plus I am super happy with how it came out, which is always a bonus.

And because I always like seeing this sort of thing (and because my sketches for this were WAY nicer than usual, for some reason), full sketch/comp progress is below.

Round one...

Round two... changed up the background, added glasses.

Final! Added tattoos and changed up some proportions slightly.

And the color comp.

allyson's wonderland

I finished this piece a little while ago for Allyson Magda of Allyson Magda Photography. She wanted an Alice in Wonderland-ish illustration with her adorable Jack Russell Terrier, Gunny, as the White Rabbit.

I haven't done a serious digital piece in a while, and I was reminded of why I have a love/hate relationship with Illustrator. One on hand, I do like the end result, and I like that it lets me experiment and change things without scrapping the entire piece. But the downside is that it completely puts me in ocd zoom mode, where I work at 1200% of the actual size (which is usually 25-50% bigger than the final print size to begin with) and get hung up on miniscule details that no one would ever notice. For this reason it takes me at least twice as long to complete digital pieces. I should really work on that.

But! I'm pretty happy with how it came out, in the end.

Lolo and NoWhey Katie

I hang around a particular message board on the interweb quite a lot, and have met some seriously awesome people - some of whom have fallen victim to the wrath of my pen! Or, to be more specific, my pencil and then my tablet. In an effort to get something finished up here and to have, you know, more than two posts, I give to you the two most recently completed portraits: Lolo and NoWhey Katie. Adobe Illustrator start to finish for both.