Aside from creating illustrations, I enjoy photography. With the ease of digital photography it is easy to amass a huge number of shots during a vacation or outing. Let’s say that you have a folder of vacation photos that you’d like to send as an email attachment or that you’d like to share with others. Using a modern digital camera, those photos will probably far too large to send as an attachment. Read more
Having grown up in southern California in the 60s and 70s, I can still remember the last vestiges of a once thriving citrus industry. Walking to school one could smell the oil-burning smudge pots and hear the whirling propellers that kept the precious fruit from freezing. By the 1980s most of the groves were cleared for houses and strip malls. Somewhere in my subconscious an imprint was made and years later I felt the urge to create a series of labels representing the citrus era. Here I’ll demonstrate how the lettering was created for the label “Mission Brand Oranges.”
When making the transition from traditional to digital media, the first program I learned was Adobe Photoshop. It came the closest to replicating the gritty airbrush texture. The problem with Photoshop was the files could get huge. For example, a 16″ x 24″ image with multiple layers would be come an unwieldy monster that taxed my computer’s hard drive. Also, a Photoshop image could not be enlarged much without distorting the resolution. In contrast, Adobe Illustrator files were much smaller and retain their quality if enlarged. The problem was that earlier versions of Illustrator were great for smooth gradations, but were limited with creating texture – at least I thought so. Read more
Over the years Photoshop has been my tool of choice. I’m very familiar with Illustrator, but rarely used it for commissioned jobs. In between jobs I like to play around with both programs and develop new techniques. sometimes I’ll take an image that I admire and replicate it in either program. Poster artist Davis Lance Goines recommended doing this and remarked that the artist being copied becomes part of you. You learn their thought process and how they must have approached a design. Read more
I love lettering. Some people like to sketch animals, some like to sketch people, some prefer to sketch landscapes. I like to sketch letter forms. Predominantly mid-20th Century lettering. Sometimes these letters don’t amount to anything legible, but sometimes they do. Who knows where these ideas emerge from when you are just letting the pencil flow while the mind is in a state of flow. Read more