April 19, 2011
favorite illustrators; inspiration
my favorite illustrators that i’ve come accross is a japanese man by the name of Kawaguchi Youhei. he has a unique cartoonish style that I haven’t really seen before. he does characters from video games such a pokemon and other animated games. this is my favorite one from his: http://kawayoo.net/tuiseki_s.jpg i love the background and the bright teal colors that stick out and move your focus around on the image.
those are three of many illustrations that stick out to me; the flow is very nice and keeps you looking at all points of the image.
gradient mesh: http://dustinpwatson.wordpress.com/
one of the illuatrators i liked who uses gradient mesh is dustin watson. he does gradient mesh portraits of famous basketball players and he does them very well! i particularily enjoyed his poster of the faces of nba. they all have great form and coloring and look very dynamic (which is very important for these). he sells printed posters and even stretched canvases and I think it would make a great business if he could find a good advertisement technique to get his illustrations out there.
istockphoto blog
Si-Gal had some very intresting vector artwork on the istockphoto website. they are very colorful as well as interesting even though one theme is used around birds in trees. it looks like the images are used with stuff like gift cards, present cards, invitations and stuff like that. my favorite was birds in the spring; but for no particular reason. the colors are intriguing and fun to look at.
Andji had tons of vector image illustrations on her profile as well. lots of hers were used for website icons with images for reasturants, parties, business and many others. her ideas were simple, yet very appealing. lots of them were hard to understand the meaning behind them, but the majority had the same theme and good color schemes as well.
The World’s Most Photorealistic Vector Art
i enjoyed the precision and detail of reggie gilbert’s illustrations. the extreme detail that goes into his & the other pieces of artwork (more specifically the motorcycles were of interest to me). some of them you can tell are adobe illustrator creations, but others look so much like photographs that it’s unbelieveable. wayne forrest creates a lot of human drawings and most of them are noticably artworks and not photos but others require you to look real closely and study the details before you can figure out whether or not the piece isn’t something that came out of a camera.
blog assignment: blog.spoongraphics.co.uk
Illustrator Tutorial: Gradient Mesh Flower
i was looking at the gradient mesh flower tutorial on the spoongraphics blog site. the tutorial was very well done with 21 steps to just create a flower pedal. they use several tools starting with the pen tool, and they include the shortcuts (which are very helpful). when he started using the mesh tool i was very interested because I have never tried using that particular tool before. he also added shadow midtones chaning the CMYK values. the final piece, if you were to work that hard on each pedal and leaf was a very beautiful flower design that looks like it has a sharp light source coming from above.
blog assignment: jeantuttle.com
one thing i found particularily interesting about jean tuttle’s studio page was her icons section, in particular the weather symbols. these and most of her other icons are very simple but still pleasing to the eye. the icon expressions are appealing as well and i enjoyed looking at them.
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