I was invited to share my creative process through Adobe's AdobeLive virtual sessions. With the help of Adobe's gracious host, Julia, I shared my philosophy on problem-solving by accepting mistakes as an untapped part of the creative's arsenal. Thank you to all who joined the chat both days and helped bring these Illustrations to life.
Day 1:
My usual process is sketching traditionally with inked lines, then scanning to vector, and finishing in Adobe Illustrator.
In this session I used Adobe Capture to both digitize and vector the drawing. Once in Ai, the pathfinder tool—Unite and Divide—were used to create fillable fills with colors made from Color.adobe.com. Some experimenting led me to a process where I first copied and pasted each shape, then shifted them slightly and used the Transparency Tool to create new color combos of the overlapping shapes. I also wrote out some words to bring in using the above Adobe Capture method. I'm pleased with how this turned out, it wasn't what I planned but that's the beauty of it.
Day 2:
I thought it would be good to show how a warm-up exercise could lead to a unique, finished design. With the help of Julia, we did a collaborative drawing in real time. She went first and drew some abstract lines then I illustrated the first thing I saw which eventually became Funky Terry. He's a fishy-platform-wearing-funktastic Dino with a loaded Adobe spray can, spreading his funky creativity all over town. Like Day one, I used the improvisational process with duplicating the fill shapes mixed with the transparency tools. Along the way, we talked about the importance of Typography and layout which I added to the drawing for a stronger design. That mustache is serious.
