2009 Calendar

I found the perfect calendar for 2009. I already have it and can barely wait for the new year to get here. It is the work of Chet Phillips, illustrator extraordinaire who happens to live in Dallas. I’ve never met him, just admired his work.

His style of illustration is very cool with a humorous twist and the fact that it is digitally created really speaks to me. Plus he loves critters and most of his work features critters. You know I like that.

I not only appreciate his talent and sense of humor, but his skill with Painter software. Every time I try to use my Painter software I get frustrated and head back to the comfort of Illustrator and/or Photoshop. But back to Chet, his calendars and other cool stuff are available at Cafe Press and he also has an Etsy shop filled with his prints, cards and even pillows. Lots of temptations.

MOO

No, I’m not channeling cows and speaking in tongues. I am, of course, referring to the company in England that is partnered with Flickr, MOO. They are printers of cool items such as tiny, heavyweight MiniCards and fun vinyl StickerBooks. Tis the season to be thinking holiday greeting cards and Moo is having a contest. The Super-Duper Holiday Card Competition and the People-Powered Holiday Card Store are where anyone can enter up to ten photos that they think would make great holiday cards. In the store, everyone can order cards made from any of the entered photos. Let me tell you, there are some really, really great images in that group. Flickr has a group set up with the entries. Click here to view these amazing photos on the Flickr site.

Prints

If you remember my digital collages and you liked them so much you wish you could get a copy to frame and hang, well, I read your mind. There are six different images available to purchase in my Etsy shop. I have more on the way. These cute prints will make excellent holiday gifts for your friends and family and don’t forget yourself. This concludes my advertisement. Thanks for reading this far.

Look!

I got a yearning to paint last Sunday so I whipped out this bright version of my flying dog. What do you think?

 

 

Teeth

All week I have been drawing teeth in Illustrator for a doctor of Endodontics. She needed these illustrations for a presentation she is making next week and I can’t remember where and what the conference is. So since I mention the teeth thing a lot, it is my paying job, the proverbial day job, I thought I’d post some pics of my teeth illustrations. Click on those teeth to see the enlarged version.

I heavily utilized the gradient mesh tool in Illustrator to achieve the 3-D look the doctor desired. Boy, that’s some fun. I really enjoy exploring new tools in my software packages.

For you fellow Illustrator users, there are some really interesting tutorials for the gradient mesh thing here, here and here as well as examples of masters of the tool here and here. Check it out. And let me know if you like my teeth.

Sleepy

So Friday I was back in the office after spending Wednesday and Thursday sitting in a hotel conference room listening to lectures about Adobe software. And thankfully it was pretty quiet, a little x-ray scanning and one short consultation about an upcoming illustration project. So I created another digital collage, this one utilizing one of the first cats I crocheted. This cat now lives in Ohio with my niece the grad school student.

I think I am compiling a book of illustrations of all the various rooms and porches of a house filled with crocheted critters. Now I have to think of a name for the book and then of course create some more collages and crochet more critters. Can’t have a book with only seven images, can we?

Lazy Day

Here’s Sammy, the striped dog that I crocheted and photographed, relaxing with a margarita on his back deck. Another digital collage by yours truly composed with Photoshop, Illustrator, PowerPoint, manipulated clip art and too much time with no project at work. I tell my boss that creating these images help sharpen my software skills. I figure its better than me surfing the web all day. And the next time I need to whip out an illustration of teeth for some publication or other, I’ll be able to produce it quickly due to my playing around during my slow time.

Lunch Time

In between installing and learning the new Adobe Creative Suites 3, I finished another digital collage I started last week. This one stars the cute little ferret that I crocheted for a friend. And am I glad I installed CS3, there are some really handy new items in Illustrator that made finishing this piece much easier than using CS2. If you are not familiar with this software package just ignore my blathering and enjoy the picture. Clicking on the pic will send you to my Flickr set where you will see all the digital collages I’ve created so far in one cute little group.

Yawn

Today was almost an exact repeat of yesterday, sloooow. So of course I created another digital collage starring Limey who was sold to a retailer in Irving, Texas. Hopefully he has a happy new home. But I still have the photos so he will live on in my artistic endeavors. I didget a design project this afternoon, the ortho department wants a screen printed t-shirt designed to give to their patients. So tomorrow I won’t be collage-ing for myself, I will have to play with teeth with braces designs for work. I hope you enjoy the yawn of Limey. He always makes me smile. I love those lime green stripes. As always, click on the photo to see it bigger.

Dog Nap

Well I had another sloooow day at work so I created this crochet doggie illustration, a digital collage. I crocheted the dog, of course, and gifted it to a friend. But I still have the digital images. I knocked out the background in Photoshop on this shot and then created a living room in Illustrator using clip art I downloaded from PowerPoint. I would find the clip art I wanted while in PowerPoint, copy the art and paste into Illustrator since the clip art is vector as is Illustrator. Then I ungroup and manipulate by re-coloring or deleting parts of the clip art. I think I’m in for slow days the rest of the week, the first year dental students have just arrived and the teachers haven’t started dumping work on me yet. I see a trend developing, more crochet digital collage tableaux to come.