Here is a short YouTube video in which I very briefly show how I created the Irish Players for the new ‘Footballheroes See Red’ book using my drawing of Paul Mc Shane as an example.
I click through some of the layers and talk very briefly about some of the software used.
In the case of the Republic of Ireland team, I started with rough pencil sketches which I then scanned and imported into Adobe Illustrator CS3.
I created all my black line work in Illustrator using the pressure sensitivity from the Wacom tablet to give me the stroke widths and the right look and feel for my lines.
The Footballheroes books are printed in such high quality and on such top-notch paper that I wanted everything to look as sharp as possible.
Finally I imported the lines into Corel Painter IX.5 and colored the players using digital watercolor.
Final artwork was delivered as 300 ppi TIFF files.
The reason Paul Mc Shane is wearing a suit and a band-aid is because I wanted all of the team members to look like characters from a classic gangster movie. Why? I don’t know.
Back in 2003 / 2004 I made a series of comedy cartoon flash greeting cards for the website www.komedykards.com. They were commissioned, written and voiced by Hal Eisenberg. Hal Eisenberg is an award winning copywriter, voice over talent and producer. http://www.eisenbergagency.com
I did all the character design and animation and flash design work. They still look quite OK in my opinion, considering that I was working in Flash 4 or maybe 5 back then. Also I did all the drawing directly in Flash in those days, because importing was not very smooth from Macromedia FreeHand back then and it was nonexistent from Adobe Illustrator. (Not like today where you can import a layered Illustrator file directly into flash!)
Today I uploaded a bunch of them to YouTube.
The cartoon shorts feature Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Dubya, Jack Nicholson, Andy Rooney and Donald Trump, James Brown, Ross Perot and a mysterious Love Guru like Swami.
