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.
Here is a photorealistic digital airbrush painting I made based on a picture of my younger daughter Ashley.
She is wearing her eccentic, international man of mystery grandfather’s white rockstar sunglasses.
While I was working on this piece, I thought back to the days when I would have had to cut each mask out of Friskfilm, wait for the layers to dry, and constantly wash out my airbrushes to make sure that the colors didn’t mix. I still have several of my old airbrushes in my studio, but they are purely ornamental at this point. I love Photoshop! Who would have thought back then that one day you could do the same job, without a mask, compressor, paint, brushes, mess, and ripping your hair out if you made a mistake or if your original got lost or damaged.
