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.
For those of you who enjoyed the first Football Heroes book and collectable stickers there is good news. A new football heroes book ‘Football Heroes See Red’ will celebrate it’s book launch date April 1st 2008.
Read news and updates from the creators and illustrators of Rootball Heroes 2008 on the official blog here:
All of the FootballHeroes portraits are now on the UEFA website.
