My Sketchbook - tree house doodles

just some tree house doodles from today

My Sketchbook - Pixie

Another entry in my cute critters sketchbook...this is Pixie! Pixie just got interrupted during her lunch. She's a Pygmy Pocket Mouse - they might look very cute and cuddly but beware, they like to nibble.

My Sketchbook - Rude Awakening

 I came across some of creaturebox's amazing sketches and I got super inspired to design some weird, ugly creatures. They mention that they use Clip Studio Pro and/or Sketchbook Pro. I wasn't familiar with either one of these softwares so I decided to download the trial versions and try them out. Omg - I can't even being to describe how buttery soft  drawing and sketching feels in them. It's absolutely amazing! I immediately started doodling!!

You can see some of the results down below.

 It's been a really nice change from my day job so I hope you enjoy. :)

Here's one of my creatures - Ernest, the Horned Blue Wobble.

done using Clip Studio Pro

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And this here is Brenda - Brenda likes to dive below the speedlimit.

done using Sketchbook Pro

Sketch time

I'm on vacation aaand I can't even tell you how long it's been that I've done some traditional pen sketches. It's easily been yeeearrs so...time to dust off and get back to it. I figured I'd start off with some flowers first before I try something as crazy as cars and planes. 

Hope you enjoy!

Have a great summer!

Tools: Pigma Micron Pen 03 & 05; White Uni-ball Gel Ink Pen, Warm Grey Alcohol-based Marker (W6)

 
 

New Logo has arrived

I am super excited because I have a new logo and I absolutely love it! 

I did this little illustration in honor of the new arrival:

...and now...onto the reveal!!

I hired an incredibly talented designer to help me with this re-branding effort - her name is Sonia and you can find her website here: www.soniaydesigns.com. You can also find her on 99designs.com://99designs.com/profiles/soniaydesigns.

She was just amazing to work with and I love what we came up with.

Without further ado...

here is the new logo:

This will be my new logo for personal work as well as my logo for any freelance professional work I do.

I hope you love it as much as I do.

Til next time :)

Sonja

Copter Air Traxx - Breakdown & Process

Today I want to talk a little bit about the process of making the Copter Air Traxx poster. I wanted to design a retro inspired drone. I was looking at the atomic age, midcentury modern time period. 

References

I like to use Pinterest for the initial reference search. It's a great way to just quickly collect images and view them all together.

Here's a snippet from my pinterest board:

After that, I usually pick the most relevant images and put them together in a Pure Ref board. Pure Ref is a fantastic tool for having all your reference images in one place and being able to quickly access them. Here are some of the images I decided to use as inspiration for my drone design. You'll notice I used references from cartoons, vintage illustrations, real life drones, architecture and vehicle and prop designs.

3D Model

I decided to explore different design options in 3D and I wanted to learn how to use Blender so I used this project as my learning platform. Designing in 3D is great because you can easily evaluate your design from all kinds of different angles. I usually tend to find new designs just by tumbling around the current design I did so I find it very useful. Some plug-ins I used during the design process were Decal and Mesh Machine, both available here: https://blendermarket.com/creators/machin3

I used Vray Next as my renderer of choice because I knew I wanted an outlined, graphic looking render and Vray Next would allow me to do that very easily. I used Vray Next's toon shading for the outline and I used a falloff map to achieve this graphic look that you see here:

Vray Next is incredibly fast. If you haven't had a chance to try it out yet -I highly recommend it. I use the interactive render option to dial in my lighting and shaders. I use the Vray SampleRate render element to analyze and optimize my render settings. In previous Vray versions I would go into the local subdivisions of my shaders and lights to arrive at the most optimized render settings but with Vray Next, I noticed I didn't have to do that. It did it automatically for me. That was another huge time saver for me!

Poster Design

Now that I had the drone, I needed to work on the poster design. I looked at a lot of different retro ads from the 1950s and 60s and came up with a couple of different layout options. I also played around with a lot of different fonts because that time period is so iconic in regards to its' typography, it's very important to get that right.

Here are some of the different layout options I explored:

In the end I decided to go with my first layout design. I liked the scale of the drone and all the elements felt the most balanced to me.

The final touches were all done in Photoshop. To get that faded, vintage look I used actions, brushes and textures from the Atomica Kit, available at truegrittexturesupply.com. This kit has everything you need to distress and grunge up your artwork and it's incredibly easy and fast to use. It also comes with different halftone brushes which is what I used to get that halftone effect in my image.

Here is a breakdown:

And then here is the final image:

Thank you so much for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed this process write-up and stay tuned for more Atomic County.

Sonja