Bottled Sky

If you have hundreds of vacation photos sitting in your hard drive and want to make better use of them, try turning them into cartoon postcards! It’s quite simple to do if you have some basic drawing and Photoshop skills.

In my aunt’s case, she had a niece with a lot of free time. Below are three of eight postcards that I made for her a few years ago (she needed them for a personal project). Click on the thumbnails for a bigger view.

I used photos from her trip to China, choosing those of her standing in front of different tourists spots with very few other people in the background. Those are the best types of photos for this kind of project.

Here’s a rundown of how you can make unique postcards out of your travel photos. One caveat: This is definitely not a tutorial. It’s more of a detailed idea for you to play around with

Continue reading Personalized Cartoon Postcards »

Several people — Sara being the most recent — have e-mailed to ask how I go about creating my mixed media illustrations. I tried my best to write a coherent reply every time, all the while thinking to myself, “I really should blog about this one of these days.” After Skye asked how I colored yesterday’s tiger-in-a-suit drawing and then gave me a shout-out and some imaginary strangulation on her blog, I finally went ahead and wrote this little how-to article.

I suppose you can call this a tutorial, even though it’s not as detailed as the better tutorials you’ll see around the Internet. Just for kicks I used the previously posted tiger’s decapitated head for visual aids.

Continue reading Coloring with Adobe Photoshop »

This little fella is my interpretation of this week’s Illustration Friday topic, suit. Tigers are such handsome animals, and I thought a cartoon tiger would look cute in a suit. It was partially inspired by a Calvin & Hobbes comic strip where Hobbes dressed up in a tie for Susie — but mostly I just wanted to draw a tiger in a suit

As usual I drew the outline on paper then did the coloring on Photoshop. The original sketch was a full-body picture, but I had to stop inking because the pen dried out, and the only other pen I had was twice as thick. Methinks I need to buy more pens