The graphic may appear simple, but took four passes on various platforms to generate the achieved look.
- By hand
- digitally in Photoshop
- digitally in Illustrator
- adjusting each anchor point by mouse and keyboard.
Kicking it all off, I started with pen and paper. Illustrated the dog on tracing paper, scanning it into Photoshop, retracing it using my Wacom Intuos Pro.
The character ‘Stoney’ is silly and cartoony in nature, so I wanted typography to match. I went with type mostly from House Industries, a foundry specializing in type which carries that handmade, loaded, kitschy/retro feel.
After importing my digital trace into Adobe Illustrator, it was redrawn again using the brush tool, tapered brushes, then Width Tool. Massaging each line and anchor point until a clean brush-pen look was achieved. Using the Live Paint, I color blocked the illustration. Originally I used three colors, but decided to use only one. I chose ‘red’, the color of Ed’s business.
Lastly, the vector graphic was imported back into Adobe Photoshop, a variety of effects we used achieving a natural distressed vintage look.
Distressing the image using ‘Displace’ with high dpi scans of painted paper. This distorts the edges of the illustration an organic-looking way. Adding and adjusting Field Blur, Noise, Gaussian Blur, Threshold, and Levels achieved a rougher, hastey budget-silkscreen printed feel.
Applying this process/effect to each separate color and type layer, and combining them to created a more unified look and feel.
I was loosely inspired by the graphic illustrations by Akira Yonekawa . I carefully studied the look and feel of his work. Backwards-engineering a process which was uniquely my own, equally cheeky, retro and authentic in style.
