I stumbled across this tip at Stubby Pencil Studios… breathe life back into dried out water based markers by dipping them in water! I had a bag full of dried out markers I hadn’t quite found another use for, so gave it a go. The method I used was :

• • Put just enough water in the bottom of a container cover the tips of the markers (In hindsight, tall glasses would have worked better as they won’t tip!)
• •  Dip the marker tip in and leave it for a few minutes.
• • Remove from marker and put the cap back on. I only waited a few more minutes before testing them out, and they worked wonderfully.

Not sure how many times this trick will work, but my daughter was pleased having a dozen old markers back into the fold and has been colouring up a storm! (And for those curious, the coloured water from runoff ink was too watered down to reuse as paint.)

This is your (belated) holiday card :) Hope you had a happy and safe holiday with your family and friends!

Was fun making Christmas Cards out of some of Hera’s old drawings, a great way to reuse them. Hera & I glued the drawings down onto cheap holiday cards from the dollar store, then once they were dry we cut them out and did potato stamps on them.

Here’s another of my drawings for my diary of Hera’s stuff, a little Oilily top with Peruvian doll pattern. I used a completely different “medium” for colouring this illustration digitally… used my iPad! I’ve been loving my iPad (my 30th birthday present) and I use it more than my imac now due to its portability and super functional apps.

So this weekend I took the plunge, broke the bank and spent $7.95 to buy Sketchbook Pro, the acclaimed sketching app for the ipad by Autodesk… and LOVE it. I’m not much of a digital illustrator, but I do like to colour my pen/pencil drawings on occasion on the computer.

I gave it a go yesterday for the first time, and must say it’s a much nicer experience colouring on screen with my fingertips than it is using a digital pen and looking up at a monitor. Not to mention was pretty cool being able to draw on my iPad away from the computer snuggled up in bed! It’s extremely intuitive to use, and aside from a few pages showing you how to use the program I didn’t need to look up any supporting documentation to figure out how to adapt it to my illustration style. From start to finish, the app is very simple to use, I just :

• • Dragged the scan of my “real” pen drawing into an Album in iPhoto I’ve dedicated to artwork.
• • Plugged my iPad into the laptop to sync with iTunes.
• • In the iTunes iPad Photo tab I set it to automatically sync all images from my iPhoto artwork album every time I connect my iPad. (Note : the Sketchbook Pro app has the ability to “Add” images to itself from iTunes, I just didn’t find it worked. The “Send To” button DID work however, which is how I later got the PSD file out of iTunes)
• • Once the sync was done, just opened up Sketchbook Pro and clicked on “Open Image” icon to access my photos on the iPad, and found the album titled “artwork” and found my sketch.
• • From there I found it similar to working in Photoshop, in that you have layers to work with (and can set the opacity of, or adjust to multiply or screen), a myriad of drawing tools. I found I kept wanting to do more (like cut, paste, use the magic wand…) to finish up the illustration, but found the drawing experience itself very enjoyable. Especially zooming in and moving around the image, felt much more intuitive than using keyboard shortcuts and a digital pen.  Felt a bit like finger painting… without the mess :)
• • Once I was all finished with the colouring, I was able to “Export Layered PSD to iTunes,” and from there send it to my desktop.

So far, I really like Sketchbook Pro. My only complaint is the small canvas size (1024×682 at 72dpi)… would love to be able to work on actual hi-res sketches. For any illustrators using an ipad, it’s well worth the spare change! I’m waiting to hear from my brother with his experience using a touch screen stylus in conjunction with this program… if it’s good I might buy one as well!

Further to the question of how to show glitter on greeting card mockups, here is a real example of one of my greeting cards that has a pearly foil pattern in the background, on the text, and embossed flowers. When I created this card, I had four printouts from the layers in my Adobe Illustrator file…

1) The Print Only Layer shows what will be printed in ink on the card. (Click to see full-sized images)

2) The Foil Layer shows where glitter or foil stamping will be used. Note that when you go to send the design to a printer, if there is more than one colour of foil used, you will need to make separate layers in your files for each colour.

3) The Emboss / Cup die Layer shows the outlines of what shape needs to be created with the emboss.

4) The Mockup shows where the foil and emboss layers are meant to line up with the printed image below.

If you are sending a card design to a greeting card publisher and wish to show foil, glitter, or embossing, the simplest way to do it is to show it in black printouts separately from the design itself. You can find more of my greeting card tips here.

I just finished this illustration for my diary of Hera’s stuff, and thought I’d share the simple technique I use for colouring pen illustrations in Photoshop. Clicking on the images below will bring up a close-up image.

Step 1 | Open the scan of your drawing in Photoshop, and create two new layers below it. One will be your background colour (I’ve used white here), and the other will be for painting in the colours of your drawing.

Step 2 | Adjust the brightness and contrast until the paper is as white as possible.

Step 3 | Select the background of the sketch with the magic wand tool, and delete it. Make sure all little bits of paper speckle are removed so the colour comes out nice and clean.

Step 4 | Set the drawing layer to Multiply. This will allow the colours below to show through your drawing, and make the pen work come out nice and dark as it multiplies over the colours below.

Step 5 | Use the magic wand tool to select the background of the sketch. Then invert the selection so that you have only the drawing selected. Feather the edges of the selection (Menu Bar > Select > Feather.) Click on the blank layer below the sketch (multiply) layer and fill the entire sketch with a predominant colour.

Step 6 | From here in, apply colour to this colouring layer whichever way you feel comfortable. Applying colour on its own layer(s) makes it easy to adjust the colours later while keeping your drawing in its original condition.I use a combination of the paintbrush and the magic wand / lassoo tools to select areas from the sketch and fill with colour. You can experiment and go as elaborate as you want with colour, shade and textures.

This week I discovered one of my good acrylic paintbrushes was as hard as a rock… I obviously didn’t clean it properly the last time I used it! Hoping to recover the brush I did a little online search for ways to soften up the bristles. I was pleased to discover that the solution was in my kitchen cupboard… white vinegar.

Here’s the method I used* :

• • Place the brush’s bristles down into a glass or jar.
• • Fill with white vinegar just to the metal ferrule.
• • Let sit for a few hours. At this point the bristles will have softened up considerably.
• • Pour some white vinegar into a shallow pan on the stove, and place the brush’s bristles into the vinegar until are submerged.
• • Gently heat the white vinegar (not to boiling!) until paint is loosened from the bristles.
• • Rinse the brush in water, then use gentle hand soap to suds up the bristles to remove any vinegar.
• • Rinse well. Condition bristles with a brush cleaner optional.
• • Make a mental note to wash the brush more carefully next time it’s used!

*Inspired by eHow.com (How to Soften Paint Brushes and How to Clean Paint Brushes That Have Hardened)

I’ve done this tutorial before, but wanted to show in a little more detail how easy it is to tint with colour a graphite pencil drawing in Photoshop. This example is from the children’s book I’m currently working on, Spotty & Eddie Visit Percé. (First off though I’ll apologize for my fluctuating spelling of the word “Colour.” Being Canadian that’s how we spell it… but Photoshop uses American spelling, but I just can’t help my English grammar sometimes!)

1) Scan the pencil drawing at 300dpi 100%. Then open in Photoshop, and resave as a PSD file.

2) In this sketch I want a pure white background. Instead of erasing the background, I used the magic wand to select the background, feathered the edges, and then on a new layer filled the selection with white. This leaves me the option to later change the white to a coloured background. (Read on …)

As an old-school artist, a valuable skill to have is knowing how to scan and stitch together your original paintings digitally. At the moment I’m stitching together the scans of the final artwork for Riley’s Tooth by Diane Cantrell.  Here’s how I’m going about it…

1. Scan your artwork in pieces :
• Place your artwork on the scanning bed starting in the upper left corner.
• Find a place on your scanner where you can visually align your artwork. I piece of masking tape down on either edge of the scanner to quickly align it.
• Tip : If your artwork is thin and warped, place a magazine on top of the artwork about the size of the scanning bed area as it will help press it down. Then stack on more weight.
• Tip : If your artwork is too large for the scanning bed, make sure it lays down flat and place something heavy on it to hold it in place. Sometimes removing the lid off the scanning bed and not using it can help maneuver for very large pieces.
• The more flat your artwork is, the more even the colours will turn out in the scan and you’ll reduce shadows. Scanning in pieces will inevitably create shadows on the edge of the scan, but the bigger the angle the larger the shadows are and more difficult to remove using Photoshop.
• Set the scanner to at least 300dpi and at least 100% in size (adjust to your needs.)
• Make sure your artwork is secure, and start the scan.
• When the scan is done, carefully lift your artwork and slide it over so that you can scan the next portion of your illustration, allowing 2-3 inches of the are you just scanned to be scanned again. This overlap will help you stitch together the illustrations in Photoshop (and trust me, it’s an awful feeling when you’ve scanned something very large to piece it together only to find a big chunk missing from not overlapping enough!) (Read on …)

I’ve been itching to do a study of this little Bébé dress by Minihaha… here’s the finished piece as part of my illustrated diary of Hera’s stuff. I used acrylic on a piece of old Pantone 178 paper by Letroset… below are a few scans I took in between the layers of painting.

First, I lightly penciled in the outline of the dress onto the pantone paper… I left the pantone details along the edge attached as thought it would be nice to remember how old the paper is.

Next, as it was such a busy pattern I painted the corderoy fabric without its pattern to establish the texture & shading.

Then, I spent quite a bit of time studying the pattern… it was so complex I left out a lot of interesting shapes & colour combinations, and tried to capture the gist of the pattern

Lastly, I added a little more texture on top of the painted pattern to knock it back a bit, and added a few white highlights to the trim.

This illustration technique me feels like I’m a little kid again and colouring in the lines! I really enjoy this style, as I can take my time with my B-pencil & smudge stick rendering an illustration… and then hop on the computer and create the final black & white and colour print-ready files respectively in a matter of minutes. It is an ideal style for creating a lot of illustrations in a short amount of time, as it achieves a traditional feel without the time involved in creating watercolour paintings.

The step-by-step process I follow to colour my illustrations in Photoshop is :

• Illustrate the character with a graphite pencil on bond paper (I like printer paper as it’s smooth and fits on the scanning bed!)
• Scan each illustrations at high resolution
• Create a Photoshop file for the character illustration
• Remove the character from the background and place it on its own layer, carefully removing the whitespace with a soft edged eraser tool or feathered magic wand selection (see below)

• Adjust the contrast
• Save out a flattened, grayscale version as a TIFF (I’ve set up an action to do this in Photoshop automatically for me)
(Read on …)