RaegalTBoggart on DeviantArthttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/https://www.deviantart.com/raegaltboggart/art/What-s-up-299641406RaegalTBoggart

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RaegalTBoggart's avatar

What's up?

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Description

Made ENTIRELY in Adobe Illustrator, this thing was a royal pain in the ass to shade. (I used Gradient Mesh, not a brush.)

This was a college project for Computer Illustration class. The goal was to practice Gradient Mesh, one of Illustrator's most powerful and most difficult tools. Those of you following me on Twitter have seen my lamentations on GRMesh's difficulty :P It was a labor of love to be sure.

My Twitter followers will also be aware that I've been rambling about this for a few weeks now. Just to give you an idea of what kind of monstrosity this was to make, this was a timed exercise (as part of a class requirement, we must time ourselves while making projects so that we can log how many hours it takes to do stuff.) and according to my work journal, this took 17.5 hours to make. I shit you not. That's an entire day with very little sleep's worth of work on just this alone. Needless to say, I won't be doing vector art very often :P

Why the critique flag? Hopefully someone familiar with Illustrator will swing by and maybe give me a few pointers. As for everyone else, go for everything BUT the shading unless you're familiar with Gradient Mesh. It's not as easy as it looks. Twitter followers (might) have seen the WIP shots with the mesh overlays, and can attest to how weird that tool is.

Oh, and look! Bismark has claws on his fingers and toes now :3 Almost all of my characters shall have those now, as well as pads on their fingers and palms.
Image size
2249x3155px 1.19 MB
Comments4
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PrincePizzaParty's avatar
Illustrator is a fun little program! I would use it but I can't seem to find a good -ahem- version of it (if you know what I mean). Haha, but I do quite like illustrator a lot.

Unfortunately, I'm not overly familiar with Gradient Mesh (I'm not the biggest fan of using gradient/soft shading), so I can't tell you too much about that. This could be a personal preference, but I think varying thick and thin lines on the line art might give it a bit more visual interest. Maybe not, though! Anyways, it's nice to see you trying new poses! Your sense of depth is definitely improving and I'm sure you can push yourself even farther with it!

Another thing that might be neat with your characters is alluding to their fur a bit more (either with the shading/highlights, or add actual tufts in the line art). Kinda like what you do with the tail, but maybe around the collar of his shirt or other things, just to give a greater sense that he is wearing the shirt AND it adds a nice bit of texture.

Ack! This became a super text-wall. Sorry about that! You probably just wanted Illustrator critiques....haha...I got a bit carried away. Regardless, it looks very nice!