Peter Beach, a technical illustrator with over 25 years of freelance experience, wrote in to share his blog The Business of Freelancing Creative. There Peter has a wealth of wisdom, including his 21 Practical Tips to a successful illustration career, and candid essays on finding your niche, work-for-hire, copyright, pricing and stock illustration.
I’ve only started reading through, but it’s already proving to be a valuable resource for those considering a career of freelance and seasoned professionals alike.
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Bill Mayer, a seasoned veteran illustrator, recently shared this cautionary tale. Innocently enough, he took on a cover illustration for an alternative weekly magazine with a very low budget because he loved the subject matter and thought that being an award-winning professional would earn him some creative freedom. Instead his best concepts were thrown out and his final illustration was micromanaged by the magazine’s advertisers. Then he was tarred and feathered by his peers for ever taking on the job.
I saw Twitter as a sales tool with an immediate and pointed delivery, to be aimed at current and prospective clients. Free, direct, and uncluttered advertising to an audience with a common interest.
Using Twitter he reconnected with Popular Science magazine, a client he worked with regularly between 1994 and 2001. He had tried with hard-copy promos, emails and even voicemails with little response. Then he started following @PopSciGuy, art director Matthew Cokeley:
Each morning Matt would Tweet, “Morning tweeps! Let’s get to work!” After following PopSciGuy on Twitter for a few weeks, I decided to make a bold move. While having lunch at a local restaurant, I replied to one of these morning salutations with “Matt, put me to work in the next issue!”
Now, I certainly wouldn’t recommend this approach to everyone! But my gut told me that this direct, outside-the-norm tactic might just garner a favorable response from the A.D. of a leading science and technology magazine. This approach was destined to go either of two ways: bold, yet smart or, the dumbest move ever.
…and it worked—within two hours, Matthew got in touch with a project for Greg.
For those of you on the fence about it, this is what Twitter is for; Connecting with people with shared interests & goals, in a casual, personable way.
If your new year’s resolution was to learn how to bring your illustrations to life with motion and interactivity, you are in luck. Below I’ve gathered some resources, tutorials and inspiration to get you started on your journey.
Adobe Flash
For better or for worse, Flash has been around for 15 years. While rival technologies may be digging its grave, Flash remains the most intuitive animation tool for users of Adobe Illustrator — and 15 years worth of online tutorials and forum discussions make for an easy learning curve.
Both made by Adobe, Flash and Illustrator work pretty well together (although, not as well as you might expect). Like Illustrator, Flash is vector based and can import .AI vector artwork along with bitmaps and video files. Illustrator can export .SWFs for Flash, and later versions (AI CS3+) can even include symbols, animation clips and dynamic objects.
In addition to animation tools, Flash also has a programming language called ActionScript (AS) with which you can make your animations interactive. There are three versions of ActionScript (AS1, AS2, AS3) which are not cross-compatible, each more esoteric than the last. I find AS2 to be the right mix of natural-language programming and breadth of possibilities, and seems to have the most tutorials too.
AE is a beast of a program; it’s like the Photoshop of video. It’s used for 2D & 3D motion graphics, editing, compositing, post-production and special effects for video, TV and film. And like Photoshop it can be used to create entire projects from start to finish, but its real strength is in manipulating and compositing assets made by other means, such as Illustrator and 3D applications.
AE takes just about anything you can throw at it — AI, EPS, PSD, PNG, PDF, MP3, WAV, AVI, MOV, even camera movements from popular 3D software — and spits out a wide variety of video formats.
Although AE does allow you to control animations and effects with scripting, it only exports video meaning no interactivity with AE alone.
Ai to Canvas is a plug-in for Adobe Illustrator produced by developers at Microsoft. It enables Illustrator to export vector and bitmap artwork directly to a new HTML5 web element called a Canvas. Canvas-enabled browsers (latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera) can then interpret and render that content for viewers.
The advantage over simply exporting images for the web is that artwork in a Canvas element remains vectored and can be animated and manipulated with JavaScript code. In fact, Ai to Canvas allows rudimentary animation simply by renaming your layers.
The fact that Canvas doesn’t rely on a browser plug-in (like Flash does) means that your animation & interactivity will run regardless of the viewer’s installed components. This means content presented in a Canvas element are viewable on Apple’s iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, since they disallow browser plug-ins. I made this HTML5 demo to try it out.
You don’t necessarily need a fancy program to create rich animated and interactive media. Photoshop is equipped with an animation palette suitable for creating flipbook type animations; Here’s a primer.
Failing that, try to be creative with the tools you have. Here are two web pages that feel animated, using only static assets:
I can’t remember how or when I came across this tutorial on drawing hands by illustrator Joumana Medlej, but it’s been an invaluable resource. It neatly summarizes everything I’ve ever learned from anatomy books and life drawing lessons on the construction and depiction of a palm & five digits. The style is clean, concise and technical, and the examples explore the hand’s full range of motion and various viewing angles.
I’ve been asked once or twice how I create some of my images. Here’s a quick rundown on how I did this illustration.
This tutorial is not aimed at making something look great but really to get the job done with a quick deadline. I’m not a great illustrator but I can get shit done fast and still make them look reasonably good. Sometimes that’s all the job requires.
It’s not overly detailed or even that good but it only took an hour and it’s going to be pretty small in the final image.
I’ve been using illustrator now since oh version 1.4 or something and I think it’s crazy how I’m still always learning on it. For example, for some silly ass reason I never bothered to really get used to setting up symbol libraries and custom user profiles. Finally after all this time I set up a user profile with custom swatches and symbols that I use every time I start up a new document. What a time saver.
And then I find this gem in Computer Arts latest edition. Here’s a tip from Luke O’Neil on blending paths. Now I’ve used blending paths quite a bit but I had no idea you could shape them to a custom spline.
05___ Creating blends between two objects is easy in illustrator. You draw 2 objects and go to Object>Blend>Make or, alternatively, specify the number of steps you’d like in the options box. It’s also possible to change the direction of the blend by simply drawing a path and, with the blend and path selected, going to Object>Blend>Replace Spine.
How about you, anything you recently discovered that you are kicking yourself in the ass for not using earlier?
Most of the stuff I do involves having to make illustrations for instructions that speak clearly and can have no text at all. The obvious reason for this are so that there will be no need for translations into multiple languages. One thing I come across all the time is the need for an icon or symbol that describes something making a sound or a click. I’ve tried a variety of things from an ear to a speaker to some silly lines indicating a noise. I would rather not go so far as to add music notes. What do you think would be a good icon or symbol to use? Draw one up if you would like, it might be fun.
I’ve been studying illustration at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and have only recently developed a desire to pursue technical illustration. I know there is much that I need to do and work on, but any comments, critiques, and help is very much appreciated!
Here’s my critique, you do very nice work, keep drawing your butt off. If a chump like me can make it as a Technical Illustrator you surely can. One suggestion, get yourself a real website with a quality domain name, not that blogspot business. If you want to go the free route here are some suggestions.
