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October 19, 2011

Create Proper Gears & Conical Gradients

Iaroslav Lazunov has a great tutorial over on Astute Graphics’ blog on how to create proper gears in Adobe Illustrator. This tutorial makes use of the plugin VectorScribe, but the same results could be achieved with Illustrator’s default tools with some extra steps.

An important distinction is made here: Proper Gear. Most gears that show up in illustrations and icons would not work with any efficiency and some would just shred to bits. While you wouldn’t necessarily 3D print these and use them, you’ll end up with something that at least looks like it would work (unlike the failboat below).

Also included in the tutorial is a way to accomplish conical gradients in Illustrator (unfortunately the technique is extremely convoluted).

Conical Gradient in Illustrator

Check out the tutorial!

April 8, 2011

How to Protect Your Images with Metadata

Protect Your Images with Metadata

There is little you can do to stop someone who is determined to steal your images. Watermarks are easily removed and website scripts are defeated with a simple screen grab. These attempts only mar your work and make your site difficult to navigate.

In this tutorial I’m not talking about protection from image thiefs, I’m talking about protection from lost opportunities. Times when your images are inevitably downloaded, blogged, cropped, reblogged, faved and saved, and end up orphaned on someone’s hard drive, ffffound, imgfave, tumblr, or email—especially when that person likes your work and would really love to hire you, if they could just figure out where the image came from.

This happens more often than you think; art directors are constantly grabbing images whenever and wherever they see them, but seldom have the time to organize them and make note of where they came from (they should really be using Evernote). Months or even years down the road they might find your image floating in a random folder, uselessly renamed li4tceEqMb1qe.jpg by Tumblr, your name & website address croppped by an ignorant blogger leaving TinEye with no results.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could tuck your name, website and keywords and copyright information into every image to avoid this situation? You can—using Metadata.

Metadata is data about data—like the Created and Modified dates you see attached to every file on your computer. It’s like a little text file appended to files only adding a few bytes to the total file size. You might already be familiar with EXIF metadata added to JPGs by digital cameras, scanners and phones. The metadata I’m talking about in this tutorial is IPTC, but all you need to know is that by the end you’ll be able to embed your name, website, email, phone number, address and copyright into every image—automagically.

February 16, 2011

Step-by-Step Isometric Aircraft

Award-winning editorial and news graphics artist Ninian Carter shares his processes for producing a complex isometric illustration of a water-bomber aircraft in Adobe Illustrator. Ninian also generously makes his Illustrator file available for download at the bottom of the page so you can open it up and explore.

By no means is this a do-as-I-do tutorial, but it looks like he uses a scale-shear-rotate method similar to Cody Walker’s Advanced Isometric Tutorial.

February 11, 2011

How to Create an Isometric Grid in Adobe Illustrator

This is a very quick and easy tutorial for creating an isometric grid in Adobe Illustrator, which you can then either work directly over in Illustrator or print out for freehand sketching.

If you want to skip the tutorial and get working in isometric right away, download these completed grids in PDF format, ready for printing or import into Illustrator or Corel:

November 15, 2010

Tutorial – How to Draw Hands

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.

Bookmark it. You’ll find that it’s handy.

October 11, 2010

Technical Illustration: Techniques and Applications

Marc Gellen was looking for recommendations for books on technical illustration on Twitter, but ended up providing me with the recommendations. Fortunately, all three books he suggested were available from my local library. I thought I’d give them a brief review here for the benefit of anyone whose public (or private) library might be lacking on the subject.

September 14, 2010

Illustrator CS5 – Perspective Grid

Adobe Illustrator CS5 - Perspective Grid

It’s that time of the year when we’re blessed/cursed with another release of Adobe’s Creative Suite software and the inevitable question of whether or not to upgrade. For those of you teetering on the edge, here’s the push you may need to break out the credit card.

Brand new to Illustrator CS5 is an embedded perspective grid and all the accompanying tools you’ll need to streamline your perspective drawing work flow. I was lucky to be part of the beta testing for this tool, along with fellow TechnicalIllustrators.org contributor Cody Walker, and I have to say I’m really pleased with how it turned out.

Anil Ahuja of Adobe has posted a tutorial that shows most of the features of the perspective grid. Have a look at it here. Check out the PDF at the bottom – it goes into more detail regarding how the tools are used. A sample of the file is there as well, but you’ll need a copy of CS5 to open it.

The grids come in default one-point, two-point and three-point perspectives, but you can tweak everything – vanishing points, origin, grid size, the height of the horizon and much more. When the grid is active, the shape tools all conform to a plane (chosen by you with the 1, 2 and 3 keys). Once objects are on the grid they can be copied and moved perpendicularly through the space as well.

However, for me the true power of this tools comes from the ability to transfer flat orthographic drawings directly to the grid. The only drawback is that raster images are not supported – only vector shapes can be applied to the grid.

The new tools will not obsolete or undermine our abilities as technical illustrators. Rather, as Anil states:

“…please understand that Perspective Drawing in Adobe Illustrator CS5 is NOT a 3-D environment. It is an extension of traditional perspective drawing technique. An artist will have a capability to define a perspective grid (one-point, two-point or three point), define a relative scale, move the grid planes and draw objects directly in perspective or attach flat art onto them by dragging with the new Perspective Selection tool.”

Also, all the old quirks of working with a grid are still there – so don’t throw out your techie toolkit just yet!

I highly recommend downloading and trying out the new version of Adobe Illustrator cs5. A 30-day trial is available on Adobe’s site.

July 2, 2010

Kevin Hulsey

“Any subject-matter is no more, or less, complicated than any other if you break it into small enough sections. A big, complex object like a car, plane or ship is just 30 or 40 small illustrations that happen to occupy the same space.”

The career of technical illustrator extraordinaire Kevin Hulsey is nothing short of prolific. His client list reads like a roll call of the world’s major transportation, technology, manufacturing and entertainment companies. His work has been recognized with numerous awards from Belding, Best in the West, Communication Arts Magazine, and the Art Directors Club Of Los Angeles. He began his trade with an airbrush in hand, then traded it in for a Wacom tablet and made the leap to digital media. And his website is an abundant source of inspiration, with illustrations of mind-boggling complexity and accuracy and myriad resources, articles and tutorials.

This all keeps Mr. Hulsey rather busy—unfortunately for us too busy for an interview. However, with his permission, I’ve collected some links to images, resources, and an interview he did with another site:

Kevin Hulsey - Automobile Motor Illustration

“Even after nearly thirty years, and thousands of illustrations, it is still fun to see your work on a billboard or in a magazine, particularly when you aren’t expecting it.”

Big thanks to Mr. Hulsey for sharing his time and work with us, and all the amazing resources on his site!

Update: Wacom case-study on Mr. Hulsey. (now on Internet Archive)

December 17, 2009

Tutorial – Advanced Isometrics

Stratocaster Exploded Isometric

In the last tutorial I covered how to make an isomeric grid and build simple blocky shapes on it. In this tutorial I’m going to talk about another method of creating isometric shapes that doesn’t require a grid and is much more useful if your objects are complex or curvy.

When creating a complicated isometric illustration it’s best to begin by breaking down your object into its simplest parts. This will help to make the project more approachable. It is possible to make the most complex objects entirely on an isometric grid using the method I discussed in the last tutorial. There is another method that is much more useful for creating curvy or complex isometric objects in Adobe Illustrator. I’m going to call this method scale, shear, rotate or SSR.

The basic idea behind the SSR method is by using tools in adobe illustrator you can place an object onto an isometric plane without using a grid. This method is most useful for curvy or complex objects but it will work for anything. I’ll begin simply by making an isometric cube.
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December 15, 2009

Pricing Technical Illustration

When freelancing as a technical illustrator, deciding what to charge clients can be as delicate and precise an art as technical illustration itself.

Here are three key factors to consider when quoting on a project:

How much of my time & resources will the project take, and what is that worth?
What is the ‘going rate’? What do other illustrators charge?
What will the market bear?