How I dealt with digital

Happy New Year, readers! Incidentally, I know of a great place where you could send some New Year's ecards that I made!

Sorry for all the shameless plugging... I just can't help myself.

On that note, I'm continuing to share my unvelope.com saga.  Two of the things that became apparent very quickly as my work for them started increasing in volume were a) animation in Flash is more flexible when the pieces are created digitally in the first place, and b) being the only illustrator, I had to pretend to be many illustrators... i.e. work in styles and media out of my comfort zone that I'd never tried before and probably would never have tried on my own. Most of these also involved making stuff digitally.

The problem was that I never worked much digitally. I took the one required digital illustration class in college and couldn't wait to be done with it.  I was ok with making layouts in Photoshop to house our various photos because that didn't feel quite like making an illustration... but beyond the silhouetted plant life pieces I already posted (which were very heavily art directed) I was reluctant to start illustrating from scratch in Photoshop. When it became apparent that I would have to do so, I was hell bent on still making my work look at least somewhat handmade.

So I started doing fake cut paper pieces, like these two:

And grungy collages:

When I learned how to make the satin in the background of the last one (which is made up entirely of gradients put through various filters), I think I fully realized how amazingly powerful Photoshop is, and that I had only been using about 2% of its potential. Now I spend most of my days in Photoshop, and I'm very interested in unlocking that other 98%.