I'll sleep when I'm dead

Click the image to see a larger version of this Focus illustration

This was probably my favorite Focus illustration to put together for several reasons. For starters, I really liked the story, about children paying attention to their parents’ lessons, but more importantly, I felt a true connection between the story and my own life.

The story came from the memories of the writer who, as a child, was not known for paying very much attention to the “logical” side of life when things were explained to him. He recalled an instance when he was young that also involved his brother and father. His father had the boys outside in the back yard and was trying to explain how a construction level works. The writer remembers how well his brother paid attention to all the details his father was trying to get across, but he also remembers his own thoughts about who would win in a backyard street fight between King Kong and Godzilla, if the two monsters were to come face-to-face right there in the yard.

I thought the story was really entertaining, but I also thought it hit the nail right on the head as a description of my own youth. I also have a brother who, like the writer’s brother, has always been much more keen on learning the technical details of things. As a contrast to my career as a designer and interest in art, he is a software engineer and is interested more in how things work than in making them pleasing to the eye. I completely (and easily) identified my brother with the attentive child and myself with the imaginative one.

Such a connection really gave me motivation to make this illustration really good. Since they were outdoors, I didn’t have to be limited by trying to show “fake” 3D in Photoshop like I was in a few of my earlier illustrations. Often, working with organic pieces in a design project is more difficult than the clean lines of something man-made, but in some cases, it makes things simpler. I was able to focus more of my effort on the drawing in this illustration, although, admittedly, not as much as I would have liked. I really would have liked to put more detail into each monster and do some more with the shading on all the characters, but I didn’t know enough about inking and coloring at the time to work efficiently enough to do everything I wanted. Since doing these Focus illustrations, I have taken it upon myself to learn much more about how to do everything in faster more professional ways and my own personal artwork looks much better because of it.

Sometimes I think it’s really kind of a shame I don’t get to do the Focus illustrations anymore!

Click to see a larger version of this Focus illustration

Long, long ago, in the early days of my employment, when I was merely a print artist, our newspaper ran a Focus section. Inside the section each Sunday, there would be a story written by a stringer (i.e. a writer not on the staff of the newspaper) that would need art to accompany it. Kind of like illustrations in a book, I suppose. I used to really enjoy claiming these Focus illustrations as soon as they would pop up in the assignment tracker, because I was always confident that, out of all of the news artists, I would be the one to put out the highest quality work, instead of just finding some stock photography or clip art to download.

This was one that printed just before Christmas. The story was written from the point of view of the husband, who is overwhelmed each year by his wife’s Christmas spirit, particularly the decorations she puts up. According to him, she goes overboard and gets worse every year, but he enjoys Christmas too, so it’s not the worst of habits.

What struck me in his story was his recollection of how detailed she would get in her decorations. Adding an unsafely-bright amount of lights to the tree was really just the beginning. Apparently, this lady even went so far as decorating the house cat. Now, I don’t know much about having cats as pets (I’m allergic, actually), but I do know that antler collars with jingle bells on them would not be very high on a cat’s list of things to welcome and appreciate.

The cat in this illustration was sort of modeled after the one owned by my coworker, Jen. She once expressed her personal frustration regarding the low number of tortoiseshell cats seen in today’s media. I had never thought about it before, and as I said above, I’m no cat expert, but it does seem true that regardless of their coloring, most of the cats you see on TV sport more solid patterns than the typical mottled “tortie.” I thought I would use this piece of art to help heal some of the pain those cats (and cat owners) must feel over the thoughtless insensitivity displayed by the media when choosing cat actors. I even gave a nod to Jen by naming the cat the same as hers—”Sailor.”

I tried, as usual to draw as much as I could, and I was able to handle some things, but I knew I would never be able to actually draw a tortoiseshell cat pattern and have it look presentable. So, I started to use Photoshop to cut some corners. It worked out really well with the cat, I think. The pattern looks great, if I do say so myself. And I knew it would significantly ease the simulation of light and shadow. But, using Photoshop too much and skipping over the “sketch” phase of the art led to inconsistencies. The room looks three-dimensional, of course, but the walls and decorations hanging on them look two-dimensional. I think most of that could have been avoided if I just would have had a good sketch to use as a guide. Lesson learned.

Looking back and remembering it, I guess this illustration is pretty good, but like many artists when they critique their own work, I’m not satisfied with all the parts of it. There are many lessons and techniques I’ve learned since producing this Focus illustration that I’ve come to practice and rely on in making art since. I now pay attention to certain things when it comes to the composition of the art, there are better ways I’ve learned to ink and color my drawings and there are several tips to keep in mind when I work on my lettering and speech balloons.

Always learning!

Click to see the Super Mario Brothers pixel art full size

This was my first experiment in producing pixel art. I thought an old 8-bit game character, like one of the stars of the Super Mario Brothers games, would be a perfect model for this because of how they were perceived—always limited to being jagged-edged little icons because of the technology of the time. So, who better to use than one of my favorites? The classic depiction of Mario!

I used several “generations” of  Nintendo’s, legendary character, pulling from some of the many incarnations of his game. He’s undoubtedly a favorite for many of the rest of the old-school gamers (so much so, that one of these sprites is used as a favicon for the Nintendo company Website). I grew up playing the 8-bit Nintendo, spending time with the original Super Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda and other classic games. Of course, as time passed, the gaming systems improved, along with the amount of detail that went into representing all the games’ character sprites.

To create the art, I found some tutorials explaining how to get good results in creating an approximation of a bitmap design using just Illustrator, instead of necessarily including Photoshop. Since Illustrator is one of the programs I use most at work, I wanted to give it a try, because I always love the scalability of finished vector illustrations. The tutorials taught me more about Illustrator’s Live Paint feature, which in this case, let me create a grid and then color in all the small blocks to represent the pixels of the original bitmap piece of art I was using as reference. It was a little laborious, but now I have vector versions of 12 of Mario’s classic poses to use in some sort of future illustration project of mine. Personal projects, of course—not to be released for commercial purposes.   For instance, I’ll be able to import these vector versions into Flash much more easily to use them for actual animation sometime.

What I’m trying to show in this little art experiment is an evolution of the appearance from the very early days of Mario’s “life” down through a few generations into Super Mario Brothers 3 and Super Mario World. Beyond those games, the characters started to get too detailed, and the technology of the gaming systems kept the pixels from being so obviously visible. Good for the gamer, but bad for the pixel artist. I also used a font for my copy similar to that used in the Nintendo logo. The font’s name is “Pretendo,” and it’s available to download for free from several of the font download Internet sites, but I got it from the Nintendo section on The Game Font Database.