Stop. Request Time.

Now that I have more time I’d like to be able to focus on contributing more to the knowledge base available for Adobe Illustrator on the world wide interweb tubes. If you have a tutorial request, or a simple question, let me know so I can start planning a series of posts on de-mystifying this fabulous piece of software.

You’ll notice to your left, a piece I created all in Illustrator for the TED696 competition. Basically, you get to dress up a brown paper bag (I’m all about brown craft paper at the moment actually) for Toohey’s Extra Dry. Dmote, Shepard Fairey and Luca have designed three bags to kick it off, and the first week’s entrants are now in the gallery. When my entry is up I’ll post about it again and implore you to vote for me every day! Mama wants a MacBook Pro!

In my design, I have included paisley motifs taken from my sketchbook and paintings and vectored them. I was always going to work on vectored paisleys but put it off because of the time involved and the complexity of some of the designs. Now I’ve started, it’s almost like an investment in the future because I’m going to build up a bank of paisley motifs that I can include in future designs (including patterns for Naked and Angry!) Some of the Illustrator techniques I used in this piece include custom designed patterns and borders as well as extensive use of the pathfinder pallette (dividing, merging and cropping).