Feelin' Peachy - Tutorial

Welcome to my first blog tutorial. I'll cover a little bit of my thoughts and my process for creating an ad I did with an "color editable spattering" technique for a regular client of mine. The technique is great for quickly creating variations for color keys and comps.The challenge was to create a dynamic Welcome to Atlanta Top Ten list, while using the assigned cliche of a Peach.

I'd been fascinated by late nouveau / bauhaus posters and also the Ratatouille posters uber talent Eric Tan-borrow from the best. I wanted to create a technique that would give me the textural style of the prints but have crisp vector edge treatment as well.

After settling on a sketch, I build from basic shapes to make sure the design still communicates properly.

Here are the basic non-type shapes.

A little frisket was made from a vector path that represented the inner color and leaf. Next I created the overlaying textures by spattering BLACK ink with a toothbrush onto illustration board, the frisket masking off the desired area.

A couple spatter variations were made of each shape to let me add color variation later and give me more options to choose from.

I scanned the dried ink and coverted the color mode to GRAYSCALE. (JPG, PNG, or TIFF file fortmats work fine)

In Illustrator I've placed all the pieces and can reassign and manipulate the coloring at will with the color sliders even pantone colors- (evil power hungry laugh).
Here I liked to use multiply( in the transparency window) so the colors to ineract and mix a little.

I wrote/designed the text, modifying the company's font, Geometric 315, to take on the Bauhaus style for the titles. A broad texturew as added in the background. I'm always taking pictures of random textures and scanning odd things to create an endless reference library to work with for both illustration and design.

To add the finishing touches, I used the text paths to masked some additional spatterings. The repeated textures help make sure that the texture and and crisp edged text are unified. Violla! See the completed image at the top of this post.

Please leave feedback, and I'll see what other traditional /digital tutorials I can put together. For some great tutorials on digital painting check out videos by Chris Oatley and Sam Neilson. They are both generous artists and amazing people.