A revolution has taken place. The digital revolution has altered the nature of illustration beyond recognition – taking it from cottage industry to household phenomenon…

Things weren’t always this way. Before the digital revolution, life as an illustrator was fairly straightforward, or so it seemed – there was no Bill Gates, no Apple, no Photoshop, no Google, no internet, no email… no hassle. Looking back at life before the revolution, albeit through rose-tinted specs, the working day for your lone illustrator was a fairly simple affair. In fact, depending on just how far back you wish to peer, it’s clear to see just how much has changed.

Back in the land-that-time-forgot, a common-or-garden commission for a freelance illustrator would come about with a phone call made by an art director to an illustrator’s land-line – mobiles only came into everyday use just over a decade ago. If you were out of the studio when the call came, chances are you could miss the job – answer phones even 15 years ago were not the norm. The brief itself would have to be posted or collected – fax machines were huge, cumbersome and expensive items even just a decade and a half ago. How the freelance illustrator, just ten years ago, maintained a professional profile, informed clients of new work and displayed their portfolios has altered beyond recognition. Without websites and email, illustrators would utilise the humble postcard as their calling card to the creative world, designing, printing, addressing and posting hundreds of these mailshots on a regular basis.

With just that single postcard to judge an illustrator’s capabilities by, art directors would take time out of their working day to view physical portfolios. Yes, they would actually look at real work in real time in the real world. Now, only six digits into the 21st century, those that commission illustration are able to view work in seconds, make creative decisions in minutes, have an illustrator briefed within hours and set the completion of the work with a deadline of a few days.

Gazing into the not-so-distant future back in 1992, John Warwicker, Creative Director of design collective Tomato, said without even a trace of irony: “I can envisage a time when we’ll all need our own individual Macs.” The working life, life-styles and the life-skills needed by today’s ‘creatives’ have altered, adjusted and accelerated. The digital revolution would take no prisoners – it was clear, adapt or die!

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John Picacio shopped at a local hardware store for the parts to assemble his starship — PVC plumbing parts, electrical workboxes and sprinkler heads.

But the clunky contraption appeared sleekly futuristic with rockets blazing against a sea of stars when the San Antonio artist incorporated it into his design for the cover of a science fiction novel, Mike Resnick’s “Starship: Mutiny.”

“I think you can see the influence of the found object collages of Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph Cornell in my work,” he said. “I like working from three-dimensional models, and I think it is important to draw from life. I have friends dress up in costume for my figures. I do my final composition on computer, but nearly all the individual elements are done by hand. It’s old-fashioned drawing and painting.”

Picacio is one of the fastest rising stars of science fiction illustration. Working out of his home studio near downtown, he’s created recent covers for Ballantine/Del Rey’s reprints of classics such as Frederik Pohl’s “Gateway” and Robert Heinlein’s “The Red Planet” as well as Walter Miller Jr.’s “A Canticle for Leibowitz” published by HarperCollins/Eos. And he’s worked with newer writers Lucius Shepard, Joe R. Lansdale and George Alec Effinger.

Picacio is among six finalists for one of science fiction’s highest honors, a Hugo Award for best professional artist, which will be announced at the Worldcon in Anaheim, Calif., in August. He’s also nominated for a Locus Award, which will be announced this weekend as part of the Science Fiction Museum’s Hall of Fame ceremonies in Seattle.

You can see his work and learn about his creative process in a new book, “Cover Story: The Art of John Picacio,” published by Austin’s MonkeyBrain Books ($39.95) and featuring an introduction by esteemed science fiction author Michael Moorcock. Picacio got his start by designing the cover for the 30th anniversary edition of Moorcock’s “Behold the Man” in 1996.

From later in the article…
” Often, a single design is broken up into different grayscale oil paintings on heavyweight, cold-press illustration board. He then scans the paintings into his computer and uses Adobe Photoshop to create a composite that serves as the final illustration.”

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The 1970s and 80s saw the emergence of graffiti culture, and its transition into a respected art form. Designer Ric Blackshaw traces the roots of his own passion for a whole new graphic language.

At Scrawl Collective, the agency I run for illustrators and designers, we have a motto: ‘Hand B4 Mouse’. However, this isn’t the modern-day Luddite’s axiom that it first appears to be. Much of our work is in fact digital: the motto merely reflects our belief in the superior aesthetics of the hand-drawn approach.

In the same way that musicians in the late 80s and early 90s would bemoan the lack of feel in drum patterns sequenced on Cubase, we at the Scrawl Collective rail against what one artist once eloquently described to me as “the hi-tech flashiness of digital graphics that scream out for the human touch”. However, when programs such as Streamline came out, hand-drawn art could be taken into the digital realm without losing the look and feel of the original work.

All the artists at Scrawl Collective, no matter how Photoshop-literate and Illustrator-savvy they may be, begin their work with something hand-drawn or hand-rendered in some fashion.

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DECATUR – Krista Ward knows the color of the beast.

She mixes it up in her electronic computer cauldron and splashes it on via mouse clicks to create folks you really would not want to meet outside the pages of a comic book: take Marvel’s “Thanos,” aka the “Mad Titan,” for example. His ghastly lavender-tone skin has been shaded into ferocious life by Ward, along with the explosive and fiery worlds he terrorizes.

For the noncomic savvy, Thanos is a Titanian Eternal with all kinds of destructive powers. He winds up killing his own mother, and the girl he wants to date is the personification of Death who, surprisingly, plays hard to get. Thanos, who looks like an animated mountain, shows some tendencies toward being better behaved and then goes bad again before, at one stage, being defeated by a character called Squirrel Girl; you just know that had to hurt the titanic ego.

Meanwhile, back in Decatur, Ward sits in her bedroom office, charged with the task of making this world of the fantastic come to vibrant life. The technical term for what this computer graphics major does is “colorist,” a person who takes the black and white bones of cartoon line drawings and shades them in flesh and blood, fire and thunder, dripping fangs or laser-vision eyes.

“The comics are not drawn or written by me,” explains Ward. “And the artist who drew them usually picks the colors. But what I do is apply them and work in all the shading and highlights.”

Computer-assisted coloring makes infinite color variations possible, but it is highly specialized work, and many artists who draw the strips look at the exacting task the way Superman views Kryptonite. “The old guard, as we call them, may have no idea how to do it,” explains Ward.

But she navigates Adobe Photoshop’s software labyrinth with consummate ease and has been called on to color the adventures of everything from kid favorites such as the Transformers to major DC Comics superhero superstars Batman and Superman.

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Source: Digital Animators
Written by Ko Maruyama

There were few outstanding commercials during this year’s Superbowl broadcast, but no one would contest that United Airline’s “Dragon” soars above them all.

The Fallon Agency (noted for its recent work on Sony’s “Balls” spot) and Duck Studios (duckstudios.com) allowed Jamie Caliri the freedom to get this commercial into our heads and hearts.

I had a chance to get a few questions with Jamie to talk specifically about Adobe After Effects’ role in the commercial. Ultimately, it was a collaboration of many different elements, hardware, software and people that brought all of the pieces together under Caliri’s direction.

If you haven’t seen the commercial, you can view it from United Airlines’ website by clicking here.

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