The Art of Illustration

Last week, Mudbug Media bought the designers something fun to play around with, the new Wacom Intuous 4 Tablet. Luckily it showed up just in time for an interesting illustration project I just started. For anyone who isn’t familiar with how Illustrator works this might not seem like a big deal, but for a designer like myself who prefers using hand-drawn illustrations, it means the world.

Incorporating original artwork is something that is characteristic of my personal design style. Usually for a project using Illustrator I would hand-draw the image, scan it and then trace over it to get a copy of my original. Retracing could take me hours to set each point exactly right. Now, the new Wacom tablet allows me to create more accurate drawings on the computer significantly faster than I could before.

My first foray into the World of Wacom involves creating cartoon figures of people for an online game we’re currently developing for a client. My task is to take photos of doctors, draw them on Illustrator and give them a few different facial expressions. The new Wacom tablet opens up Illustrator  and Photoshop to a whole new set of features that makes the Creative Suite a lot more interesting and robust. For this particular task I can quickly draw shapes and adjust the points if needed. There’s also the new sensitivity feature that gives me a lot more control over the weight of the stroke. It takes some getting used to, but once I caught my stride with the stylus everything fell into place.

Overall, this exciting new addition to the Mudbug office has made me want to live and breath illustrations. I’m not kidding.