Promotional Art for Adobe CS4 Illustrator "Loyal Order of Wormwood."
For well over 15 years I used Macromedia FreeHand. Along the way I had dabbled in Illustrator in order to convert a file or open a file etc. but never really used it from beginning to end on any project. That changed in 2006 when Adobe hired me to design a poster to promote CS2 and assumed I used Illustrator. Long story short I recognized the hand writing on the wall and switched drawing applications. You can read more about that whole story here.
Detail of Art: New song bird of proclamation.
A little over a year passed and I was using Illustrator for some projects and FreeHand for other projects. I had a hard time cutting the cord completely. That is until I installed Leopard in 2007 and FreeHand stopped working. The cord was completely severed now. I found many things frustrating in Illustrator and posted my experience on my art blog here.
Detail of Art: Vacant worms demise.
Through the magic of the intertubes my blog post some how found it's way into the inner circle of Adobe and before I knew it they were talking to me, addressing my concerns, answering questions, fixing problems and ultimately inviting me to be on their beta team for CS4. To be honest I felt like I was sleeping with the enemy, but their people behind the scenes listened and their integrity was impressive and one thing was obvious they were improving the application.
Detail of Art: Evil worm.
Today Adobe announces the launch of CS4 Illustrator and I am happy to say that it's been a great app to work with and I am proud to be one of the many artists who were part of beta testing it. I think the improvements are incredible and the the new features will no doubt make many users very happy.
Detail of Art: Inner worm and the cup of trembling.
Adobe hired me once again to create some original artwork that will be shipped with CS4 Illustrator. Anyone who buys it will be able to open up my original Ai file and see how I pulled it off using CS4. I think it's pretty cool when a large company hires you to do artwork for them and basically says "Do what ever you want." That simply doesn't happen that often. Thank you Adobe!
My artwork is titled "Loyal Order of Wormwood." The source file that ships with CS4 actually has two pages within the file. One shows the artwork below and the other tells the story behind it. If you'd like print resolution version of this art to hang up in your work area you can download a larger version here. (2.5 MB)
I hope you enjoy the art and CS4 Illustrator.
9 comments:
Great job man.
Liked the post and your artwork
It was good to meet you last week!
Mark
Excellent illustration and story!
I bet there's a Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis connection here.
Well done!
Yeah, I understand the difficulty of moving from Freehand to Illustrator.
However, I'm getting used to Illustrator, and enjoy the power of not having to take my files into Photoshop to do texture overlays.
Very cool.
Hopefully the pen tool will be a teensy bit more like Freehands?
I suppose I'm lucky to have always been an Illustrator geek. Well maybe not a "geek"--but I've used the app since college ('88), and it's been my absolute favorite program ever since. Great illustration, btw...
That's awesome, man.
I'm still new enough to Illustrator that I haven't exhausted its abilities (and not having used Freehand extensively, I didn't have a lot to re-learn). Seeing the kinds of things you create gives me hope -- if the new Illustrator makes it easier to do that sort of illustration, then that's great.
Of course, now I have to think about upgrading (I have CS3). Hmm...
Von,
Your making me want to upgrade to CS4
Did they finally introduce PASTE INSIDE? Please, please, tell me they did!
Goenetix,
CS4 has many features you'll find very familiar with FreeHand.
- Masking has been improved and now functions like it did in FreeHand. Meaning, it makes sense now and items being masked are no longer selectable outside of the masked area.
- Multi-page support is now in Ai. So you can have all parts of an identity project in one file and each artboard sized to fit. Also makes multi-page PDF creation easier too.
- Blend from color to transparent just like Photoshop inside Ai now. Huge improvement. Say goodbye to the hinky "Opacity Mask" it's gone bye bye.
- On object gradient controls. This is a huge improvement and works very well.
- Better point control. Not so hard to select what you want and get what you want.
NOT FIXED, THAT SHOULD BE!
- No sub-selection of content. This is a huge pain in the ass still and Ai engineers are aware of it so there is no excuse not to add it.
Von
Amazing work as usual! Great shapes great colors and all around fun.
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