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Adobe Illustrator CS5 How-To Guide

Adobe® Illustrator® CS5 How-To Guide

Blue Mirror
by Greg Geisler
Based in Austin, Texas, Greg Geisler has been freelancing for 10 years and is currently working on a variety of web site projects and online educational products. That is, when he’s not creating compelling and curious portraits with Illustrator. Greg has worked in design, illustration, andanimation on the computer now, for 20 years. That experience landed him a spot on the team that created A Scanner Darkly, where he primarily contributed background artwork for the film. He subsequently collaborated with the creators of the software used to produce Scanner, working on an animated short and on a weekly animated series. For our How-To Guide, Greg tells us how he used the new BristleBrush features in Illustrator CS5 to create the personality and mystery in the character in Blue Mirror.

“I’m a huge fan of the German Expressionists and their figurative work. I try, with my renderings of the human face, to express a similar depth of emotion.”

How I work
I’m a graphic artist—more of a draftsman than a painter. I don’t have any formal training in painting, so my methodsmay seem unorthodox or impure to “true” painters. I almost always start with line drawing, but from there my normal process defies linear logic. I become more of an expressionist, preferring a loose, sketchy, and unrefined approach. I think this is partly a reaction to the very controlled nature of the design work that I do. With my fine art, I like to “let things happen” and generally not adhere toa methodology for how line and color are applied. I also don’t erase lines or mistakes—I avoid command-Z—preferring instead to cover them or let them show through. I do a lot of layering and use a wide variety of opacity settings. But for this piece I took a slightly more linear approach so I could best demonstrate how you might use the Bristle Brush to create something similar. The theme “Depthof Expression” was a good one for me to demonstrate how to use varying depths of Bristle Brush strokes to build up an image.

Subject matter
I wanted to use an inspiration that had a bold, high contrast light source. My fine art subject matter is always figurative, mostly portraits. I dug through a box of old photos and found a piece of an old black-and-white Polaroid from the early 80’s. Iscanned the photo and used it in Adobe® Photoshop® as a reference to draw a more stylized version. I distorted and exaggerated features, and elongated the head. I sketched and hatched in tones and shadows.

Adobe Illustrator CS5 How-To Guide

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In Illustrator
I placed the resulting sketch into Illustrator to use as a template. I started vector drawing by sketching the outlines with a fineBristle Brush. I was able to define a brush that had the feel and feedback of a pencil. This has tremendous potential for artists out there who want a responsive pencil tool that is vector! Next, I used a wider brush to rough in the midtones and shadows. I then placed a blue background behind the art in preparation for laying down highlights. I used a wide translucent brush to rough in the highlightareas. See the highlights here in orange and the Bristle Brush Options that I used. There’s a stroke being applied there to the nose.

Adobe Illustrator CS5 How-To Guide

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“In general, I don’t think that much about what I’m doing while I do it; the mood simply comes out. The emotion transfers to the canvas with my brush strokes.”

Midtones and shadows
I roughed in some midtonesunderneath the orange highlights using a lighter blue. Next up was blocking in some of the shadow areas with black. Here it is in outline mode to show you how the build-up of strokes is progressing.

Adobe Illustrator CS5 How-To Guide

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Creating the frame
A wide, opaque Bristle Brush makes it very easy to create those cool rough-edged frames, in just seconds. I roughed out a rectangular...