Illustrator artwork gallery

Throughout this course, you're going to be seeing plenty of examples of my work. But because, I'm also the author of the Illustrator WOW! Books, I wanted to share with you some samples from the latest Illustrator CS6 WOW! Book, so that you can see some of the range of amazing artwork that's being created using naturalistic brushes by wonderful artists around the world. So let's take a look. This is a Blob brush drawing by David Turton and he saved it in stages so that you could see how it evolved.

He used a Syntec tablet and we've a demo of this Syntec tablet. And he was able to get in an excruciating detail to all the fibers of the fur. This is a wonderful Blob brush painting by artist Lance Jackson. He calls it a vegetarian Cheetah. This is a beautiful floral illustration by Lisa Jackmore. And she took a very standard vector illustration and applied custom stroke profiles in order to add warmth and texture and a more hand-drawn look to what would otherwise be crisp and little cold.

This is also a wonderful example of use of stroke profiles by an artist who calls himself MCKIBILLO also Josh Mckible. And starting with the parable of the blind man and the elephant, he created this beautiful grid of images and he added his custom stroke profile. So we could add a hand-drawn look to what would otherwise be crisp. And here's another take on stroke profiles by artist Donal Jolley. And here, in his rubber ducky, you can see some stages going from very simple vector to his customized set of profiles and adding color with brushes as well.

Here's another Donal Jolley and he made a sampler of a bunch of the out-of-the-box brushes that are available in the Illustrator tool sets. So he didn't make his own, these are just using the brushes that Illustrator makes available through the Brush libraries. Here is another Lisa Jackmore, lyrically drawing with a number of the different brushes--mostly calligraphic--taking advantage of pressure sensitivity in her beautiful fluid lines. In this pair of images, I love these.

Because, this is a series of students that teacher Stephen Klema, who is also an artist featured in the book, gives as an assignment following the WOW! Book. So they create a series of food illustrations using a variety of brushes. And Greg Geisler, who is a master of the Bristle brushes. Greg is one of the artists who actually does max out Illustrator's ability to handle all the Bristle brushes he packs into one file.

So he's had to develop a couple of ways of how to Rasterize intermediate versions of his image in order for it to print properly. But he always makes sure he keeps live versions. So any editing can be done at any point. And here is another one of Greg's pieces, also done with Bristle brushes-- a completely different effect--this time using some squiggly lines and filled shapes created with the Pencil tool. We'll cover incorporating the Pencil tool into the brushes, because a lot of artists do that.

And then finally, using Draw Inside, this is again a painting by Lisa Jackmore. She started with the Pencil tool, sketching out the initial artichoke here on the left, and then used Draw Inside mode to paint in depth with the Bristle Brushes. Even if you don't have a premium account, we've made a copy of this PDF excerpt of the book, including some front matter and contact information for each of these wonderful artists.

So hopefully by now you're ready and excited to get out that brush and start exploring, experimenting and seeing what discoveries you can make with this wonderful set of tools.