I’ve been contributing lightly to iStockphoto.com since 2005 but over the past couple of months I’ve made the commitment to be a stronger provider. I’m exclusive with them for the vector stock art that I create. I’ve never submitted any uploads to the vector challenges they sponsor, but I thought I’d give it a shot. The theme is “Retro” this month so I designed a retro comic book cover.



I tried to include the classic EC comics elements from the “Weird Science” covers. Spaceman hero, girl in distress, creature and a rocket ship.

1. Using my sketch as a guide, I inked this as black and white in Corel Painter 11 at 300 dpi. I kept the characters on their own layers so they could be separated from the background.

2. I used Adobe Live Trace to vectorize the high res black and white images.

3. I copied and pasted them into Adobe Flash. I colored the images there, because I prefer Flash for vector painting.

4. Then brought them all back into Adobe Illustrator to finish it up for iStockPhoto.com. They require all vector files to be compatible with Adobe EPS version 8. They also require that there are no open paths. Illustrator is great for finding problems in vectors.

Tags: iStockPhoto.com, Corel Painter 11, Retro, Vector, Comic Book Cover