iStockPhoto.com
Night And Day Animation
August/24/2010 05:50 PM Filed in: Royalty Free Flash Animations
Last year on the 9th of September, I uploaded a new animation. I wanted to comment on this one because of some of the things I learned while making this animation. I animated it in anime studio and exported the animation as a swf and brought that into flash where I optimized it further. Anime studio gave me keys on every frame. Lots of keys are no problem for those wanting to use the royalty free flash animation in video, but for the Web, lots of keys can mean too big of a file size. I went through the keys in flash removing what I could and cleaning it up so that it was smaller in file size. In the end I’m pretty happy with the result. I worked to give the sun lots of character and personality. It’s not one of my more popular downloads and I think part of the reason for that is that it has both night and day in the same animation. If I just made the sun its own animation, it pops up and shines and stays up. I believe it would sell more. Many people that are downloading the flash animations are putting them into presentations and don’t really want to mess with editing the animation. It may be worth re-uploading a new version with just the sun against a blank background to see if it gets more downloads.
27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0" height="275" width="275" alt=“Night And Day Flash Animation" title=“Night And Day Flash Animation">
27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0" height="275" width="275" alt=“Night And Day Flash Animation" title=“Night And Day Flash Animation">
Gardening Vector Illustration
February/12/2010 09:48 AM Filed in: Vector Illustration | istockphoto.com | Royalty Free Illustrations
This morning I took an old sketch and made a new vector illustration for my iStockPhoto.com portfolio. I live in Provo Utah. It’s an understatement to say that the popularization of “Folk Art” into mainstream “craft” is big in these parts. The craft style of has gained its force because homes need decorating. House wives can band together. Craft business can create ready made projects that can be made in groups. Crafty style passed down from mother to daughter. The craft style is approaching kitsch. Scrap Booking has taken a similar path in recent years and it’s a very popular past time in the Utah County area. I shouldn’t be stereotypical and point to only females, because I made this illustration this morning. But I don’t have many guy friends that like the crafty style.
I drew this sketch in the late 1990’s. I found it while going through my very old stuff. I scanned it onto my computer and did the ink drawing below.
I inked it in Painter 11 at 300 dpi, then brought it over to Adobe Photoshop and made it a two color bitmapped image. Once a black and white bitmapped image, I used a photoshop brush to clean up my inking. I believe that viewing it as a 2 color image and touching up line thickness and adding details in the 2 color state, will give me better results when I vectorize my inks. I have the flag-heart crossed out because I want this illustration to be used by designers from other countries. The heart serves no purpose in a garden anyway. lol
Here is my final Illustration. It’s crafty enough for me, although some uber-crafty folk may scoff.
One interesting note is that this time I did some inking in Flash. I usually have some type of smoothing on the paintbrush to smooth out the vector strokes. This time i turned smoothing way down and when I was inking while zoomed in on my illustration, it behaved more like ink than I expected. I prefer an efficient vector stroke, but if it looks too clean it’s recognizably vector. (not always a good thing). Contrary, if a bitmapped black and white image is not at a high enough resolution for it’s physical size, then vectorizing it can cause optimizations of paths that will look blatantly like..optimized vector paths. (not always a good thing either).
If you’re reading this and are new to flash, then here’s an important tip:
Tip: The closer you are to an object, the more control you have on that object. This way of working is fundamentally different from Adobe Illustrator and if you are new to flash it may drive you nuts at first.
Here’s an example:
You want to rotate a graphic and you’re looking at the stage at 100%. The graphic you want to rotate is an inch square. You go to rotate and it snaps at odd times. You just want to rotate it a little. However if you ZOOM in on that object and THEN rotate, you will have much better control. The surprising thing about flash is how deep this modal kind of thinking goes. It’s pervasive and to be honest, I like it. So no matter if you are drawing with the pen, brush, rotating, scaling, auto tracing and a host of other features. The more zoomed in you are, the more control you have.
If you use the brush to make a stroke with your stage at 50% and then zoom into your stage at 300%, then make a similar stroke... you’ll see the point I’m trying make. Vector painting or Inking gets to be tricky if you like to zoom in and out, because ink thickness and smoothness can change depending on how close you are. I use CS3, so maybe this has been changed, but I doubt it because it’s so deeply used in flash and I’m not always against the way it works. It just took some time to get used to how drawing in flash behaves.
Joey
I drew this sketch in the late 1990’s. I found it while going through my very old stuff. I scanned it onto my computer and did the ink drawing below.
I inked it in Painter 11 at 300 dpi, then brought it over to Adobe Photoshop and made it a two color bitmapped image. Once a black and white bitmapped image, I used a photoshop brush to clean up my inking. I believe that viewing it as a 2 color image and touching up line thickness and adding details in the 2 color state, will give me better results when I vectorize my inks. I have the flag-heart crossed out because I want this illustration to be used by designers from other countries. The heart serves no purpose in a garden anyway. lol
Here is my final Illustration. It’s crafty enough for me, although some uber-crafty folk may scoff.
One interesting note is that this time I did some inking in Flash. I usually have some type of smoothing on the paintbrush to smooth out the vector strokes. This time i turned smoothing way down and when I was inking while zoomed in on my illustration, it behaved more like ink than I expected. I prefer an efficient vector stroke, but if it looks too clean it’s recognizably vector. (not always a good thing). Contrary, if a bitmapped black and white image is not at a high enough resolution for it’s physical size, then vectorizing it can cause optimizations of paths that will look blatantly like..optimized vector paths. (not always a good thing either).
If you’re reading this and are new to flash, then here’s an important tip:
Tip: The closer you are to an object, the more control you have on that object. This way of working is fundamentally different from Adobe Illustrator and if you are new to flash it may drive you nuts at first.
Here’s an example:
You want to rotate a graphic and you’re looking at the stage at 100%. The graphic you want to rotate is an inch square. You go to rotate and it snaps at odd times. You just want to rotate it a little. However if you ZOOM in on that object and THEN rotate, you will have much better control. The surprising thing about flash is how deep this modal kind of thinking goes. It’s pervasive and to be honest, I like it. So no matter if you are drawing with the pen, brush, rotating, scaling, auto tracing and a host of other features. The more zoomed in you are, the more control you have.
If you use the brush to make a stroke with your stage at 50% and then zoom into your stage at 300%, then make a similar stroke... you’ll see the point I’m trying make. Vector painting or Inking gets to be tricky if you like to zoom in and out, because ink thickness and smoothness can change depending on how close you are. I use CS3, so maybe this has been changed, but I doubt it because it’s so deeply used in flash and I’m not always against the way it works. It just took some time to get used to how drawing in flash behaves.
Joey
iStockphoto.com January Vector challange "Retro"
January/17/2010 11:22 AM Filed in: Vector Illustration
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.
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.