Moving on with this project I managed to finish the older girl. Same process as was outlined yesterday. I’m still missing a few details here and there and I’m not totally sold on the colors yet. At this point I am thinking more in maybe exporting the illustrations to Photoshop as Layers and then coloring there. I’m also playing with the idea of using slightly desaturated colors over a grainy, or noisy, texture… I’ll need more than good luck trying to sale that to my girls tho’.

This is the second part of a project that started yesterday, if you got here just now, make sure you read the original article.

This is the progress so far, tracing on Corel:

Adjusting the flame on the candle.

Finished illustration!.

Now I need to create the background and provide some ground for these girls!.
UPDATE: At this point this humble soldier would like to show a “Commander’s letter of intent” sent directly from “Barbie Command”:

I was maybe hoping of going landscape with this, but looks like I ain’t!

Thanks for keeping up with this . more is coming.

It is been a while since I last wrote anything over 140 character on this, or my Spanish blog. It is been even more since I designed something for print, roughly 10 years… yet here I am trying to do both at the same time .

The project

So, this is the deal: two of our girls are getting baptized shortly and we arrived at that all too familiar “what do we do with the cards” moment with my wife.

We weren’t really sure about what we wanted but we were sure about two things:

1. We didn’t want the classic and way overused corny light-from-the-sky-lighting-my-path images that are the norm for christening souvenirs for the last 30 years. We wanted something cheery, colourful and we wanted something more personalized than a generic girl holding a bible.
2. We decided against regular cards, and the reason is simple: How many of you still hold a card that was given to you at one of these family events? . Chances are you don’t and if you are on the minority of people that said yes, probably you got it somewhere out of the way, hidden in a shoe box in the attic.

So with that in mind we quickly realized we had to a) design our own, and b) we were going to do some fridge magnets. I know it might sound ghetto at first, but believe me, these were a GREAT success when we made souvenirs for the birth of our younger one two years ago, and plus, we love to go for dinner at our parents and find they still have it on their fridge!!!.

Nuff said, let’s get to work

Disclaimer: This is a work in progress and the idea is to start and finish this weekend. If you want to keep updates you can follow me in twitter.

As said we wanted something more personal so I took some of the family pics and tried to look for ideas. Ended up finding one of my favorite pics of the younger one and after a few sketches this is what I came up with:

And these is the basic layout we are shooting for, as well as a few notes on the style. The idea is to make a vector, cartoonish version of the two girls as little angels. Don’t forget these had to be approved not only by my wife but also by the two little ladies! (ages 2 and 7).

Tracing in Corel Draw 11.

The reason I used Corel and no Illustrator is that I didn’t have illustrator installed, as opposed to Corel. I guess I’m a die hard designosaurus when it comes to my tools. Used to work with Corel a LOT back in the 90s for pre-press so the option was natural for me. I still plan on giving the design a final polish in Photoshop.

So the first girl is done and I am doing the other one next. I started by the smaller one because she is the foreground, that way I’ll avoid adding detail on the larger one that won’t be seen (since they are overlapping).

Hope you liked it so far!. Stay tuned, more is coming!

Man it was a little bit of a pain and spent most of my weekend cranking code, but looks like my Blip social plug-in is finally up and running!

Please feel free to let me know if anything is broken and/or any missing stuff that might have lost in the process.

Also thanks for all the kind messages letting me known the site was down, it was actually me working on it!

It is amazing how many of you checked my site on the weekend! I Feel flattered

Finally, after more than we are willing to admit, we are back!.