Chris Deutsch

Birthday Card

This is the illustration to a birthday card we did for a colleague's 30th birthday.

I start with sketches from photos.

Then I try more cartoony versions.

For this card, we decided to have him ride a huge rabbit. So I sketch bunnies in mid-jump.

Sketches of the whole thing:

I apply colors, shadows and highlights to the last sketch:

For the flour on the sausages I took brush strokes I had scanned and traced:

Below are the brushes I used. These things come in handy all the time. If you want some of your own, draw about 200 different brush strokes with various brushes and scan them in. If you vectorize it using a tracing program (Illustrator CS3 has this function built in) you can create actual AI brushes!

For the fur I took another brush and did several strokes over each other. In the end, I don't think that was the best solution for creating fur. I'll try a different approach next time.

Here's said fur brush:

Turns out, it was a salami I had supposed to draw, as opposed to sausages. So I change that, since he likes salami so very much. Also the bottle looked too much like champagne, so I redid that too. Then I paint a background in Corel Painter, smack him on top, give him a drop shadow and enhance the contrast in Photoshop.

For this piece I used Scriptographer, a plugin for Adobe Illustrator for which I wrote a script that gives me better control over the thickness of stylus-drawn lines.