Building a Portfolio Site using WordPress
When I first started my career I was working hard to manage extravagent websites to showcase my work. These sites were hard to maintain if you’re not a programmer, which I’m not. Luckily my brother is a web developer and is always happy to lend a hand but as his career has grown he has […]
What is Adobe Configurator?
Did you know Adobe makes a program that lets you make your own custom panels/palettes for Photoshop and Indesign? Well not many people do, so lets talk a little bit about Adobe Configurator. Adobe Labs offers the free utility for Mac or PC and give it a try, but if you’d like to learn more continue reading. If […]
Photoshop Fireworks for the Fourth
For the Fourth of July I thought it would be fun to show you how to create some fireworks in Photoshop. There’s a ton of different ways to make fireworks but here’s a few tricks and filters you can use to create some quick digital fireworks. Watch the above video for the entire process of how […]
Painting the Legend of Halloween Book cover
Thea Berg, writer of the Magical World of Sebella book series, commission me to illustrate the Book cover for her second book in this series. Thea was gracious enough to allow me to share my process with you. This is a sped up video showing my coloring process for creating the color cover.
Wacom Cintiq Companion Review
If you’ve been following my blog for any amount of time you’ll know that I have been looking for a portable digital drawing solution. I’ve tried drawing on my iPad with expensive stylists and even tried Microsoft’s Surface tablet, but nothing I found ever made me feel like I was drawing on my Wacom Cintiq. Maybe […]
Zidane Tribal 2000 vs 2014
For me it’s always great to go back and see how I’ve improved my drawing skills over the years. It’s fun to take old sketches I did a long time ago and redraw the subject matter in the way I draw now. The image below is a side-by-side comparison of an image I drew in […]
Creating a vector graphic from a bitmap image in Adobe Illustrator
In this edition of the Once Upon a Sketch screen cast we show you how to use the live trace tool in Adobe Illustrator. In Adobe Illustrator CS two Adobe added a handy tool called the live trace tool which allows you to convert bitmap images into a vector based image very easily. Check out […]
Using Dropbox to Send large Files to Clients
I’ve been sending a lot of large files to clients. As an illustrator I get my drawings done and the files saved, compressed into a nice, neat package, but in our line of work, we end up with pretty large files that we try to send to our clients. Even if it’s over 5 MB […]
Inking and coloring artwork in Adobe Illustrator
When I first started doing the Once Upon a Sketch Screen Casts I created a series of two videos about how I ink and color my drawings in Adobe Illustrator. Well, it’s been over a year since I created this set of videos so I thought I would share them again for those who haven’t […]
Alternatives to Using the Adobe Creative Suite
There has been a lot of fire out there about Adobe changing their upgrade policy and some users feeling like Adobe is taking advantage of their monopoly on the design application market. So I thought I would go through and find a few alternatives to Adobe applications. I’m not saying that any of these are […]