So I recently finished my first professional illustration job, and I thought I’d share some of my experiences here, along with some different versions of one of the illustrations.
I was asked to make five colour illustrations for the interior of a book, as well as one colour illustration for the front cover. You can read more about the book on the author’s blog here: http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/
I decided to use Adobe Flash, to get a particular clean-yet-hand-drawn look. However, I quickly learned that Flash has a SUPER FUN limitation one has to deal with when illustrating for print.
There’s no effective vector export option unless you have Illustrator too, in which case you must export to Adobe Illustrator (which I don’t own) and then export from there to a more compatible vector file. So I decided to create high resolution PNG files instead. But hey, surprise surprise – Flash wanted to crush that dream too! In the end I had to export the images in four or more sections, and then stitch them together in Adobe Photoshop. This is the sort of run-around that Adobe seems to be extremely fond of. Unfortunately, they do make the best programs out there.
Here is the first sketch I did for the cover design…

…and here is the second. This one was more or less the design we stuck with, although as you will see, a few elements were switcheroo’d later.

Here is the final cover design, including the title and other elements which weren’t made by me. I think it worked out rather well.
