Speaking of my brother, I’ll be featuring a video soon where my brother, the amazingly talented Gregg Ostrom, composed and played all the music. You guys are going to love it. He plays a mean guitar. You can check him out here playing with Emily Hurd.

The other day as I was jotting down some reminder notes an idea popped into my head. Luckily I was sitting at my computer so I decided to work it up in Adobe Illustrator while everything was still fresh in my mind.

I took a few snap shots as I went to show you how I typically work through the development stage and added my some of my thoughts to the captions. Unfortunately a few of the shots are a little on the small side so the notes below don’t read as well as they could, but I think you’ll get the idea as you go through them… I’ll try to fix those later. Note to self- zoom in, enlarge art, and leave a little white space before taking snapshots.

I’m pretty happy with the look of this one so far but I’ll probably revisit it at a later date and make a few tweaks. Sometimes the ideas go quick (like this one) other times I need to let them rattle around inside my head a little bit before they come out. I’d think I’ll add something a little more cartoon-ish to that space above the type on the right so it looks more like it belongs to the Bob Ostrom Studio family, but that’ll have to wait until I’m finished with my next set of deadlines.

Click on the images below to enlarge…

[View with PicLens]

Just click on the little picture below and you can have your very own free panda coloring page. Use markers, crayons, colored pencils or even color it on the computer like I did. It’s all yours so have fun and happy coloring.

* Note: the coloring book pages are totally free and you can copy them as many times as you like, you can even make copies for your friends. All I ask is that you don’t try to sell them or remove my website and copyright information from them… other then that have fun and don’t forget to tell your friends where you got them. All artwork posted on this site is © Bob Ostrom illustration unless otherwise specified.

]]> http://bobostromstudio.com/how2draw/2009/07/02/panda/feed/ 0 http://bobostromstudio.com/how2draw/2009/06/27/experimenting-with-adobe-illustrator/ http://bobostromstudio.com/how2draw/2009/06/27/experimenting-with-adobe-illustrator/#comments Sun, 28 Jun 2009 02:48:38 +0000 admin http://bobostromstudio.com/how2draw/?p=525

Ink Scan.

So I’ve been experimenting with Adobe Illustrator a little bit lately. I wanted to try and find a way to bring some color to the hand inked look I’ve been having so much fun with lately. A couple of weeks back I rediscovered these really cool brush tip markers while shooting the videos for Jerry’s. It was all kind of by accident…

It was all kind of by accident. I’d used the brush tip markers once or twice over the years but wasn’t really in love with them. Then as we were shooting the videos I realized I wanted a heavier line with a more organic look. I remembered the brush markers I had sitting in my art kit and fished a few out. They turned out to be just what I was looking for.

Work in progress...

Since then I’ve been experimenting with them a little bit and I’m really kind of digging the whole shaky Charles Schultz looking line I’m getting. At first I was attempting to color the illustrations in Adobe Photo-shop but that was WAY too much work. More recently I’ve been experimenting with Adobe Illustrator and the whole live paint thing (which for some reason I keep wanting to call smart fill). Anyhow I’m pretty sure I’ve got it just about worked out. I’ll keep you guys updated as I go.

Here’s a little time saver for you Adobe Illustrator CS users out there. If you’re like me, occasionally you need to convert a bunch of files. Oh sure you could sit there and nurse them through one at a time, but is that really a productive use of your time? No, of course not. Look at you, you’re important, you’re way too busy for that.

So what do you do? You have Adobe do it for you, that’s what. “Really Bob? Adobe will do it for me?!” Yep, its called batch conversion. Here’s how it works…

Let’s say you have a bunch of files you need converted from .AI to .PSD, .TIFF, .JPEG or whatever, Adobe Illustrator CS can do it for you. Just follow the simple steps below and pretty soon you can have Adobe working for you too.

Step 1

Start by creating an Action. Find Action under the Window drop down menu.

Step 2

Once you see the Action menu click new action.

Step 3

Create a name for your Action and hit record. You may also want to select a function key

Step 4

Hey cool…look! There’s our Action. Now select Batch from the drop down menu on the right.

Step 5

Up pops our batch menu. Make sure you select the correct action from the Action drop down menu.

Step 6

Next find the folder you would like to convert and select it. Don’t forget to assign a destination for the converted files.

Step 7

Check once more to make sure everything is assigned properly and click OK. Then sit back and watch the magic.

That concludes this lesson. I hope you’ve found this useful. If you have a great short cut you’d like to share please let me know. I’m always on the lookout for things that will help lighten the work load.