Did you know that illustrators– especially humorous illustrators– suffer from a chronic condition called Idea Cascade?
No? You’ve never heard of it?
That’s probably because I just made it up… : )
We usually think of a cascade as a waterfall, but it also means something occurring
in a succession of stages, or something rushing forth in quantity.
For me, ideas are like that– on a good day, anyway. You find yourself coming up with endless variations. I thought it might be fun to look at an example.
I’m currently working on a self-promotion slideshow called 13 Reasons To Hire An Illustrator. Reason #7 is about how illustrations enhance your social media posts (on Twitter, Facebook, etc), making them more likely to be shared and retweeted.
I have an online store now, so when I finish a drawing I ask myself: is there an idea lurking in there that would make a good poster and/or greeting card?
My fish drawing “spawned” several ideas. I selected one, and set about constructing the new illustration in Photoshop.
I’ve learned to ask myself: Can I save myself some time and effort by reusing part of a previous illustration? Here, I used the Copy Merged command to copy the underlying
sea water in my fish drawing.
Then I rotated it 90 degrees to make it vertical, and pasted it into a new Photoshop document:
Next, I did a new line drawing, and scanned it into Photoshop.
Then I pasted it onto my sea water layer, and added some base color.
Using clipped adjustment layers, I added light and dark tones to the fish and the water.
Worth noting: all the skeleton fish now have some light blue shading. It makes them more credible somehow– more convincing than the stark white skeletons in the previous image.
Last step: adding some bubbles and the text which explains the joke.
Here’s a close-up detail:
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Have you ever attended a high school reunion?
Ever been shocked to see how someone turned out?
Ever met a skeleton at a high school reunion??
Hope you’ll leave a comment.
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