I love participating in Vector Tuts Community Challenges. It's always fun to see what people come up with. I also think it is the best place on the web for vector/digital illustration tutorials and they always have great discussions about art and illustration. How the Community Challenges work is that they give you a template to edit, draw on, and just experiment with. At the end, they publish all of the entries in a blog post. You still have until Feb. 17 to submit a paper doll design which I strongly encourage. Visit their post here to get the doll.
This is my second time participating and I have been watching the MTV show, Daria lately. The stance of the paper doll reminded me so much of Brittany from the show so I decided to do my first ever piece of fan art.
I also did the cassette tape challenge awhile back. So go check out vector tuts. They are very newbie friendly.
I am not a big fan of illustrating hair. It has the tendency to command all of your attention and you start to ignore other parts of the illustration. When you finally finish it just makes the rest of the illustration look and feel done, which is why a lot of vector artists leave the hair for the end of the project. So I was looking for a quicker and easier way to illustrate hair so I started experimenting with brushes in Adobe Illustrator. Here are some tips:
I know I am not the first one to write about this. In fact, one of my favorite tuts can be found here. I am more of a flat designer so I changed the idea to suit my needs, but this is one of the best vector hair tutorials on the web, and is great at showing how to make your own brushes. Once I made my brush I could just draw the strands on with the pen tool then apply the brush settings. Here are my final results:
If you don't want to make your own brushes you can buy them online, but I suggest trying to make your own. Not only do you get the learning benefit but the mistakes and experiments make some really beautiful vector art. I'll show you more examples of that in an upcoming post.
