Madame Em

Oh dear, oh dear! So it has been 3 months since my last post! WHAT A YEAR! don't you agree?

I have been busy... A big E V E N T occurred in early November which I will officially announce in a later date.  In the meantime, the lovely thing has consumed my time during the past few months and I didn't have  time to look after these lady Poufs. 

However, I will be trying to update my blog regularly.

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I have something special for my first post of 2013. I am going to share some of the process on how this Pouf was created. It also shows a little bit on how I work with Photoshop and Illustrator, which is pretty simple.

Madame Em is a bespoke Pouf I made for a very special friend I have known for several years (more than 20 years in fact eek!) and I know that she is basically two things: 

1. She is absolutely trendy and cool.  2. She is super cute.

So, these are some images from my sketchbook in which I created Madame Em last year. The overall design seemed to ask for a very simple look, art nouveau-ish with a high contrast. Instead of filling it with intricate design, I based this work on my friend Em, who is rather practical, naturally elegant and quite straightforward.

I tried to keep it simple and maintain a strong contrast for the hair.

The process started taking a picture of the sketch with my phone (oh yes I did it, sorry if I make raise some brows) and simply sent the picture to my email address. Once I received it, I opened it in Illustrator and clicked Live Trace - Threshold (185). The result was pretty awesome:

I cleaned some bits and the image was ready to be worked in Photoshop. I simply selected the image and copy-pasted it into a new canvas. Once there, I created several layers to fill with color. These are some screen shots of the "makeup" part:

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The original artwork didn’t have any typography, and as I was away from the scanner (lazy me), I decided to make a little experiment and  went back to Illustrator. I just draw the letters with the pencil and worked with some Art brushes. Finally, after some hours of shading, highlighting and “priming”, Madame Em was ready.

 

If you have any suggestions or comments about this very simple process let me know in the comment box below or email me. 

Thanks for visiting!