Medical Illustration

I spoke recently at the Institute of Medical Illustrators conference about drawing and painting with a Wacom tablet, knowing I have no work of any kind that would relate to a scientific audience (!?) I set about to create a quick illustration of the human heart to present at the workshop - I rarely get to just sit and draw something for the sole purpose of well.. drawing.

Pre-production paintings for unreleased Oakenfold project

These are some 16 x 9 concept paintings for an unreleased Paul Oakenfold video project, painted in Photoshop CS5 with a Wacom graphics tablet. I use images like this to guide colour-keys and focus scenes I feel are important to capture in a production. The images in the desert are more colour keys than concept art but the first image I wanted to shoot and splice into the beginning of a show to increase the drama of the opening.

iPhone to CS5 Workflow

I have been experimenting with the iPhone as part of my creative workflow - I already use a variety of applications to get interesting and creative results out of my iPhone photographs such as Photoshop Mobile and Shakeit Lite - and I wanted to see what the possibilities are for creating a full design using the iPhone as a launchpad.

My first iPhone app in this workflow is Adobe Ideas - a simple vector drawing tool for making notes on photos and creating sketches and proofs of ideas in note form. I'm also a big fan of Shakeit Lite and other 'effects' apps for the iPhone - the camera on a 3GS is not actually all that bad and performs very well in daylight. I really like to use it as a visual journal - I'm not going to take a Canon 1Ds MkIII with me everywhere all the time its simply too bulky. I have started to take a few of these 'digital polaroid' images every day with the intention of making a project out of it at some point.

I enclose below a simple workflow diagram for working with the iPhone and Photoshop CS5:

Russian Dolls

Following on from my last post on painting tools for Photoshop CS5, I have been designing some Russian dolls as templates to use for a real world creative project I'm working on. In the markets of Moscow you an buy 'blank' unpainted dolls to be painted with acrylic or poster paint - some come with the line work of the traditional doll but I wanted to start from a plain wood background and design my own doll - So far I have designed two layers to the doll using a mixture of Photoshop and the new Illustrator CS5 - illustrator has a nice feature for textured brushes that can be painted within a shape - this makes intricate design work with the unpredictable nature of brush control that much closer to working with pixel based paint in Photoshop.