Artist
Nick Diggory Brisbane, Australia
Designer, Illustrator, Cartoonist, Art Director www.nickdiggory.com
Project
Cat and Dog for 2002 Calendar
Client
Origin Design, Bristol, England
Illustrator Tools and Techniques
Pencil Tool, Layers, Stroke palette
Opposite:Lady in tub | Self promotion
Nick Diggory Cartoons from Down Under
Where does a 21st-century artist live? If you're Nick Diggory, the answer is, anywhere in the world you want. For Diggory, that place is the beautiful Gold Coast of Australia. Originally from England, Diggory moved to Australia and found no work available in the area he chose to live. Thankfully, he kept his English phone number, had his calls routed to his home in Australia, and talks to his English clients as if he were sitting across town from them. "It's funny. When I talk to new clients in the UK, they think that I'm just down the road a bit. After I tell them I am actually located in Australia, they are quite surprised." Diggory quickly reassures his clients that they are only paying for a local call. "Technology certainly has made the business end of things easy to deal with." Diggory found that with his computer, a high-speed connection, and call forwarding, he could serve clients anywhere in the world.
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Figure 1 Cow | American Showcase, a journal for illustrators
Diggory has had a passion for doodling and illustration since he was a kid. He couldn't wait for high school graduation to start a career in illustration, so at the age of sixteen, he dropped out of school and went straight to art college. He enrolled in the Cheshire School of Art and Design where he graduated with a Distinction in Exhibition and Design. Since then— over 20 years ago—Diggory has delivered more than 16,000 commissioned illustrations without ever missing a deadline.
Diggory tried the job market for a while after graduating from art college. His first job was with a fashion photographer in Manchester, England, where he worked as a finishing artist. Shortly thereafter he moved on to work as a visualizer for an advertising agency and later became an art director at another agency. His five-year career as an employed artist ended when he was given the boot for spending more time on a fast-growing freelance business than he did at his "real job." The consequence of being asked to leave was a blessing, and he's freelance business has grown to the point that he creates illustrations for package designs and brand advertising for clients all over the world.
The freelance work that occupied his time during his last employment was drawing the character Oddbins, a French peasant who popped up all over the place to represent a wine distributor in the United Kingdom. Other artists have depicted Oddbins since then, but Diggory was the bloke who drew the first illustrations of the French peasant logo.
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Figure 2 “Errors can improve the finished article. I often send the
client three or four versions of the finished artwork because I prefer the look
of some of the illustrations with errors. I love the flexibility of Illustrator.”
When artwork started to become computer generated, he balked. "I held off using computers for ages. I actually told my wife that if that was the way things were going, I'd do something else for a living." Then one day he was introduced to Adobe Photoshop and he learned what people were talking about. He bought his first Mac with Photoshop 3. It wasn't until version 6 that he started using Adobe Illustrator. A client wanted a billboard design, and Illustrator was the obvious choice.
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Figure 3 Snake | Contact,a UK advertising journal for illustrators
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Figure 4 Dog on leash | Self promotion
Diggory begins a project with a pencil sketch. His clients are relatively firm about the kind of design they want, so he creates only three or four sketches and sends the scanned pencil drawings to the client. "Occasionally I'm called into an agency at the design stage to give some input of my own. More often than not, the designers know exactly what they want but can't draw it. That's where I come in. Nine times out of ten I can hit the mark in a couple of sketches." For Diggory, a 48-hour turnaround is a luxury he seldom experiences. His clients typically want something within 24 hours. Following client approval, he creates the illustration in Illustrator and emails it to the client. Then it's off to another job.
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Figure 5 Computer Collage | Internet Advisor magazine
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Figure 6 Sports | Internet Advisor magazine
Sometimes a client, such as an ad agency, will provide Diggory with visuals of the concept they want to pursue. They then ask Diggory to put his spin on it. When he has to work from just a written brief, it's harder to predict what the client wants. In fact, occasionally a client will reject his sketches, but use them to refine their needs, saying, "No, that's not it, but now that I have seen something, I think I know what I want." Clients such as Warner Brothers and Disney are extremely specific about what they want. "They will go so far as to say, we want you to use a 1.4 stroke here and a 2.5 stroke here. Those types of jobs are not very fun—they're too restrictive."
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Figure 7 Pig | Ad for Graphics International
"With Illustrator I can actually be more creative. There's more room to explore the possibilities. Sometimes errors I make can improve the finished article. I often send the client three or four versions of the finished artwork because I prefer the look of some of the illustrations with errors. I love the flexibility of Illustrator. It's so easy to try out new styles."
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Figure 8 Cowboy | American Showcase, a journal for illustrators
The Project
Origin Design, a small design studio in Bristol, England, and also one of Diggory's existing clients, commissioned him to create an illustration for a 2002 calendar.
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Figure 9The theme was a play off the two number 2s in that year's number. Origin Design had a list of clever pairings, such as hook and eye, sticks and stones, cat and mouse, chicken and egg, yin and yang, night and day, and so on.
They told Diggory to choose one and he picked the pairing of cat and mouse. Other than the size, Origin gave Diggory no other direction. He had free creative reign. " When a client trusts you enough to say, 'do what you like,' that's when the job is both easy and fun." The calendar also featured illustrations and photographs from eleven other artists and went on to win a Certificate of Merit at the National Business Calendar Awards 2002.
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Figure 10 "I love the flexibility of Illustrator, which enables me
to easily create several versions of a drawing. If I could ask for one more
feature it would be an airbrush tool."
— NICK DIGGORY
The Steps
Step 1: Creating a good sketch.Diggory created the initial concept pencil sketch for the project in a mere half-hour. "Sometimes the concept comes to me immediately. Other times it takes a long time. If I get the feeling that it just won't happen, I get up and go fishing, clear my head, and then come back and try it again. You can just feel it not happening and you know you have to walk away. Sometimes you can get too close to it and try too hard to think of something clever." Satisfied with his first crack at a concept, Diggory tightened up the rough and drew the final pencil sketch. He scanned the sketch at 300 dpi into Photo-shop and saved it as a JPEG, which he then emailed to Origin Design. They approved it right away without changes.
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Figure 11)
Figure 12Step 2: Making a template.Upon approval from Origin, he created a new, A4-size CMYK file in Illustrator and placed the scanned sketch on his base layer. He then dimmed the sketch layer to 50%. Diggory uses Illustrator for his projects because, as he puts it, "Illustrator allows you to experiment with different styles. Photoshop is more restrictive in that you know you can always replicate a style. I mean, if I can put a reflection on a shape, then anyone can. I guess if there's a downside to using the computer as a tool for illustrations, it's that you see a lot of art that looks the same. You can spot someone who has just started using Illustrator or Photoshop from a mile away."
Step 3: Starting the cat drawing.He started the illustration by concentrating on the main characters first, beginning with the cat. "I tend to concentrate on the main characters first. If I started with the background first I could easily go overboard and then the focus would shift to the background rather than the characters." On a new layer, using a Wacom tablet and Illustrator's Pencil tool, a stroke weight of 2.6, and Pantone 161 CVU (a dark brown) as the stroke color, he drew the paths that composite the head. Diggory didn't worry about creating closed paths (see the inset figure in Figure 14), but instead concentrated on just the stroke line. "I tend to avoid the Pen tool and work with Bezier curves. Because I work so quickly, the Pencil tool is ideal."
Step 4: Filling in gaps.On the same layer, Diggory created the fill shape for the cat's face and also added the jaggy highlights, using a 1-point stroke. The fill shape would fill in the gaps left by the open paths. For any shapes that would later contain just a fill color and no stroke, Diggory set the stroke weight to 1 point and then later, when he applied color, he set the stroke weight to None.
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Figure 13)
Figure 14Step 5: Adding the facial features.On a new layer, he added the nose, mouth, eyes, and insides of the ears. The stroke weight ranged from 1 point for the teeth to 2.2 points for the eyes and 2.6 points for the nose. For shapes that would ultimately have no stroke color, but just a fill, Diggory used a 1-point stroke.
Step 6: Finishing the face.Diggory created a separate layer and added the shadows in the eyes and mouth. Again, using a 1-point stroke, he drew the brows, the pupils, and the nose reflection, each on its own layer. On yet another layer, he created the nose shadow, the soon to be white ruff, and the jaggy highlights of the ears and fur.
To complete the face, Diggory created another layer and added the whiskers, using a 1-point stroke. He then used the Ellipse tool and created the pores.
Step 7: Drawing the cat's appendages.Diggory created another layer and drew the tail, using a stroke of 1.7 points (Figure 17). He created the stroke layer for the left paw, using a stroke of 3.2 points. Using the stroke layer as a guide, he drew the paw shapes that would contain the fill colors, and then moved the fill layer under the stroke layer (Figure 18). He repeated the process with the right paw.
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Figure 15)
Figure 16)
Figure 17)
Figure 18Step 8: Drawing the mouse.The mouse wasn't as complex as the cat, so he created the entire mouse on one layer. He drew the stroke outline of the mouse using 80% Black and a stroke weight of 2 points for the outside body outline and .7 to 1.5 points for the thinner detail strokes. Diggory then created another layer and made the shapes that would contain the fill areas of the mouse. He used a 1-point stroke that he would later set to a color of None once he filled the areas.
Step 9: Creating the background elements.To begin creating the background, Diggory started with the background rectangle and shadow areas (for the objects in the background) on a single layer. He then created another layer and drew the objects in the background, such as the door, the picture, the lamp, and the window and curtains. He drew all the objects with a 1-point black stroke (Figure 20).
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Figure 19)
Figure 20Step 10: Creating additional elements and details.Next came the flower pot and the cup and saucer, each on its own layer. Since he wanted to fill and stroke the cup and saucer , he used a 1.7-point stroke for those elements. He then created a couple more layers and created the table with the Pen tool. He switched to the Pencil tool and created the saucer and mouse shadows. Back to the Pen tool and a new layer, Diggory drew the 3-point strokes that would make up the stripes on the tablecloth (Figure 21).
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Figure 21)
Figure 22Step 11: Finishing the line drawings.Finally, to complete the background, he made a layer and drew five circles with the Ellipse tool to create a paw print. He grouped the separate circles, selected them and then Option-dragged (Alt-drag to do this on a Windows machine) to clone a second print. He repeated the process, randomly placing the paw prints on the background wall. Diggory added detail elements to the background, such as the paw prints and the fish in the picture frame that were not in the original sketch. "I tend to keep the background in the sketch very loose. The clients don't seem to mind if I embellish the background somewhat in the final illustration. I call this little bit of extra detail the 'selling layer.' The client sees new elements I've added and thinks, 'I didn't ask for that, but it's really nice.' They feel like they're getting a little more for their money."
Step 12: Adding color.After he finished the line work, Diggory chose his color palette. He used Illustrator 9's PANTONE Uncoated Swatch Library for all of his colors (Figure 23). While he tends to use intuition to select his colors, he did consciously choose more subdued, pastel colors for his background elements, so as not to detract from the foreground characters. Diggory says, "One of the most frustrating things to me about working on a computer is the difference in how colors appear between monitors. I have two G3s and the colors look different even between the two monitors!" Diggory painstakingly selected each of his elements and filled them with color. Some shapes were both filled and stroked with color. Others were just filled, with the stroke set to None, while yet others were stroked with color and without a fill. To get the stacking order of the shapes correct, he chose Arrange from the Object menu and made the appropriate selections. In some instances, he had to rearrange layers to get the compositing correct.
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Figure 23Step 13: Framing the picture.As a final touch,Diggory created two more layers.Using the Pen tool and a 3-point black stroke,he created a frame around the entire illustration.The final layer contained an additional black stroke to touch up the bottom portion of the frame.
Step 14: Final adjustments in Photoshop.Once Diggory completed the illustration, he opened the Illustrator file in Photoshop, rasterized it as a 300-dpi CMYK image, and applied a drop shadow behind the cat to "liven it up a bit and bring the characters off the background." The entire project took Diggory only 3.5 hours. "I work very quickly. And because I'm so busy, I also like to get each job out of the way so I can move on to the next one. I prefer a deadline of three hours rather than three months. If I have three months, it's too easy to wait until the last day to do the job."
Diggory saved a copy of the file as a low-resolution, 72-dpi JPEG file. He emailed the JPEG to Origin Design for final approval. Once Origin gave the okay, he flattened the layers, saved it in Photoshop's native file format and emailed the 20-MB file to the client. "Unless the client specifically asks me not to, I always flatten the final file before I email it. That way, no changes can be made. I have had some pieces where alterations were made after I submitted the final and I wasn't told about it." In this case unfortunately, the size of the calendar was changed at the last minute and therefore the printer resized the entire illustration, keeping approximately the same height, but elongating it quite a bit. Says Diggory without irritation, "I preferred the original size, but who I am to argue with a printer?"
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Working Between Illustrator and Photoshop
Nick Diggory, like many of the other artists in this book, often uses Photoshop in concert with Illustrator for embellishments that Photoshop handles better. Among the most common uses of Photoshop for Illustrator artists are applying soft, blended drop shadows and rasterizing artwork for printing.
Nick Diggory used Photoshop for both these purposes. He applied the drop shadow in Photoshop at the final production stage. In some circumstances you may wish to add Photoshop elements, such as drop shadows, in Illustrator and preserve the vector artwork while adding some raster images to the final drawing. It's not hard to do since Adobe developed Illustrator and Photoshop to work together.
If you want to add a drop shadow to an element or an entire drawing and preserve the vector objects that you created in Illustrator, open Photoshop and create a new document, being careful to specify a color model and image resolution when you create the new file. If your artwork is to be printed in CMYK color at 175 lpi, for example, be certain to create a new document large enough in physical size to accommodate the Illustrator elements at CMYK and 350-dpi resolution. (Note: use two times the halftone frequency for image resolution as a standard rule of thumb.) Open both Illustrator and Photoshop and place the document windows side by side. With a new document in the Photoshop window appearing as a blank page, select all the elements to be shadowed in the Illustrator window and drag them to the Photo-shop document window (Figure 26).
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Figure 26: Drag and drop Illustrator vector art from the Illustrator document
window to the Photo-shop document window.
When the objects appear in Photoshop, the artwork has not yet been rasterized. You can freely size or transform the vector objects without affecting image resolution. As long as the vector-bounding box is visible around the objects, the objects are still in vector rather than raster format. However, in the case of drop shadows, you'll want to be certain not to scale the objects, so leave the size alone.
To rasterize the objects, strike the Enter or Return key on your keyboard. The result will be a rasterized version of the objects on a new separate layer. Hit the slash (/) key to lock the layer's transparent pixels, and then fill the layer with white. When transparent pixels are locked, only the layer's nontransparent areas will be filled with white. Use the Layer Style dialog box (Layers > Layer Style > Drop Shadow) to apply a drop shadow and set the distance and size (Figure 27).
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Figure 27: Open the Blending Options dialog box and check the box for Drop
Shadow.Set the size and distance to create the shadow desired.
Click OK in the Blending Options dialog box. Drag the layer with the shadow to your Illustrator drawing and send the shadow behind the objects (Figure 28). By preserving the type and objects and only adding smaller raster images to the design, you'll use less memory than rasterizing the entire illustration.
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Figure 28: The final artwork after the Photoshop shadow has been introduced
in the Illustrator drawing.