My Work :: Part 11: Uchiha Fan and AngstyBishy Howl

Man, am I really so lazy a person that I never wrote about Howl? (Answer: yes, which means I suck, especially since I forgot I never wrote about him. Oh Howl, you are loved, really and truly!) And I must talk about Uchiha Fan as well.

:: AngstyBishy Howl ::
I wanted Howl to look right so very badly, so the sketch took a while to get right. His hair especially, and his wonderful but extremely detailed coat. Luckily for me I had the artbook from Howl's Moving Castle, so I got to use really great, non-pixellated pics to help me out this time. Woo Hoo! His coat gave me the most grief, as I wanted to get the diamond pattern correct. I'm quite proud of it; look closely at it and you will see it matches the original almost perfectly. I was thinking of adding dark-haired Howl (but he's lost his angst by then) or blobby orange-haired Howl, but didn't have time to sketch them out as well. He works so well as a chibi AB that I smile each time I see him. what a prettyboy, neh?

:: Uchiha Fan ::

Elicia was making two costumes for friends going to Anime Expo, and while helping her finish the Sasuke costume I got the idea for this shirt. (I think it was while I was printing out the fan icon as an iron-on, but I'm not positive.) But the idea was/is so cheesy, so anvil-dropping obvious, that I was afraid Elicia would laugh at me for such a stupid t-ahirt idea. But I checked online and couldn't find a similar idea, so I decided to bring the idea up. Her reaction was perfect—she clapped her hand over her mouth and couldn't breathe for several moments as she was laughing too hard—so I took that as a sign that I had struck on a good idea.

Making it was brilliant; normally I would trace the fan shape with the pen tool, but this time I purposely tried to create it in my most Illustrator-savvy method. As you will see, it sounds hard but actually isn't and by using it I was able to create a perfectly symmetrical, linear design to match the look of the Uchiwa.

First, I took a pattern of the fan I found online (http://www.narutouchiha.com/contenido/ClanUchiha/UchihaFan.gif) and placed it in Illustrator. I then made a perfect circle shape with the Ellipse tool by holding down shift key as I drew it, the same size as the circle in the fan. I then made another ellipse, this time squashing it into a long oval shape, and lined the top of my oval shape with the fan's bottom red line, so that the two lines matched perfectly. I then took the scissors tool and snipped of the extra parts of the oval that I didn't need, turning the oval into merely a curved line. I then copied this line by holding down the alt key as I dragged it, and moved my new curved line shape to the top of the white part of the fan. (I found I had to tweak it a little to perfectly match the whote curve, but other than that it was good to go.) I decided to combine these two curved lines in to one shape, for reasons that will be revealed later. So I used the direct-select (or white arrow) tool to select only the right anchor points of the two curved lines. Then I went up to my top menus and selected Object>Path>Join. This created a new line that joins the two points together. I repeated the same step with the left points, and behold! A new shape was made.

Now that I hade made the curved lines into a shape, I could easily punch their shape out of the circle I originally made, and create the two halves of the fan. I did this by selecting both of the shapes, and in the Pathfinder Palette I clicked the "Subtract from shape" (or the second) button, then clicked the Expand button to the right. And voila! Two lovely fan shapes. But the pathfinder palette tends to group the shapes it makes together, which makes it hard to edit each individual shape on its own. Since I wanted to do this to color each shape separately, I went back to the menus and selected Object>Compound Path>Release. Now I could color the top red and the bottom white, yay.

Now for the fan's base. I just drew a rectangle with the polygon tool, selected it and the white fan part atthe same time, and clicked on the "Add to Shape" and Expand buttons in the Pathfinder Palette. Cake.

Then I messed with the strokes of the lines of the text and fan until I liked their thickness. I then outlined the text and paths. So now it can be scaled to any size and the strokes won't change a bit. (The font is the same one I used for AB, if anyone is interested.)

And that is the process I used! Yes there are simpler ways to do it and still have it be perfect shapes, but I wanted to reacquaint myself with as many tools, palettes, and menus as possible. I love my job, but I don't get to do stuff like this nearly as often as I would like. So I had fun and got to feel like I am on top of the Illustrator tricks, at least for a little while. Yay for this blog, since it gives me a permanent place to record how I've done stuff like this!

Anyway, I still think the pun is cheesy, but it does make me laugh so it was worth it.

Leeshee's friends at the Expo are passing around my cards, so I really wanted a new design up at the CafePress site to celebrate that. (They were even the ones who thought up the idea of me making cards and offered to pass them out for me. Someone else willing to do my promotional work? I love you forever! Like I've said before, I'm not good at doing that sort of thing myself.) We printed off 2500 cards. Elicia and I cut out every single one by hand, so they truly are made with tender loving care! Man, the cutting was a lot of work, but even if just one person likes our stuff and buys something, it will so be worth it. And I do realize that at a con with over 40,000 people attending, that 2500 cards is a drop in the ocean. But you have to start somewhere, and that is still a freakin' lot of cards.

The cards turned out nicer that I initially thought they would. I wanted them to be clean like the rest of our work for ello, and I couldn't decide on just one design and there was no time to make something fancy, so I got the idea to do different variations of the same card. All the contact info on the front is the same, but there are 10 different backs, each with a different AB or shirt design that we've done. Collect them all! Not really. But I actually like them a lot.