Have a Scopa update.

This is just about done, though John suggested adding a pocket with a handkerchief and some buttons, which sounds great to me.

Mostly, I focused on coloring and texturing.

The shadows and shading were all done by hand using extra vector art in Illustrator, something I’ve never done before. I usually try to use gradient meshes or drop shadows or Illustrator’s 3d tools for that sort of thing. But now that I’ve tried this, I love it — as a bit of a control freak, I like having absolute control over the shapes of the highlights and shadows.

Once I had the coloring done, the image looked like this:

Kinda cartoony, kinda flat. I think, for this sort of look to work, you have to make it look a little distressed… more like an old poster printed on idiosyncratic equipment and less like cheap vector clipart.

This is actually a look I’ve been trying to get on my stuff for years, and I think this is the closest I’ve ever come to it. If you’re curious, what I did was this:

• Import my Illustrator art into Photoshop.
• Duplicate the one layer you’ve got.
• Apply a gaussian blur to the duplicate (I did 6 pixels here I think.)
• Apply a normal diffuse filter to the duplicate 10 or so times in a row.
• Set the blending mode of the duplicate to 100% overlay.
• Add a new layer.
• Make some black & white clouds on the new layer.
• Add a few difference clouds to that. I did like 6 iterations.
• Emboss.
• Set the blending mode of the clouds layer to 100% soft light.

So that gave me some wrinkles and the impression of imperfect printing. I’ll probably futz with it a little more and add some scratches too.