Swapping Skills

My hairdresser and I have done a little swap – a business card design in exchange for a nice hair do. Daily exposure to a sea breeze and a silly hat means that quite a bit of effort is required to turn my tangled barnet into luscious locks! I love doing illustrations and taught myself how to use Photoshop and Illustrator – but there-in lies the problem. I can turn a drawing into a graphic image (a vector drawing – one that will enlarge without losing definition), colour it in and turn it into a logo – most of the time! It seems my technique works more by luck than judgement and on this occasion I came very unstuck. But with the aid of my 2 inch thick techno book and a bit of Googling I learnt how to do it properly and even imported some pretty star bursts. My hairdresser is very pleased with the end result (not to mention the loss of a few years and a boob job) and I am very grateful that she won’t need to reciprocate such a trial and error approach to the execution of her own skills!

Having a giggle setting the design brief!

My pen sketch (left) was transformed into the graphic (right) 

as follows:

I scanned my sketch and opened it in Photoshop then used
the "magic eraser" to rub out the white to leave only the lines

I then opened the drawing in Illustrator and used "live trace"
and then "live paint" to isolate the shapes and colour them in

I then (somehow!) switch on all the paths and "dragged"
 it back onto a transparent file in Photoshop

voila!

The with a bit more jiggery-pokery I popped the logo onto a
Vistaprint business card template and added the text