Cephalopodcast

I’d like to introduce you to the Cephalopodcast mascot. His name is Pucker. He’s got suckers.

I am starting a new series on this blog called Pucker and Bloat. It’s named after one of the distortion filters available in Adobe Illustrator and I think it sounds pretty funny. It will feature postings based on my dawdling doodles made with this new tool. And since Illustrator is vector-based*, it should be possible for me to later animate the images in another program I want to work with, namely Flash.

Pucker and Bloat also sounds like a good name for a cartoon, don’t you think? So I am going to use that as a springboard to guide my studies. And with that in mind, I’d like to introduce you to the first character, Pucker. He might look familiar. In fact, it’s sketched from the Cephalopodcast mascot, who now officially has a name. This is not the final version. I am going to keep working on it. But in the meantime, I have to come up with a second character called Bloat. That sure sounds like the name of a blowfish to me. But what do you think? What marine creature would be friends with Pucker and have a name like Bloat?

Besides making learning fun for me and amusing for you (I hope), my other goal is to end up with a series of marine life clipart images. If this works, I’ll make them available under a Creative Commons license for use by educators.

So are any of you illustrators? Any one using Illustrator? What resources are your favorites? I am looking for tutorials and sources of inspiration. Here’s some of my favorites:

• Veerle’s blog. Veerle is a graphic/web designer living in Belgium. She makes lovely things. She also sometimes writes about science and nature (but not recently)
• Jada Fitch: I Heart Cepholopods
• David Lanham: Currently Occupied
• Kevin Cornell, Bearskin Rug: Octokid
• Aaron Blecha: Monster Squid
• Ectoplasmosis is inspiring.
• Tubbypaws: the artistic method. Cute animation that illustrates what working in Illustrator is like.
• Wanna buy me a book? Real World Adobe Illustrator CS3 by Mordy Golding, because I’ve got a lot to learn.

*Graphics programs basically come in two varieties, raster- or vector-based. Raster programs like Photoshop represent an image pixel by pixel. Because of this, they can produce painterly effects but the images are difficult to scale. Vector programs create images as a series of lines and polygons that can easily be scaled because they are fundamentally just mathematical expressions. It’s always reminded me of the wave/particle duality of physics.