Expanding My Team to Create Professional Vector Art

I started my career as a graphic artist with illustrations for archaeological digs in Crimea. I have been creating freehand artworks for a significant part of my life and even today, when artist’s business requires mastering graphic editing software such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, I still gravitate to old school hand-made drawing. The majority of people start learning to draw or paint in a traditional way using conventional art tools such as paper and brushes or pencils. Doing so is natural. That’s why lots of old-schoolers proved to be unprepared for the digital era when all kinds of artworks can and sometimes must be created with the aid of special software and hardware like graphic tablets. I was lucky enough to have had the opportunity to learn how to utilize Adobe Photoshop to edit, outline or color my freehand sketches in order to turn them into digital pictures as well as how to work with Adobe Illustrator to create infinitely scalable vector images that are indispensable for many purposes dictated by technology advances of the twenty-first century.

In this blog you can find a few articles about projects which suggested applying my modest skills of creating vector images, for example, posts about the motocross vector illustrations, the panda mascot, and the posters for a chiropractor. However, when it comes to large projects involving vector graphics, I feel that my vector art skills are not strong enough for me to be able to offer my clients fast delivery and top-notch quality of images compared to artists whose major specialty is vector graphics. Therefore I decided to ask my former colleague to join me and become my associate in creating vector art for my customers who approach me with their big vector art projects. Her name is Natalia Busayeva. We used to work together for a web design and development agency, but today we both are freelance artists living in the same city. Natalia has acquired solid Adobe Illustrator skills which is exactly what I need to compensate for my lack of experience with vector graphics and meet my customers’ most challenging demands.

Our First Project Together: Vector Images Related to Sports and Hobbies

The first project Natalia worked on under the brand of Igor Lukyanov’s Artistic Studio was a series of vector pictures related to sports and hobbies. They were created for Split P Studio, LLC (owner of the "FunnyLuggageTags" trade mark) – my old client for whom I created custom drawings for the vintage-fashion-inspired luggage tags. These images were also purposed for a collection of luggage tags. As you can see from images below, vector art created by Natalia has a professional flair, even though I showed them in low resolution and they look not at their best here.

Male mountain biking

Female mountain biking

Fly fishing

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Custom Vector Illustrations for a Chiropractor

I have recently created a series of custom vector illustrations for a chiropractor from Paris named Fabien. He commissioned me to make 8 illustrations in a peculiar style which looks like old school comics style advertisements. Fabien wanted to print out a big poster incorporating illustrations which would represent real life situations when people are suffering from pain caused by certain pathologies, harmful conditions or injuries which can be effectively treated by an experienced chiropractor like Fabien C-Storz. So if you urgently need help of a manual therapist while in Paris, make sure you contact Fabien for a quick relief or a comprehensive treatment (you can visit his website at www.myosteopathe.com). Meanwhile, let me show you the illustrations I created for him:

Custom Illustrations for a Poster at the Manual Therapist's Room

Sprain

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Panda Bears Drawing Assignment

Today I would like to tell you about one of my assignments which is very special for me because it was my first project I fulfilled independently as a freelancer. It was a panda drawing project.

A teacher from the USA William Cunningham was looking for an artist to create a panda mascot for his classroom. He posted his request on DeviantArt website where I was one of the whole bunch of artists and illustrators willing to get this job. At that time I worked as an artist and illustrator for a web design company but I needed extra earnings, that’s why I visited DeviantART from time to time to check out whether there were interesting project over which I could work evenings and nights. Luckily, I have a rich portfolio containing quite a number of interesting works. And I was chosen by William for this panda mascot project.

William Cunningham had a rather funny and appealing to children idea to create a classroom mascot representing a cute panda character wearing a hoodie and socks. And this was my initial sketch of the mascot which the client accepted at once.

After that I proceeded with a raster (pixel based) panda image to show how the mascot will look like in color.

And eventually I created the vector image of the panda which looks somewhat smoother in comparison with the raster one.

The client was happy and that was when I realized that working as a freelancer artist and illustrator could give me more freedom in choosing interesting projects, communicating with clients and setting price for my illustration job. Furthermore, William Cunningham proved to be a very decent person. He was so supportive and patient that I had very positive feelings about possibility of starting my freelance career. I was also impressed how this guy was interested in making his teaching process fascinating in every possible way. He is willing to invest his own money in something that we would think is auxiliary in the educational process. However, those minor auxiliaries play a very important role of mortar which glues together every piece of knowledge we acquire from our teachers and holds them tight in our memory, for our brain is created to store much longer those things which we cognize “to the accompaniment” of positive or negative emotions. Teachers are intended to teach us as much effectively as possible and evoking positive feelings is one of the most efficient methods to catalyze the process of knowledge acquisition. What does a child need to have positive feelings? Well, much less than an adult needs… Just a fascinating game to play. I hope that this little panda character will help William to create the environment conducive to learning and imagination development through a game in his classroom.

The panda mascot project being accomplished, I still had this drawing aftertaste and I wanted to draw something interesting instead of those boring assignments I often got to do for the web design company I worked for. I was still “panda-minded” and used to make doodles of little panda bears when testing my new brush pen. Some of those sketches turned to be quite nice and I want to show you a couple of doodles.

I was happy when William got back to me with another project for his classroom. He wanted to make visual improvements to the scrolling flash icons on his website. There were icons linked to various pages of the website. The icons were represented by a dozen of ugly worms with dialogue balloons containing links. So I suggested replacing the unattractive worms with…pandas. I want to show you how I drew those panda bears.

You can also see them all in the William Cunningham’s online classroom.

And here are videos of me drawing a panda bear:



Here is where you can find my other animal drawings and illustrations:
Panda tattoo
Drawing Panda Bears with a Pentel Brush Pen
Drawing a pet portrait
Other animals drawings and illustrations
American wildlife illustrations
Grizzly bear drawing

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