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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Motocross Vector Illustrations

I want to show you the result of my work for Filter Publications, Inc., the publisher of Racer X Illustrated – a magazine and website in motocross and supercross as well as Road Racer X and Racer X Brand websites. I was asked to create vector illustrations of motorbike riders using as reference some photos supplied by the customer. Making all bikes yellow and depriving racers’ uniforms and bikes of all logos and brand names were among client’s requirements. Guys from Filter Publications, Inc. wanted vector illustrations as the vector format allows scaling images to any size without loss in quality, unlike the bitmap (aka raster) format. Since the drawings were supposed to be used to promote an iPhone motocross game on posters and other printing materials as well as one of the illustrations would be used as an iPhone icon for the game Filter Publications, Inc. needed both very small-sized images as well as extra large ones. Therefore the vector format was the best solution for them.

I never stop being amazed at how brave and skilled professional motorbike racers are. When I see what those fast riders can do with their bikes I the only word I can utter is “Wow!” Motocross, bike races and any other kind of motosports are pretty much tough and dangerous competitions for real men only. Although due to the vector images specificity it is impossible to make vector drawings as expressive and effective as they would be if done in bitmap format, I still hope I have managed to convey a little bit of racers’ courage and sporting blood in my illustrations. Below are shown the low resolution copies of the vector images. I also added simple backgrounds for the bikes to better stand out on the pictures.

Motocross illustrations (bikes and racers)

Related posts:
Custom vector illustrations for a chiropractor
Expanding my team to create professional vector art

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