Casey Illustrates

Classy ass art and shit. Buy some here.

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 18:36:00 -0500

Classy ass art and shit. Buy some here.

Moonshine is a brighter thing than fog. A little quote from...

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Moonshine is a brighter thing than fog. A little quote from Sherlock Holmes — enjoy :)

Digital painting of Q from Skyfall. I wish my hair had looked...

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 21:38:38 -0500

Digital painting of Q from Skyfall. I wish my hair had looked this perfectly disheveled when it was short…

Made with Paper

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 20:20:12 -0500

Made with Paper

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 23:25:46 -0500

Made with Paper

fatboonbo: Cursed Words:fuck (via Casey Ligon)

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 23:02:00 -0500

fatboonbo:

Cursed Words:fuck (via Casey Ligon)

Made with Paper

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 22:37:28 -0500

Made with Paper

Another Ringling College sponsored figure drawing session where...

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 14:04:00 -0400

Another Ringling College sponsored figure drawing session where students draw and fair-goers gawk.

great sketches!! i love to look at them, do you sketch wherever you go?

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 20:59:33 -0500

Thank you! I sometimes sketch when I’m out or traveling, but I have a very hard time sketching consistently. I tried, for the last month and a half, to draw one page every day. I don’t have classes requiring traditional pieces to be turned in, so this gave me an opportunity to draw on a more frequent basis.

This may be a good time for me to say: I’m sorry for the lag in posts lately, everyone! 4 jobs, 3 classes, and a few days out of town have tripped me up recently, but I hope to pick back up starting this coming weekend.

Hi Casey I saw your posting on Facebook for Hallmark and had to check out your sketches and I must say...I love them! I'm guessing you loved interning for Hallmark because now your going to be working there :) What was it like? -Mandisa Surpris

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 20:53:00 -0500

Hallmark was amazing! Definitely a more holistic experience than I expected. They’re the type of company that wants to see you do the best work that you possibly can. Whether it’s what you were originally hired for, or if it means going somewhere else and coming back to the HQ when you’re ready — they’re simply interested in happy artists who want to create the best work of their careers.

The internship was exactly what a creative internship should be. I was treated like a regular employee and had my work approved and produced just like any other writer in my studio. The extracurricular activities helped me see the surrounding area, which let me know that KC was the kind of place I could see myself working full time.

Advanced Potion Making book cover that I put together after HBP...

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 11:22:00 -0500

Advanced Potion Making book cover that I put together after HBP was released.

Puppy in the Design Center at Ringling College.

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:30:06 -0500

Puppy in the Design Center at Ringling College.

2011 Hallmark Internship Sketchbook.

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 10:04:58 -0500

2011 Hallmark Internship Sketchbook.

T is for Twilight.

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 20:23:00 -0500

T is for Twilight.

Sketchbook drawing of my friend Nicole.

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:55:24 -0500

Sketchbook drawing of my friend Nicole.

Cursed Words Series.

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:00:05 -0500

Cursed Words Series.

Big Cats (and one little one).

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:00:05 -0500

Big Cats (and one little one).

Pixar Pattern Tutorial

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 18:11:33 -0500

I learned how to make patterns by attending a lecture with Ringling College Illustration Alumnus Sara Watts. She taught us a few tricks that she learned at Carter’s for pattern making. She used a lot of key commands and short cuts that I don’t want to take up time getting in to right now (although I use mostly key commands for editing things here); I want to focus on the nitty-gritty “how do I make a simple pattern??” aspect of, well, pattern making. I chose two patterns from my Pixar Patterns set: Monter’s Inc. and Brave. My process for Monster’s Inc. follows along with Sara’s “Invisible Sandwich” tutorial (we’ll get to that), but Brave became a whole new beast with that mess of curls. I’m not saying that this is the professional way of doing things or that i have any reason to tell anyone “hey, do it this way!”—this is simple a step-by-step guide as to how I personally went about creating patterns. I hope it helps!

Find out how to turn this:

Into… A Monster’s Inc. Pixar Pattern

And a Brave Pixar Pattern

Read the rest of the tutorial below or check out the complete set here.

Monster’s Inc

First, open up a tabloid-size Illustrator document and hide the art boards to give yourself a big, open canvas on which to work. The important windows here are Layers and Swatches. Change your document setting to display content in inches.

Use the rectangle tool and click on your document space to create a perfect 3x3” square.

Use the circle tool and add a shape on the edge of your square. Because this square will serve as the repeating area of our pattern, anything that lays across its edge will need to repeat on the other side. Sure, you can click and drag to copy a shape in Illustrator, but why not let the computer be uber-precise and do the work for you?

Highlight your circle and square together and click Object>Transform>Move… Use 3” for the Horizontal move and 0 Vertical. Click Copy (not OK), and Illustrator will create a copy of your shapes and place it perfectly along the edge of the original. As long as you remember your starting square dimension (in this case, 3”), you simply move the shape that distance to keep in line with where the pattern repeats.

Select and delete the extra square shape on the right (I copy and delete the square shape in this way to keep my movements in check).

Repeat the process, this time moving the two selected shapes 3” vertically. Don’t forget to delete the extra square, just as before.

You can add internal shapes at any time. As long as they don’t overlap an edge of the square, you don’t need to Transform>Move.

OH GOD, WHAT IF A SHAPE OVERLAPS TWO SIDES?? Do the same Object>Transform>Move…Copy just as before, but twice: once for Horizontal and once for Vertical.

I chose a simple teal-y green and deep purple and then removed the standard black outline.

Now comes the fun part! Select only the background square of your pattern. Hit Command+C to copy. Then hit Shift-Command+V to past a copy in the same exact place. Change the fill to No Fill and watch your layers. There should now be an invisible box on top of your shapes and a teal box below your shapes.

So far, so good. Select your invisible box and repeat the process: copy it and paste it in place. But this time, send it all the way to the back by hitting Shift+Command+[ (Or drag it down in your layers). You should now have an “Invisible Sandwich” surrounding your colored shapes. Watch your layers!

Select all of your shapes and hit Command+7 to create a clipping mask. Now select your clipped shapes and drag them into the swatches pallet to create the pattern.

Using the shape tool, draw a shape to test out your new pattern.

As you can see, there were some rivers in my pattern, so I used the Direct Selection White Arrow to move only certain shapes within my original pattern. I deleted the old pattern in the swatches pallet and dragged over a new one to replace it.

Voila! You see the tiny seam created in my large shape? Most times, the computer displays this because it’s simply repeating the pattern and making sense of the shapes, but it doesn’t show up in the final print. Test a few prints or save a jpeg to see for yourself!

Brave

I wanted to create a cool curly hair pattern. I went about pattern making in the same way, but the curls were tricky, so I’ll show you how I did them specifically.

I used a standard brush present to draw some curly shapes with my tablet. After I finished drawing my curls, I changed them back to a basic 5pt stroke with rounded corners. Using the brush tool helps to soften some of the curves automatically, but I still went back in with the pen tool and adjusted a few wonky shapes here and there.

Now the tricky part. I dragged one of my curls over to another 3” square and deleted the excess. The process of repeating shapes is the same as before. Select the curl you want to repeat and click Object>Transform>Move… Use 3” for the Horizontal move and 0 Vertical. Click Copy (not OK), and Illustrator will create a copy of your shapes and place it perfectly along the edge of the original.

Select the two nearby points and join them. This creates one long curl, which I adjusted with the pen tool.

I then dragged my long curl up to the center of the square. If done correctly, the curl shape will repeat seamlessly. I continued the process with 4 total curls and moved them to one side so that a single curl would need to be duplicated.

Move the overlapping curl and create a copy for the opposite edge, just as in the previous tutorial.

The “Invisible Sandwich” part follows suite and you should end with a pretty awesome curly pattern.

Thanks for reading! I’m no Illustrator guru, so I frequently Google trouble-shooting tips and tricks, but be sure to message me here if you have any questions about this tutorial.

Patterns based on Pixar films.

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 02:43:39 -0500

Patterns based on Pixar films.

Floating lanterns.

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:00:05 -0500

Floating lanterns.