DataLife Engine - Softnews Media Group

Have you ever wondered how some digital artists are able to create such realistic pen and ink illustrations?

Here's exactly what you get:

20 Clean Ink brushes (recreated from source material)
20 Dirty Ink brushes (created from scanned samples)
Beautiful 8.5 x 35 inch reference chart (with brushes)
Instructions included in reference chart
Versions for CS4, CS5, CS6 and CC

You'd swear their work was created in a wood paneled commercial art office. India ink heavy in the air, piles of paper filled with sketches, and busy artists at sturdy wooden desks using ink brushes, rollerballs and nib pens.

So what's the secret to creating authentic commercial art illustrations?

Here's a hint: inconsistency and human imperfection.

Adobe Illustrator has given us the ability to create precision artwork. The problem is that it cost us the human touch that adds warmth to illustrations.

This can all be boiled down to one key trait. Expression filled ink strokes with varying weights and subtle imperfections.

We've recreated the feel of this era with the VectorHero Pen Pack for Illustrator. Here's how we did it:

Gathered a huge library of commercial art from the 1940's and 50's.
Studied how these pens perform in the real world. We paid close attention to things like how the ink pools when a nib pen first touches the paper. How brush strokes widen as pressure increases and decreases. How the end of strokes terminate.
Carefully recreated these characteristic in vector form. We used real commercial art samples, strokes we created with brush and nib pens and even created ink strokes with the pen tool using historical reference material.

The bottom line is we created the pen set that we've always dreamed of.

You see, most Adobe Illustrator brush packs are made by scanning pen strokes, auto tracing them and making them into brushes.

The result is hard to use brushes that give less than stellar results.

Scott Fuller and myself (Dustin Lee) spent over 40 hours compiling material, studying the best examples of commercial illustration work, recreating and refining brushes and then testing them by creating real artwork in the classic style of 1950's illustrations.

The result is a pack of brushes that we love using in our work. We think you'll love them too.

Tags: VectorHero, Brushes, Illustrator