AI art – Midjourney blending of ideas/styles
Half man, half fly for Stufly music producer cover. The art of HR Giger inspired me.
AI art – Midjourney Prompt Engineering plus face replacement
Illustrate me is a new service we are offering to create affordable custom profile images.
Midjourney AI and Photoshop for finessing
Crying over spilt milk illustration. Concept art for sale through Adobe Stock. Punctuated caricature style.
Digital Illustration and AI
Stuart Flynn – BA Design – Illustration
With a BA in illustration from the University of South Australia plus 28 years as a working graphic designer, you can be confident of finding a solution to your illustration needs.
Mixed media illustration, and now AI
I don’t have a particular illustration style but I am a technical chameleon. I have diverse Photoshop, traditional and Adobe skills, and I can advise the best approach to suit your needs and budget. With the help of AI tools, almost anything is achievable from a creative brief.
Some of the more common styles I use are vector illustration in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop masking, airbrush, inking, traditional sketching & tracing and Midjourney AI.
Adobe stock image contributor
I create commercial AI generated illustrations every week for sale on the open market.
Before hiring me, you can heck out hundreds of my ideas to see what the capabilities of AI image generation can offer. You may even find a style or image you’d like buy, or use as a base style or composition for your custom project.
Using photographic references
‘Scared boy on the schoolbus’ using Photography and Prompt Engineering with Midjourney
I made it with prompt engineering and photographic reference of my son starting high school that week for inspiration and using Midjourney by Open AI. See my free lists of effective prompts to help develop visual ideas with AI technology.
Building up illustrations with inpainting
Some of the AI generation tools allow you to start with your main idea and look and feel, and then allow you pull back or sideways to generate new elements. This allows you to add more detail and characters. You can even edit existing elements and swap them out with new ideas.
Illustrating just about anything you want. AI combined with Photoshop and traditional means no limits.
The only limitation is time and budget when combined with stock imagery and traditional painting. See below for samples of my illustration work.
3D rendering and Photoshop poster design
Milfest 2000 poster design
New Years Eve Poster for Millicent’s year 2000 party – Based on the Millennium bug theme – I was given an open brief for this country event.
With a $2,000 budget, I made this idea from scratch in 3D and then finessed the detail of the facial details and background in Photoshop.
Mixed Media acrylics and pastels
Wall painting – replica
This is a personal piece of art that was loosely copied from an artwork we liked. I’m not sure how the original artist did it but I used a mixture of acrylics and chalk crayons.
Mixed Media 3D and Photoshop CD design
You’re soaking in it – CD design – bathtub idea
Chunky Custard CD – My second project after graduating. A cover band wanted a CD cover design using a custom illustration of the band to go with their album titled ‘You’re Soaking in it’. The was made in a 3D program and then Photoshop. The bathtub idea was mine once I heard the album name.
Inking versus hand-drawn illustrations
Above you can see a practical application for the inking style on a Facebook banner, and below you can see an image that has been hand-drawn, scanned and vectorised in Adobe Illustrator.
Resizing, colourising and exporting advantages of vector images
By applying both of these methods within the Adobe Illustrator application, images can be resized without loss of resolution, plus they can be more easily edited in various applications like Photoshop.
Pencil sketches
This pencil drawn illustration style is a looser style and still editable like inking but to a lesser degree.
Drawing and tracing on a lightbox
I draw in pencil, build up the image on a lightbox with multiple traces and then scan and trace with a brush tool within Adobe Illustrator. On a separate layer, I use the blob tool to do loose fills below the linework. This keeps the style of the illustration loose, plus it’s fairly easy to fill large blocks of space with little effort on the underlying colour layer.
Adobe Illustrator Inking technique
Showing the two-step process of this illustration using Adobe Illustrator. Beginning with the tracing of a photograph by using a Wacom tablet. Following this, the rough edges are removed and then the paint bucket tool is used to drop in flat colour.
Before and after retouching a portrait in Photoshop
Retouching experiment with face – A personal project using opposite techniques and effects. Left and right I generate an older and a younger version of this wedding photo of myself. The project took about 3 hours.
Cartooning using a Wacom in Illustrator
Concreting Logo and Website – A sketch based on combining an existing illustration and the owner’s face. The sketch was then made into a vector image using Adobe Illustrator and colourised into the brand colours of the business. Two additional versions of the logo were made to incorporate the trucks in the business. https://lizardsconcretepumping.com.au/
Traditional airbrush
Just to prove I can paint without a computer, I am using an old-fashioned airbrush. A project from my University days, just to show a bit of diversity and a more organic style. I started with a super unit shape (composition) and just worked in detail from the outside in. The focus is on the eye. I used random bits of torn paper and some acetate for masking. The colour pallet was red, blue, yellow, white and black. Building these colours up over time allowed nice skin tones and glued the whole thing together.
Using colour hues to create depth
During the time of this project, we were learning about hot and cold colours in the illustration to enhance a sense of distance. You may notice the subtle changes in the hue between the foreground and background parts of the face.
Tracing a hand-drawn sketch using markers
Handdrawn using traditional marker pens. Scanned and traced in Illustrator. Fills are dropped in on the computer. This idea for done for an Award School print ad concept.
Mixed media digital illustration using Adobe Applications
A blend of Illustration techniques using Adobe and Poser
Complex images and gradients were drawn and combined in Adobe Illustrator. The hand was rendered using another application called 3d Poser and then the whole composite image was integrated into Photoshop. The animation was also done in AdobePhotoshop using layers. For the full website and explanation of this product visit. Extremenouns.com
