The illustration goes with a story about barbecue tips and techniques. I came up with a funny idea to have pig cooking up some ribs. Yes, a pig, which might be disturbing, but in the same sense the pig is pretty funny looking and he's having a good time grilling.
I first did a pencil sketch of my cartoon pig.
Then I scanned my pencil sketch and placed it in Adobe Illustrator as a template.
I traced my pencil sketch using the pen tool. I wanted the pig to stand out, so I added two strokes to the shape of my pig. The black stroke was set to 4 pt. outside. I then duplicated the stroke in the appearance palette and made the duplicate stroke a dark pink with a 4 pt. weight with it being an inside stroke. So, there is still only one object shape, but has two different color strokes and weights added to the outside.
Other details include some highlights, which I made white ovals using the elipse tool and placed them on the pig, grill and barbecue bottle.
The smoke coming off the grill is a simple shape I drew with the brush tool. The shape's fill color is a simple black and white gradient. I set the transparency to 50% multiply and added a 5.0 px gaussian blur. The gaussian blur is located under menu effects listing in the blur submenu.
The publication date for my illustration is June 18 in the York Daily Record's Flipside Weeekend section.
Here is the final illustration.
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