Again, I'm not sleepy so I decided to work some more on my vector art of Audrey Hepburn...
And another look at the art with added details.
The highlights and shadows are a combination of the gradient mesh tool, gradients and blends. I did use the blur filter on the shadow behind her pearl necklace.
This image is the preview mode.
As a graphic artist my main job is to come up with and design layouts and illustrations from scratch. But sometimes I get my ideas from reporters I work with. My most recent page design is the York Revolutions playoffs layout. I received a preliminary sketch from Jim who is a sports writer.
Here's the sketch 
So this gives me a basic idea where the writer is going with his idea. I then start building my package based on his sketch. The idea was to layout the players on the page in their playing position on the field. I drew a baseball field in Adobe Illustrator and brought in images of the players and positioned them on the field.
Here's a sneak peak of the final page, to see the enitire finish page check out tomorrow's sports section in the York Daily Record/Sunday News.
Okay, not exactly, but I think it's impressive what a simple point and shoot digital camera and some artistic understanding can actually pull off a pretty darn good fashion shoot.
With on staff photographers limited and my magazine production deadline looming, I asked my supervisor if I could try and shoot the fashion spread for September/October edition of Smart. He said, sure. And here's the result.
After taking each piece individually I went into Photoshop and bumped up the contrast using levels, and then adjusted the sharpness.
I took the photos on a clean white background. To soften the flash reflection off the patent leather shoes, I held up a white paper napkin. You can use this trick when taking other photos and the flash is to harsh.
Dropshadows were also created in photoshop.
After the images were ready I went on to laying out the spread. I new that one image would be main, and then the rest would fall in line. I wrote the headline and decided that I needed to make the headline a little standoutish with out being over powering I used a thin modern looking serif font. I also like to play with font sizes and nestling of letters as you can see with the lowercase "b."
The rest of the design is clean and to the point, which makes the spread visually appealing.
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