Vanessa talks a bit about how she started to learn how to illustrate. She followed every possible illustrator and animator blog, did all of the Illustration Friday prompts. She copied her favorite artists like Sasek and Blair, but then adding her Vanessa interpretation. She works both traditionally and digitally, and is a perennial student in both. Vanessa stalks Youtube and still enrolls in things like Lilla Rogers classes. She tells us to make a lab for yourself, take a day to learn how to do something on Youtube and improve all your illustration weaknesses in this customized fashion. Paint your own textures and papers so you have your flavor in those textures and also so you don't need to rely on stock sites or worry about copyright.
To Vanessa, the ideal is: You want to get to that point where people can't tell, even art directors, if it's digital or traditional.
Dyslexia made Photoshop and Illustrator's complicated workspaces too difficult for her to work in, but Vanessa found that Corel Painter had a simpler tool panel that she was able to master quickly. One of Corel's drawbacks is the inability to add texture to those digital drawings, so after all of the drawing and flat color is done in Corel, Vanessa brings that art into Photoshop to add her texture and collage elements.
She uses Photoshop to put together her sketch dummies, too.
She collects all kinds of fabric, paper, she makes her own paper, too. You can buy textures, but Vanessa recommends taking your camera outside and taking photos of textures and building your own digital library. You can add photographs to your work to add dimension, too. Photos from flea markets!
MARY HAD A LITTLE GLAM was hand drawn first, scanned, and then colored digitally.
For her Hallmark work, she used the Corel Draw airbrush tool.
She shares art made just a few weeks ago, it's made with a scanned piece of linen fabric with multiple layers of color overlayed over the linen layer and then she uses the Photoshop scissor tool to cut out shapes on that color layer. Amazing! Here is my terrible screenshot of it, I'm sorry I can't do it justice here.
Vanessa asks us to all bring diversity into your art, we are all different colors, we have all different hairstyles, don't go for stereotypes.
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