illustration with a vengeance

Get out your pencils, kids: illustration is back. Stock photographs or slick Web 2.0 style graphics are so last year. The next generation of graphic design is all about good old-fashioned illustration with a digital twist.

Very clean, slick and slightly stiff digital illustration has been popular for a while now, as is a style that I would describe as looking like ‘information graphics’, but clients are starting to get bored with this. I don’t want to scare artists that just render color digitally – that’s not what I’m talking about. I often hear the words ‘authentic’, ‘painted’ and ‘hand-made’ coming up lately.
- IllustrationMundo.com

One of the trends we’re seeing a lot of lately is the vector/photo mashup (a la ‘A Scanner Darkly‘). Layers Magazine has a good tutorial on how to create this effect using the Creative Suite. It’s a striking visual effect, but my guess is this isn’t what people mean when they say they want something “hand-made.”

The simplest solution, of course, is to actually do art by hand. You know, not on the computer. The results really can’t be duplicated…or can they? Heathrowe.com has a tutorial showing how to use Photoshop to get a surprisingly realistic sketched look from a photograph. Want a more stylized look? TutorialDash suggests some ways to give your illustrations an Anime flair. And the brilliant Veerle shows us how to use Illustrator brushes on text to create a unique, hand-drawn effect.