Graphix, Design, and a way to be Digital!

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Tshirts, every day I am passing shirts and never realized earlier last month during my career searching, that the answer was right in front of me. Lots of online artists are selling merch with their illustrations and getting in on turning even my sketches into something someone could buy would be the end I needed towards financial freedom. Even my online portfolio and website would still need to sell digital assets and prints at the least. I did not know the amount of info I would need to endure and push through but I am glad to have gone down the rabbit hole too as my son’s homeschool laptop, though limited, was able to pull off a miracle. With proper mouse work and dedicated time inking my sketches. I was finally able to transfer into the digital workspace. Opening up a whole new medium of graphic design, covering; Inking and Vector Art.


    I will be making several new shout-outs as I finally divided into graphic design via LinkedIn Learning Since none of the mentors and masters I followed so far during this blog ever really cover or discuss the topic of graphic design. Linkedin learning didn’t just provide courses but an entire learning path towards becoming a full-time graphic Designer. Learning paths are a series of related courses that build off each other into an industry-specific career, giving another Achievement/Certificate on top of the individual credentials you get from the courses within. This bigger Certificate is Industry recognized. SHouts to these courses and instructors are as follows;


-Sean Adams

-Cara St. Hillaire

-Tony Harmen

-Ina Saltz

-Jim Krause

-David Blatner

-Juliene Kost

-Denis Juche

-Nice Cuevas.


I also took a course on Inkscape as low-budget me needs cheap solutions, so a quick shout out to Miek Raikin as well.


    What’s crazy is I never gave two thoughts about the differences between sketch, drawing, illustration, or design. Always look at them as meaning the same thing but just a different flavor of saying, Art. Turns out I was well, wrong. Design is all about position, layout, and typography. Where illustrations are fully rendered drawings that can be used as elements of design. Important to note, that design is the presentation and display of art, to convey a message. Problem-solving is your main duty as a designer.


    Even more amazing is how much design was all around us. From web banners, brand logos, apparel, and even patterned designs across drinking glasses, silverware, and wood engraving on furniture are all graphic designs. If that circuit startup wasn’t so $$ I’d probably already own an Etsy shop selling doodads of whatever. There are a plethora of options and talent was now in my hands, amateur yes, but the talent to start somewhere, and right now I wanted all the sketches I have been working on for months to be digitalized and used for illustrations. So I learned that you can Ink and Scan your drawings. Then Use Adobe Illustrator Inkscape. You can use an Autotrace feature to create, clean digital strokes of your work to then give the digital finish it needs to become a full-on illustration. This Vector Style of Art is sort of new to me. The nodes manipulating the very strokes, and then the strokes themselves always on their layer reminded me of the short-lived 3D modeling classes I took in college for game design. I FInd this excitement as my weakest link in digital art is not having the tech tools like a drawing tablet or Touch screen with a digital pen. Vector art and its node manipulation make my mouse worthy.


    As I began practicing what I learned in the graphic design courses and Inkscape. I found some sketches and went to work to find myself enthralled by the manipulation and accuracy of my lines. The clean look just made me gasp. It finally felt like I was worthy enough to showcase my art and get all of these income ideas out of my head and dive right back into creative, improvisational, open art. Maybe the hardcore studies are now over and I now can focus only on improvement through the actual work of illustrating. I sketch a couple of shirt ideas before blowing them up, inking, and scanning to be vectorized. The design classes helped me understand having to compositionally place my illustrations to make them eye-catching.


    The key takeaway from this month’s studies.

  • Vector art is used for a lot of my favorite cartoon shows.

  • Typography is not my strong suit when it comes to its terminology (Body parts really? Letters have ears and feet now and I can’t get it out of my head) Learning differences between sans serif and serif was cool. Also, a whole new look of digital assets came to me as I discovered people sell Fonts. Time to redo my ABCs!

  • Iconography is a thing.

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