Five Simple Steps

Last week, we published interviews with the amazing illustrators Elliot Jay Stocks and Kevin Cornell who have both been commissioned to produce work for Hardboiled Web Design.

In this post, we're talking to the very awesome, Geri Coady who has created brilliant Hanna-Barbera style illustrations for the book and accompanying website.

1. Tell us about yourself?

I'm a designer, illustrator and photographer based in Newfoundland, Canada. I freelance through my personal site, hellogeri.com, and I tweet @hellogeri.

2. Tell us about your work on Hardboiled?

I've worked on various things for Hardboiled — illustrations for the example files, illustration for the website animation, and Andy's author photos.

3. What were the tools and processes that you used?

For the illustrations, I first sketched roughs on paper and scanned them for Andy's approval.

Thankfully he was easy to please, so I went ahead and did vector traces by hand in Illustrator. A few objects were repositioned during this stage.

The next step was to import the lineart into Photoshop where I used handpainted, watercolour textures to colour the image.

Originally we didn't plan to do an animation of our detective, so when Andy asked me to help him with a CSS3 animation to be featured on the Hardboiled website, I had to make some changes.

I worked with the animator, Anthony Calzadilla, to edit the artwork appropriately. I went back to Illustrator and used solid fills in place of the textures so we could take advantage of the SVG format. I then redrew certain areas such as the torso, neck and arm. The newspaper was also simplified as the filesize was too large to be practical.

4. Where did you get inspiration for your work?

The idea for the Hanna-Barbera style artwork came from a cartoon I did while Andy was 'Looking For Yogi' on a roadtrip across the Western United States. We thought it would be a fun, lighter direction to take the Hardboiled theme for the example files in the book.

5. How do you like your eggs?

The same way I like my detectives!

Look out for our last 'Five Simple Questions' with the book's editor.