Cartoon Devotional by CluelessClay
Ephesians 1:13 “And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit,..”
Published in Shanghai Community Fellowship’s 24 August 2008 bulletin
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Ephesians 1:4 “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight”
Published in Shanghai Community Fellowship’s 17 August 2008 bulletin
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God really has a plan for this blog.. as you can see, since July 2007, there has not been any update to this blog for the simple reason that I have not been drawing any cartoon. However, in July 2008, the English fellowship that I have been attending for 3 years (also the church that I was baptised in Shanghai) asked if I could draw cartoons for a year long sermon program on Ephesians.
It just so happened (does anything just happen?) that a sister in Christ who is on mission trip overseas requested that I buy some sermon CDs from Singapore. And guess what? I bought a series of sermons on Ephesians! Little did I know when buying them, that I would be listening to them, learning from the sermon CDs and drawing inspiration for my cartoons!
Now, pray for me that I can keep up the listening, keep up the drawing and that I can meet the weekly deadline for the cartoon to be published! Praise the Lord!
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No new Adobe Illustrator tools used for this one but it is difficult to make the facial hair realistic. I have used the wrinkle tool for the moustache and beard and stylised brush for the eyebrows.
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The hair took a long time, not perfect but tried my best using overlapping shapes (different parts of the hair) and gradient, lasso the points and eyedrop the neighboring color to make it look more natural.
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I have posted an offer to do up cartoon portraits and I thought the number of requests are manageable until I checked my spam mails and realised that there are quite a number of requests that went in there.
So, I suggest that you post a comment on any of the cartoon portrait related blog posts requesting for one just in case your email went into spam and I missed it. So far, to everyone that requested, I have replied so you don’t have to comment here.
Also, quite a number of people are wondering why I’m doing this as it takes about 4 hours to get one done. I’m doing this in the spirit of giving and for a link crediting CluelessClay (i.e. this blog) for it. :)
Remembered what Jesus said, ”it’s better to give than to receive.” Acts 20:35
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There is this guy, he finds the life he wanted on the blue path.. but after a while, it starts to spiral and he decided to take another path.. but this one soon turns into a big question mark.. life seems exasperating for him!
But human beings are limited.. and sometimes when I encounter such moments of exasperation, I like to think that all these curvy detours that we take are actually all part of fulfilling God’s purpose for us.
Isaiah 55:9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Illustrator tool used.. dash stroke and copy the blue path on the lower map, changed to orange color, delete some points and place over the original blue path!
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Here is the fourth cartoon portrait!
A new tool used in this portrait is the Brush tool.
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Here is the third cartoon portrait!
One new tool which I have used is under the Transparency, choose Darken and insert a % of about 30%. This will change the black color shirt to a lighter greyish tone. Same trick I used on the eyebrows.
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Thanks to everyone who responded and here is the second cartoon portrait.
I’ve missed out mentioning that I will be putting up the cartoon portraits that I have done for you on my blog. However, in view of privacy, I will not post any name or any link that will connect to you unless you wish me to.
The above cartoon portrait is done using Adobe Illustrator and it does take some effort as I’m pretty amateur; below is a screen capture of the different noses, hairs and some tips on the tools used.
1. Using the Gradient Mesh tool - Do check out Veerle’s tutorial on gradient mesh.
This allows for different shading to have a more realistic effect.
2. The hair is not so easy to do.. it’s not perfect I know. I have used a combination of the tools:
Under Effects-> Distort and Transform -> Roughen and then follow up Crystalline
This is after I realised that using one single effect doesn’t quite acheive the effect.
From top right, the effects are Scallop, Crystalline, Pucker and horizontally, it’s Wrinkle, Bloat and followed by the original trace.
3. Noses require some simplification in cartoon and I have tried quite a couple before deciding on the one to use.
4. I have done this initially on .svg file using an open source software but then decided to use illustrator. Unfortunately, I did not save on an .ai file (illustrator format) when I have completed and subsequently could not re-open it on illustrator. So.. well, the source file is gone but the jpeg file still survives :OP
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