It’s been some time since I posted last, but it’s been super busy this summer and to top that off I began a new webcomic called Robot Friday that posts daily so my time management has been a little squirrly as of late.

At any rate I wanted to post up a recent coloring job that I did on the Robot Friday logo. As you may recall I created the logo few years back for a project I wanted to develop at that time. Sadly, that project never got off the ground and I was able to salvage the logo with the webcomic – trust me, the relevance of the name will become apparent in later comic strips.

Until this past weekend I had not had the time to put color to the logo and, to be honest, I wasn’t really sure how I wanted to approach it anyway. As you will be able to follow in the recorded “tutorial”  that I created, I finally settled on a steampunk approach to the color. Since the logo already had a “grinding gears” feel to it I thought that steampunking it out would be nice. Another reason I decided on the steampunk feel was that I REALLY have fallen in love with the new gradient tool in Adobe Illustrator CS4. The new tool takes a little bit to adjust to, especially if you are used to the earlier Illustrator versions of it, but once you get it to work for you MAN it’s great! I also added in a texture to the coloring as well to experiment a little bit. I haven’t worked with textures like this very much in my past work, but have always admired designers that could pull it off. I feel like it worked out pretty well in conveying what I was going for. You can get the textures I used and many more at Artbackwash.com.

To sum it all up, if you check out the desktop wallpaper above and the recorded tutorial you can see that it came out pretty nicely. I will be doing more coloring in Illustrator in the near future, advancing the skills that I already have. So I’ll keep the posts coming as I get future projects done