Cliff Knecht Artist Representative
Your trusted illustration resource for over 20 years // Call me at +1 412 761 5666
Peter’s wild and humorous digital illustrations are created in Painter, Illustrator, and Photoshop. His area of expertise is the children’s market where he has illustrated numerous children’s books and products including extensive work in elementary textbooks. He has created games, mazes, doodle books for kids, comic strips, and web site art to name a few. Kids just love his art!!
A recent zany illustration by Peter Grosshauser for Highlights/Book Series called Hidden Pictures Super Challenge. Check his portfolio for more art!
Shahab is an award winning international illustrator who lives and works near Florence, Italy. He has a distinct whimsical, quirky, colorful style that is achieved through a combination of mixed media and Photoshop to produce digital files for clients. His area of expertise includes character design, comics, greeting cards, and wonderful picture books for children and young adults.
Larry Jones has created a series of new illustrations that digitally show a nice clean design look. The art is built in Illustrator and then textured in Photoshop. Something to think about for your next project!
George Schill’s assignment was for the Media Bullpen, the Center for Education Reform’s website which brings accountability to national education reporting and “scores” stories across the media. The site redesign was to have a baseball theme, and George was called upon to create a series of banners and spot art using education, baseball, and media metaphors. Here is a typical sheet of idea doodles sent to the client. 
After approvals and working with their color palette, the final art was created in Photoshop. Here is a sampling of banners and spot art that is used throughout the site. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge.
When talking to clients about my work as an illustrator, one of the most frequently asked questions is how I go about painting assignments digitally. So here is a step by step procedural, taking a painting from initial drawing to fully rendered, final art.
Santa Claus has been a frequent illustration subject over the years and I have several different treatments of Santa figures drawn up in my sketchbook. I chose one of those to use as the basis for this demo.
Nearly all of my work begins with a traditional pencil on paper drawing. The drawing gets scanned into my system and opened in Photoshop, where it can be cleaned up and adjusted. I like to work on a toned background, so I import a favorite backdrop and use it as a base layer. The drawing layer, now floating above the Background, is changed to a Multiply layer style, made to look like a sepia ink drawing, and the opacity is lowered to 50%.
I move the art to Painter, which I like to use for it’s natural look and feel. I create a new layer, between the canvas pencil layers, and paint in some basic values with an airbrush tool. A background is created to give Santa an environment to stand in.
On another new layer, I begin to lay in local color. I like Painter’s Chalk and Pastel brush categories and use them often, here with Flat Cover on basic paper settings, to give a firmer edge. I like to work over the entire painting at the same time, moving between background and foreground.
Color block-in continues. I want some texture in the illustration, so I use Painter’s Square Chalk brush variant with a heavily textured paper setting on the walls. The drawing remains the top layer acting as a blueprint to keep everything on track.
When the basics are laid down I begin to refine the painting, adding color and rendering form. The moon is added outside the window as a source for some rim light on Santa.
At this point I am far enough along that I can collapse most of the layers into one. I always make a duplicate of the drawing layer first, in case I need to use it as a reference point later on. I usually work with as few layers as practical. This allows the painting tools to interact in a much more natural, traditional media, way.
A view of trees and snow outside gives Santa a winter setting, and the diamond pattern adds an Old World look to the window.
All that’s left now are a few details. Santa gets some overstuffed pockets, the wall gets a trim board, a bit of flash here and there, some minor tweaks, and the painting is complete.
In the beginning of 2011 Peter Grosshauser was asked by Project WET to create artwork for a website they were building. Project WET (Water Education for Teachers) is based in Bozeman, MT and they provide educational materials all over the world concerning water and water use. Peter has been working for them for many years and they wanted the artwork to reflect the same style he used to illustrate nearly 50 kids books for them previously. The assignment was to create an interactive, animated web game that would be fun for children. Basically Peter’s job was to create all the frames, borders, and all the different elements that were involved in each subtopic and game. Each character illustrated had to be in different layers (different layers for arms, legs, tails, etc…) for animation purposes.
His favorite part of this project was creating the home page globe with all the different elements on different layers which spin at different speeds. The Blue Traveler game was also fun to create. Peter worked with Big Bad Tomato out of Los Angeles for this section of the web site. All illustrations were created in Painter and Photoshop while listening to many hours of the Ricky Gervais podcasts! View this fun site at – http://www.discoverwater.org/
George has been providing award winning conceptual art for years for the advertising, corporate, and editorial markets. He is extremely conceptual in coming up with ideas to solve the needs of clients. His illustrations are created digitally in Photoshop and at times creates acrylic paintings on canvas that are converted into Photoshop files.
John creates artwork for advertising, editorial, and publishing clients using a variety of traditional and digital media. Completed assignments range from point of purchase displays, magazine ads, board games, children’s books, ebooks etc. Many of his projects involve painting people in a representative style, along with animals/dinosaur art using both a realistic and anthropomorphic approach. He paints regularly with traditional methods, mixed media/acrylic on board, but most illustration projects are painted digitally using Photoshop and Corel Painter.
Larry is an extremely versatile artist providing illustrations for all facets of our business. He has created cartoon characters, children’s illustration, mazes, board games, retro art, picturebooks, and editorial work to name a few. His work can be produced both traditional and all digital in Photoshop and Illustrator.
Cliff Knecht Artist Representative 