Meet Gavin Baloney, Agent to Polar Bears | Just too Cute serie, is an illustration by designer Johnny Yanok. My challenge will be to reproduce the illustration in order to perfect my craft and hopefully learn a lot of new tricks. I love how unique his style is, mixing traditional techniques and digital media ! let's see how that goes for me!

Happy to be here :) 

//// UPDATE #1 ////

Hello everyone. So I've been able to spend a bit of time today on recreating the illustration above. So far, i've focused on building the general shapes. I haven't tackled any texture, shadow detail or anything. My biggest struggle so far is getting smooth curves, they often seem choppy. Colors are not the final ones!

I have to say i'm having a lot of fun recreating this! great exercise! Thanks for the Shift-x trick, it's super useful. 

As far as the textures are concerned, i'd have a tendency to jump into Photoshop at that stage but i'm pretty sure everything can be done inside Illustrator.. let's see! 

//// UPDATE #2 ////

Hello everyone. Here's step 2 of my process. Still have a lot of details/ gradients/textures to add. :)

Feel free to post some feedback! thanks!  

//// UPDATE #3 //// 

Added those little guys tonight. 

//// UPDATE #4 //// 

Ok. So Gavin Baloney was a tough cookie. But i had a LOT of fun and really learned a lot. I might retouch a few things but this is close to my final version. 

//// UPDATE #5 ////

Hey guys! So i made a few touch ups to the illustration. I used larger strokes for the bin, rounded the character's tongue with the smooth tool as suggested and finally chose a tad darker tone for the skin so it contrasts more against the yellow background. Could even be darker maybe. Thanks for the feedback!

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Hey Guys! 

This is a link to Johnny Yanok' site if you want to check more of his awsome work!  :) enjoy !

http://johnnyyanok.com/#work