Along with some other RecLab stuff (which is coming along nicely), this week I finally tackled a little project that I’ve been thinking about for a while. Unlike most of the RecLab work this was much more artistic than technical. I built the first first hand drawn icons for the site.
I knew that I wanted custom instrument, track, and song icons so I started out with a small set of 8 (with plans to make more as we need them). I did these icons the same way I do my comics: first drawing in pencil, then inking, then scanning into Photoshop, then cleaning up the lines and adding color in Illustrator. They had to look good at a wide range of sizes: 400px to 30px so I didn’t add too much detail.
To handle what I think will be the most commonly used instruments I started with (electric) guitar, (electric) bass, drums, keys, vocals, sax (perhaps my own bias), percussion, and general track.
So here they are!
Guitars are still hard to draw.
I used a small pallet of colors for all the icons in the hopes of creating an overall cohesive effect when they all get seen together on the site. Bobby doesn’t like the percussion one very much and he’s probably right. It’s my least favorite too, but this seems like a good start and really adds some nice visual variety to the site. Plus it’s always fun to draw things!