Lu Matthews Illustrator

Line work created in PowerCADD, rendering in Photoshop.

Since I switched from the drawing board and airbrush, I've worked almost entirely in Photoshop creating airbrush-style illustrations for advertising agencies and companies.

In the drawing you see here, I was commissioned by AMF Bowling to create an illustration that showed how a bowling alley is made. I needed to create precision linework as the basis for the drawing, so I created a line drawing in PowerCADD and then took this into Photoshop. At the time I did it, I actually printed the linework on film and then scanned this into Photoshop. Today I would just save the drawing in Illustrator format and import the paths into Photoshop and then stroke the paths.

The final illustration is 600 dpi and 18" wide, and it's a 94 MB file in Photoshop.

Lu Matthews

Lu Matthews

Lu Matthews is a commercial artist in Richmond, Virginia, specializing in artwork for advertising, and he's a long-time friend and associate of WildTools author Alfred Scott. He is one of the most talented airbrush artists on the east coast, and all of you have seen his work at some point. He no longer works with an airbrush, and instead works almost entirely in Photoshop and uses Illustrator and PowerCADD to create the paths that he takes into Photoshop for 'air brushing'. Telephone: (804) 798-9144. Email: luonardo@richmond.infi.net

How the bowling alley drawing was created...

Lu drew the original isometric linework in PowerCADD

Here's a detail from the drawing above.

Then rendered in Photoshop

And another close-up view

Then rendered in Photoshop.