Blue Boy by xeophin-net

I hate Illustrator. I really hate it. Yet it has those cool gradient meshes that make for great effects, but are themselves a pain in the a*** to use. But as Illustrator doesn't get gradients done by FreeHand, this was the only way to go.

The illustration was done for a poster. First intended just to show my "customers" how vector illustration would look, they decided that the boy was looking good enough to appear on the poster. So I cleaned it up, changed colour and added the final text in InDesign.

This is a version without the text and a slightly different placement than the poster that's going to print.

Original traced in FreeHand and coloured in Illustrator.