This whole piece kind of happened by accident.  I’ll explain.

It started out as a background I was drawing in paint in my downtime, just roughing things out as I was bored.  I took the layout and brought it in to Illustrator to clean up and work with, and got a little carried away.  I was just going to do a rough layout I could work with in Photoshop, but I kept adding highlights and shadows and details, and eventually had something I was proud of.  At this point, I was thinking, I’ll take it into Photoshop and use it for the background in a simple 3 panel comic.  But I didn’t.  I kept on in Illustrator, creating vector versions of Bo, Jasper, and our two new guys.  I was really happy with how they turned out too.

I sent it over to the wifey, who asked for a desktop version, so I resized it and added some text and a word bubble (which sadly covered up a bunch of the background I’d done) and sent it over.  Then I realized I should share with others.

So download a high resolution background (1900 x 1200) and don’t forget to visit the Facebook Fan Page to give your input on the two new guys names!

Click it to big it.

Techy side note: Super proud of how the stubble turned out.  I did it as a scatter brush where a single piece of stubble is repeated and scattered at random intervals with random sizes, keeping their orientation in line with the curve of the path, giving a sense of shape and depth.  The lighting and shadowy lines were done similarly.  Illustrator rocks!