Adobe Photoshop
Compositing, painting and colour
The core surface. Layers, masks and custom brush work carry most of the painting, retouching and colour decisions across the archive.
Inside the studio
Ira Zoot works entirely digitally. The tools change; the decisions do not. Every piece in the archive is still about mark, surface, light and colour — made on screen rather than on canvas, and finished at full resolution long before it reaches this website.
The toolkit
What the work is made with
No single app makes a picture. Each one does the part it is genuinely best at.
Adobe Illustrator
Vector structure
Used where an edge has to stay clean at any size — shapes, marks and repeatable geometry that later get painted into or printed on product.
Corel Painter
Brush behaviour
Brushes that respond like real media. Impasto and Stroker work leans on this for load, drag and directional pressure.
3D and generative tools
Form, light and pattern
Volumes, reflections and procedural texture are built in 3D and generative apps, then taken back into 2D for painting and finishing.
Digital camera
Source imagery
The photographs in the archive are digital captures. Some stand as photographs; others become the raw material for a painted piece.
From blank to finished
How a piece comes together
Four stages, repeated in different orders depending on whether the work starts as a photograph or as a mark.
Stage 01
Start with a mark or a capture
A piece begins either behind the camera or with the first stroke — a shape, a texture, a colour that suggests where the image wants to go.
Stage 02
Build the surface
Layers accumulate. Brushwork, vector structure and 3D-derived texture are stacked, warped and blended until the surface has real depth.
Stage 03
Push the colour
Colour is tuned last and hardest — saturation, temperature and the small neutral passages that let the loud colour read as intentional.
Stage 04
Finish at full resolution
Every finished piece is kept at its original high resolution. Site images are previews; prints and products are produced from the master file.
Preview on screen, master in the studio
Every image on iZoot.com is a preview-resolution version, sized for fast, sharp viewing in a browser. Prints, wearables and licensed reproductions are always produced from the original high-resolution artwork, regardless of the size shown here.