Jungle Cats!

The other day I read an article about how to create a seamless repeating pattern. This jungle cat pattern is my first go, I think it's okay, it could probably be more 'seamless' though!

Numbers, croc teeth and one lovely lady

WHEW! Busy busy busy busy busy. All of these are Photoshop, with the exception of the lady, who was painted with gouache on pastel paper.

Illustre was great! So much wonderful work. I met some really awesome illustrators and designers from NMIT and met some people from the industry too. I even managed to sell a few pieces and win an award! Wooohoo!!

Best of all though, I met someone who was very interested in my work. And I am going to see them on Tuesday and show them my portfolio. So I am very excited and super nervous as well, but it's so cool. I am one very happy illustrator right now!!

Will post more soon, but for now, back to work!

FIVE!

Brought to you by the number 5! Hoo-rah! The giraffe has 5 spots, and he is eating 5 leaves.

My beary good friend

Uh oh! Better keep out of this angry bull's way.... I drew him to go with my happiness bear. I'm also going to do a pelican and a wolf.





Also, I'm doing a series of black and white ink drawings for my portfolio.

The theme I chose for the first few drawings is a story about a boy who wants a pet- but he doesn't want a boring cat or an annoying yappy dog. He wants something FEROCIOUS - a lion, or a tiger, or a crocodile....

One day while on his lengthy walk home, he finds a bear. Next to the bear is a sign saying 'freE BEaR'. Could he have finally gotten his wish...??

How does a tiger brush his teeth?

We have an awesome little project at school that I've been scheming and planning for kind of slowly. It's an artist book and we have free reign over everything, pretty much. I want my book to be a fun and playful exploration of images, type and colour, and I want it to be chock-full of animals of course!

So here's a peak at one of the pages I've finished today. How DOES a tiger brush his teeth? I'm not really sure but it seemed something interesting enough to make into a cute picture.




And here's a close up of the tiger. I'm quite proud of him! Rawr!

Zebracorn

Fun little image I'm doing for a series of little promotional cards. I was originally going to paint it but, for some reason I ended up doing it in Photoshop instead. I think I've been agonising way too much over these pieces and want to get them out of the way quickly.

I showed this to a friend who liked it, but mentioned that the girl's pants blended in a bit much and were hard to make out. So I did a little bit of a colour change and the difference is huge!



Looks a lot better I think!

I uploaded the colour rough before, but just thought I'd show it again.

Boa Lady

I am thinking I'd like to jazz up my website a bit. Maybe with a bit of artwork for the title of each page. This lady is an idea for one such artwork, inspired by the Dr Sketchy's session I went to last week.

Patchwork Lion + website is online!

Here's a quick pic I did in class today. I had a lot of fun experimenting and playing with fabric and patterned textures! I also decided I have too many tigers, crocodiles and bears, so I figured it'd be nice to do a different animal for a change. In this case, a ferocious circus lion who looks more like a plush doll... teehee.

Also, in other news, my website Bearprints.com.au is online! Hoo-rah!!

Owly!

Just a little more illustrator practice, nothing spectacular... I'll tell you what though, I'm having a hard time enjoying anything that I make lately, so I'm not very happy at the moment. Oh well.

Tiger head

I feel like I need to do more work in Illustrator and get good at doing vector illustrations, so here's a 10 minute tiger head for a bit of pre-bed practice. RAWR!

Underbed Pigs and clucky duckies

The two other monsters to go with my nose ghouls for the monster competition! The first is a 'Long-Legged Underbed Pig', an anxious monster who likes collecting rocks and living quietly under your bed. The other is a 'Quarking Duck', a silly duck who wears boots and marches in a line, stomping around.

Hat girls

Vector illustration. Been pretty sick lately so not much else to report.

Hat Lady

This is a sketch for a drawing I am doing to be a part of the design for a nice lady's website. The client is a milliner and she makes really pretty hats! Originally, I had a design that was quite nice but it looked a bit drab, and not very bright and fashiony. I'm still using this design but changing a lot of it, and adding this soon to be finished drawing to spice it up a little.

Monsters up to no good!

It's finished! Though I might tweak it here and there later. It was certainly a challenge getting all these characters into the one picture but it was a fun piece to do. Onto the next monster now, however I won't be posting any more monsters until after I've sent my entries in!

I also went to the Zoo yesterday, I have loads of drawings to scan, and I'll get around to doing em eventually.

Monsters in progress

Nose ghouls! AAHH! I've never done so many characters in the one picture before, and I figured doing this many in one photoshop file would mean billions of layers and lots of frustration. So I am doing one monster at a time seperately, then I'll bring them all together. It's also a good exercise in making characters consistant. I'm hoping to finish this one today and move onto the second monster... which is a duck!

Bearprints Type

Playing around with some type ideas for my website Bearprints.com.au. I'm having fun playing around with typography! Anyway, I wanted a fun, hand-done look for my site and business cards, and I also wanted to incorperate the bear print somewhere in there. At first it was going to be some background element but I decided it'd be better if it was actually on one of the letters.

Business bear and tiger man!

Whew, home at last after a fairly productive day at Tafe, I would say... this happy bear is going to make his home on the front of my business card! I have heaps of fun making this and by the time I had finished, my headache had gone away!


And these are some concepts for a drawing piece. It's looking a little bit too 'Disney' for my liking at the moment but it's getting there.

Book Cover Final

I think I'm pretty happy with it but it looks a bit tackier than I thought it would be. Sadly, I am not a fantastic designer, though I wish I was. Great design makes me happy.

10 10 10!!!!

After a nice morning out shopping with mum, I did some more work on my Books Alive cover. The book's title is quite long - '10 Short Stories you Must Read This Year'. With a title like this, you really have to think a lot about hierarchy and the way the text is arranged on the page. If all of the text is treated equally, the importance of certain words is lost, and it doesn't have much of an impact on the viewer. If some of the text is too small or faint or hard to see, it becomes unbalanced and confusing.

The most important part of this title is '10', followed closely by 'short stories'. That's what this book is - a compilation of short stories, duh! Also, I placed emphasis on the word 'must'. Because it's a strong word and I felt I should treat it that way. And although it isn't capitolised, it's still stronger than the following words. You MUST read these stories. You must read these stories.

All that is left to do basically is the illustration of the owls, which I've decided will also be done in Photoshop. I really want to give this illo a real retro cartoon character look - solid, clean lines and sort of a silk-screen printed look.



This was a fun part - making the text pretty. For this design it was really imperitive that the title of the book was as much a piece of artwork as the rest of it. I used a cool font called 'Big Top' for the number 10, and then decorated it some more. They key to this is clever use of the Selection and Stroke tools:

• select the 10
• create a new layer
• modify > contract the selection by about 20 pixels or so
• use the Stroke tool, be sure the stroke is located INSIDE the selection
• repeat and experiment with various weights and colours
• and remember to create a new layer for each thing you do so you don't ruin anything you like!

I hope that makes sense. Here's a bit of a step-by-step series to give you an idea of what I did.

TIGER TIGER TIGER

Our first assignment for computer class was to design an image that was to be printed on a t-shirt. It had to be fairly simple with no really fine detail, and we also had to incorperate some text. Originally I had the tiger yelling 'RAWR RAWR RAWR' but like 3 other people in my class also did cats that were saying 'rawr' so I went for something a bit different.

But really what's not to like about a tiger screaming 'TIGER!'? He's making himself known, and declaring his place in the world!

I'm pretty happy with the result, especially the text. I really like adobe illustrator now and will use it a lot more in my future work.