Zara Picken

Zara Picken's illustration work

Fresh out of uni with a first class degree in illustration, Zara seems to be getting lots of interesting briefs for her highly textured illustartion style with beautiful muted earthy coulors. It’s a style that I’m starting to move towards myself, so good to see that she’s doing well with it :)

Krop – Creative Database

Krop - Creative Database

There’s a lot of simple ‘build yourself an online portfolio with minimum fuss’ sites out there, such as Behance and Carbonmade. But new kid on the block is Creative Database by the design jobs site Krop.

I must say, out of all the one’s I’ve tried, this is definitely the easiest to add your own content and the most pleasurable to view a finished profile. Sadly the free version only lets you upload 10 images, for unlimited uploads you’ve got to pay $10 a month

I’ve made a quick (free) page for myself here, but you should check out a pro user with lots of images to see how the scroll bars and image previews really make it a pleasure to use.

Would be nice if they had some way of browsing/filtering all the current users to discover peoples work, maybe that’s coming once they’ve got a few people registered.

Sign yourself up and start making your portfolio here »

    Via: k10k.

    First proper traverse of the Andes

    Andes traverse photos

    Holy crap someone’s actually done a 7,800 mile continuous traverse of the Andes! I’m sure you’re aware of it’s status as the longest mountain range in the world, because of this I’ve dreamed of doing it (along with Everest of course) since I was a kid. I’ve looked into it many times for reference, but all I could find were stories of people who walked the length of South America, on roads… I wanted to find a story of someone had actually walked the length of the mountain range, not the continent.

    At last I’ve found it (almost a year after they completed it though)Deia Schlosberg (28) and Gregg Treinish (26) managed to do what I wasn’t even sure was possible. Now I’m hungry to follow in their footsteps 2012 Paul?

    andes map

    I’m surprised that it only took them 2 years (665 days), I’d guesstimated it would probably be at least 3. Although if you look at their route, they seemed to missed a fairly big chunk at the top? Oh yeah, it’s Colombia, probably didn’t want to get shot ! Maybe there’s still time for me to be the first person to do it all :)

    Not only were they the first people to backpack the Andes Mountain Range (walk it through the mountains without relying on roads), but also and Deia became the first woman to walk across South America.

    Read their journal »
    • See all their photos from the trip »
    • Check out their video on YouTube »

    Well my hat’s off to you guys, an amazing journey and thoroughly worthy of your best adventure of the year award.

    Via: Best Hike.

    studio aka

    Recycling animation, cardboard

    Just been looking through studio aka’s extensive portfolio of animation. Love pretty much everthing apart from the Lloyds TSB stuff with the weird noses…

    But my favourite of all is the distinctly lo-fi recycling film for Disney (doesn’t look like there’s any deep linking on their site, look for it in the overview or idents section). It’s a mixture of puppeteered live action and stop motion, all kids stuff should be like this, just gives you that warm fuzzy feeling watching it.

    Also the preview of the Lost & Found short film looks awesome too.

    Dropular – a bit like FFFFOUND!

    Every week I get email from people asking if I have any FFFFOUND invites left, once again, no I don’t. But Nicky’s just put me onto this new site Dropular, it’s a bit like FFFFOUND, but you can also grab videos and website links as well as images.

    Anyhow it’s just opened for Beta registration at 9.00am GMT today and is only open for the next 24 hours. So if you’re pissed that you can’t get into FFFFOUND, get your self onto Dropular today.

    And here’s the link to my drops so far.