Tomorrow is my last day at Poke and my last evening in England for the next 6 months or so… I like to leave in style, so I’ve planned a bit of a farewell drinking competition for tomorrow evening :)

Basically I’ve stripped down the much loved pastime of drinking into it’s 5 main skill groups - Buying booze, carrying booze, drinking booze, being pissed & getting the Drunkest. When all the scores are added up at the end of the evening, we’ll find out - Who’s the drunkest?

If the prospect of that wasn’t thrilling enough, the prize for the winner is custodial care of my personal pint mug which Pete keeps behind the bar of the Owl & Pussycat for me. It generates much envy from fellow patrons each week, and could almost certainly ‘get you laid’ ;)

If you want to see me off, I’ll be at the Owl & Pussycat on Redchurch Street from about 6pm. If you want to compete for the prize, or just for fun - download the score sheet here, print it out and bring it along with you. If you want to rehash the game for yourself, feel free to download the original Illustrator file here.

I‘ve finished drawing all the Crank band members and have made a desktop of them rocking out. You get it in Green, Blue, Yellow or Orange, hope you like it. Remember you can also get each character individually here. I’m really enjoying doing all this Poke band stuff, mainly because it’s all nonsense and just a bit of fun, refreshing change to the world of corporate web design!

Hopefully I’ll have time to finish the comic book story of Professor Crankingstein and his monster cock and how that led to the bands creation! More soon…

Blue:

Yellow:

Orange:

Currently I’m making some T-Shirts for the Poke band CRANK! Their first gig is coming up soon, not yet official, but likely to be April 16th at On the Rocks. Above is the design for one of them, he’s kind of a cross between Captain Caveman and the Wombles… Don’t really now why? Anyhow’s brighten up your desktop with him by downloading the image here.

Update:

Flying V guitars rule! Download this one here.

Another update:

Rocking out with his cock out… Should probably explain that the name for the band Crank came from the word cranking, meaning crying & wanking simultaneously. Just so you don’t think I randomly drew a cock on it! Download this one here.

More updates:

If you know the Poke band, you might be able to guess which member this is, smashing his guitar to bits. Download the slightly less hairy rocker here.

And finally:

The drummer completes the set! Download Mattias here.

As I posted about before, Andy Whitlock from Now in Colour is running Early Designs and wants us all to show some examples of our early work and talk about how it compares to the work we’re producing now. It slightly pains me to unearth all this ancient work, but I agree with the principle that it’s quite an interesting thing to see, so here’s some examples of my Early Designs:

Illustration:

I’d say my illustration style has changed a lot over the years. But actually after going through a load of old sketches and stuff, I’d say my hand hand drawn illustration hasn’t changed much at all.

Some stuff like life drawing, I was much better at then than I am now!

I think it’s the tools I use that have changed, this has had the biggest effect on my illustration. The early illustration examples above are hand drawn, pencil and ink. Spirit marker & pencil crayon. I started during 2000 (because of flash) producing vector illustrations, but these were still scanned in ink drawings, then ran through streamline. God do you remember streamline :P

Nowadays in 2008 I use Illustrator as my primary drawing tool. Which generally gives my work a more stylised & simplified look. I think my hand drawn sketches are quite similar to those of the past though.

Design:

I didn’t think I’d have much direct comparison work to show because I didn’t do web or multimedia design at Uni, I was a industrial designer back in the day. So my work (few examples above) is of products not websites. Even though it’s quite different, I can see my sense of fun in the handheld Sgt. Smiles teeth cleaning game for kids. Also my love of all things ancient and industrial, in the timer dials of the flip-top microwave.

Above is more recent web design work, not really a direct comparison, but I think has a similar mood? But wait, while looking through all the old stuff I unearthed a CD containing the first ever website I built! I kind of forgotten that I’d build websites back as early as 2000 - so bear in mind that this was the first thing done by someone self taught… Now re-uploaded and not seen on the web since 2000, here’s one of my final year projects at University called Jibber-Jabber. Makes me cringe a bit, but I am impressed by the amount of man hours that went into that thing…Blighmy when did I ever find time to do any drinking!

Some things haven’t changed much though. I’ve always liked making charts, diagrams and interesting ways of keeping scores. Above is a birthday scorecard type thing I made for a mates 20th birthday. You can see how the more recent King & Queen of Sports scorecard below, is kind of like an evolution along the same lines.

That’s pretty much me done. Hope you enjoyed looking at my old work alongside more recent stuff to see how it compares. Now it’s your turn! Unearth those old college sketch books and post your own Early Designs.

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a long long time but never got round to - Illustrate myself as a playing card! Before I started I had a quick look on the web to see if anyone had a vector playing card templates I could edit, couldn’t find any… I’m sure it’d be a fairy handy thing for folk, so I’ve uploaded the illustrator file of my version of the King for you to download and use as you please. I’ll try and get round to finishing the rest of the deck at some point, but don’t hold your breath!

Asite I designed and illustrated a while ago has just launched today, it’s the Are you British in Bed Quiz or K-Y Jelly ;)

They’ve got a new product out in the UK called Touch Massage, or how we had to refer to it endlessly in the site - K-Y® brand TOUCH MASSAGE® 2-in-1 Tingling or Warming… that rolls off the tongue nicely doesn’t it! Anyhow it’s a combination of pussy rub and massage oil, to get you all sexed up in the bedroom.

We basically built a sex quiz located in a passport control booth (I didn’t think of the idea!). It’s pretty well done if I don’t say so myself, Dezza & Russ did the flash development, Mattias did the HTML and FaceBook application. So on give it a go, it is actually pretty funny.

If you just want to get your hands on the lube, it’s available from Boots here »

Can you Adam & Eve it, today I’ve posted about titty twisters, crocheted cocks and now I’m posting an illustration of me and Nicky in the buff, not bad start to the week ;) Download this week’s Desktop here »

If you’re like me and generally try to do your daily blogging at lunchtime, you might need this weeks desktop - Get back to work, STOP blogging! Because there’s never enough time is there..?

Arrr, so ye be wantin’ t some booty? Then ye best download this weeks desktop har, it’s another sticker I be doin’ for visitors to the good ship Poke. Aye.

By popular demand, this is as demo of how I draw with Illustrator ;) To be honest I’m completely un-aware of how other illustrators use it and I’ve never had any lessons or read an instruction manual, this is just what what works for me. I always start with a scanned in sketch, I only draw directly on a blank page if it’s something really simple or geometric. I’ll not get into drawing and sketching here, might write another post about that some other time. I generally lock the layer the sketch is on then draw over it on another layer with the pen tool. Hopefully by watching the video you should get the idea, below is a bit more in-depth info.

The pen tool:

This is what Illustrator is all about for me, the pen tool is pretty much the only thing I use. I know a lot of people that don’t use Illustrator because they can’t get the hang of the pen tool, I suppose it isn’t that intuitive, but it’s pretty simple once you get the hang of it. Click and stretch - everytime you put an anchor point down you can move your cursor while the mouse button is held down to affect the curve. If for example you’re drawing a ’s’ shape and you want the curve to flow gracefully one way to the next, just keep adding anchor points and Illustrator automatically flows the curve (no idea what the proper technical terms are for this stuff!) If you want to make a hard corner you hold down the Apple key (cursor turns to little white arrow) and click the canvas (not on the line). Now if you click on the last anchor point you can carry on as before and send the line off at a sharp angle.

Tweaking the handles:

This is the key really, you try and draw it right with the pen tool, but you’ve always got to select the odd anchor with your little white arrow at some point and tweak them. Just click it, move it around, pull it’s handles in & out until your curves are looking just right. You can hold down the Apple key to get this tool while using the pen.

Colour palette:

It’s down to personal preference I suppose, but I like to use the HSB colour palette over RGB or CMYK for making the colours I use. Mainly because I prefer my colours unsaturated - you can find the Hue you want with the top slider (H), then I generally take the saturation down a bit (S) slider and add a bit of black (B).

Pathfinder palette:

This is a really handy palette that I’m always using. Not sure what half the stuff does, but (1) joins shapes together - remember to click expand afterwards (from the menu bar: Object > Expand) And (2) divides over lapping shapes - remember to ungroup afterwards (from the menu bar: Object > Ungroup) Trust me, they are more useful than they sound!

Any questions just ask! I’ll try and update this post with feedback. Confused about of pork nose? Just playing around with the Poke’s logo, which my missis designed incidently.

Here’s a quick tutorial showing how to make your illustration/graphics look like they’re printed. This is pretty much the same as the first tutorial, only we’ll be using different textures for the image than the background. For this example I’m re-creating my Cookie’s Plonk desktop wallpaper.

This is our starting point, check here to download the Photoshop file I’ve used.

1. Create a layer mask. Open the image you want to look printed. If you want you can download the image I’ve used here. Click the mask button on the bottom of the layer panel (1).

2. Add some paper texture. If you’re using my photoshop file, select the Textured Paper layer and copy it. Then re-select the image layer and click the channels tab (1). Select the bottom layer (alpha channel) and paste in the texture (2).

Return to the layers tab, and click the image layer. You can see above that the flat colour illustration now has the texture of the paper.

3. Add some wear & tear. To make it look a bit more realistic you might want to add some extra wear and tear. First you need to apply the first mask, select from the menu Layer > Layer Mask > Apply. Then repeat step 2 but use the dirty paper layer instead of textured paper this time.

The finished image:

Here’s the finished image! If you quickly scroll up and quickly compare it to the starting point - it’s good at taking the edge off crisp vector graphics, making them look warmer, friendlier & more real I think.

Today I’ve been making stickers for Poke’s visitors to wear in our building. If you’d like this half dog, half rat type creature on your desktop, download in here »

Iposted a while back about the amusement the word cranking was giving us in the office (crying + wanking). Well it amused us enough for the Poke band to call themselves Crank in it’s honor! They’ve got their first gig coming up at the next ClubPub, which I can’t wait for :)

I had a few spare minutes this afternoon so had a go at creating them a logo… Not sure if they’ll like, but if you do, you can download it as a desktop here »

Hmmm… Smells like Chicken! Just opened for voting on Threadless is my latest tee design, based on the box of wine I made for the cardboard party. If you have a spare minute please head over and vote 5 points for me :)

International King & Queen of Sports is the perfect way to break the ice, entertain and woo the girl/guy of your dreams! Well it’s a bit of fun anyhow… I made it for a valentines a few years ago and thought it was about time I dusted it off and gave it a second outing. Basically it’s a competitive drinking / pubcrawl type game designed for 2 people.

What you get:

• An editable Illustrator file of both the King & Queen score cards
• 2 chest numbers to print out and attach while competing
• Full instructions & rules and regulations of how to play

Download the free King & Queen of Sports Illustrator files here. Feel free to use it in anyway you see fit. For those of you who don’t have Illustrator, you can download a set of pdf’s of the scorecards and numbers here.

There’s 17 mini games to play (you don’t have to complete them all) here’s a basic description of them in order:

1. Tally up your pints, 10 points each - remember this isn’t a date, it’s a pub crawl, so drink!
2. Highest free standing tower - Think empire states building, iron girders and all - use the marshmellows as joints and the spaghetti as girders. You might need to get a referee to judge the tallest if it’s a close call.
3. Darts is obvious, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a pub with a board these days…
4. Bar Billiards - tricky one, the only pub I know of in London which has it is the Owl and Pussycat on Redchurch Street in Shoreditch. You’re in luck though, as it’s also the finest pub in the whole of London so should definitely be on your list of pubs to crawl to.
5. Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarghing the longest - this is a game inspired by one of the GI Joe clips over at Fensler film. Basically you both start saying ‘baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrr’, first person to run out of breath loses.
6. Beer mats tossed - flip ‘em and then catch ‘em.
7. Biggest bubble gum bubble.
8. Table football - some folk call it fussball, you all know how to play
9. The trussing game - this is my favourite, it’s an old Victorian parlour game, but requires some diagrams to properly explain… google it, I’ll try and do a proper post about it later.
10. Dominoes
11. Karaoke - you need a referee to judge
12. The splits - you know trying to touch the floor with your crotch while your legs are straight - the lady will more likely win this one.
13. Portraits - drawing each other (you’ll need so paper and pens) - you also need a referee to judge.
14. Pool
15. Derek Zoolander Award - most outrageous clothing on the day bags these points.
16. Best banter (mutual decision)
17. French Kissing - save this for last!

You should also have with you a bottle of Champagne, so at the end of the night when the scores are added up, the winner can spray it all over the loser, grand-prix style.