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:

Here’s how they drink in Iceland, we’ll miss you Jolly.

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 »

For some reason Buzz’s beard looks a bit fake in this shot, but I can assure you it’s real, Rolf Harris himself would be proud.

Oh poor buzz, it’s started a bit of a trend…

Or is it Michael Moore? Nah, it’s Alex ;)

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.

Mike Pearson is a project manager here at Poke, I knew he loved (& was very good at) making things, after he knocked up our burping booth last year. But I didn’t realise how deep his eccentric hobbyist building went until he turned up to work the other day with a remote controlled steam powered tank?!?! T’is a thing of bizarre beauty, you can read all about it on his blog Questioneering, see pictures of it on his Flickr, and you’ve got to check out his video of it here »

Good work Mike :) Can’t wait to see want’s next!

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 »

Great time was had by all, above is my effort at a David Boon (legendary Aussie Cricketer) costume. Marc has uploaded the obligatory Flickr set of the evening. Worthy of note is the new ClubPub hat that Vasco is sporting in the top right, if your 15min CD mix is playing you have to wear this hat.

Australia Day ClubPub this Wednesday, 30th Jan. Ok so we’re going to be a bit late, Australia Day is on the 26th, but better late than never! Poke’s always had a good amount of Australian employees so were celebrating the founding of their land down under :) We’re moving slightly away from Shoreditch for this one to the Pleasure Unit on Bethnal Green Road – Map. Not been before, but apparently it’s a bit retro and psychadelic, also they’re about to re-fit the place so it doesn’t matter if we trash it. It used to be a gay pub called the Cock & Comfort, what a class name! Get yourself into your tightest shorts & cork hat and head on down, should a good night.

Also I think we’re bringing back by popular demand the GIF Jockey 2.0, so if anyone has an amusing animated GIFs send them my way!

Another POKE blog in one day!

This time it’s Greg who’s got his act together and made peeklondon »

Looks great Greg! I love the extra large first letter caps & the huge quotes. Apparently the link background colours change according to what time of day it is, nice touch :) I blogged a while back about Greg’s fantastic photography incase you missed it.

Tags are back! This one is probably of no interest to anyone but me, but I’ve set up a Yahoo Pipe to aggregate just about everything on the web that is tagged with “cookie”, you can view the output of it here »

It’s dead easy to set up, I just cloned a pipe Nico made to aggregate design links within poke, you see that pipe here » its a surprisingly simple solution to suck in content from a whole variety of web services, all you’ve got to do is tag things with a relatively unique tag.