Category Archives: Illustration

Layer Tennis Results

Cook vs Crowle - Layer tennis

Game set and match to Rex by the look of the votes. If you missed it, you can still view the match volley by volley here » I think in the heat of the moment I kind of forgot about the ‘layer’ aspect of the game… The advantage of us both being in the same room was I could see what Rex was drawing and start sketching ideas for my return volley before my 15min had even started. But that kind of led to me just doing a doodle and not re-using any of the layers. Nevermind, it was a great match and we both had fun, especially the post match drinks :)

I was impressed with the speed that Rex could knock out full colour visuals. My usual style is to pencil sketch, scan, then work up vector outlines and then colour last. Not a hope in hell I could get all that done in 15min, so I just stuck to the pencil sketches. Rex though works straight into photoshop with a Wacom tablet, it was quite an eye opener, might have to get one and give it a go.

Thanks again to Anne for her commentry, check out her reflections on the game. And of course thanks to Coudal for inviting us to play :)

Here’s the both of us in action:

Playing layer tennis

Layer Tennis

Layer Tennis

This very exciting news – me and Rex Crowle will be playing in an All-English bout of Coudal Partner’s Layer Tennis this Friday. The idea is we swap a photoshop file back and forth every 15min over a match of 10 ‘volleys’. I’ve no idea how it’s going to pan out, but I suspect they’ll be much doodling of monsters, moustaches and general mayhem.

I think we’re going to create a little lawn tennis club in my front room, I’m going to paint my desk to look like a little tennis court with our Macs either side. Obviously we’ll be quaffing Pimms and munching strawberries & cream in between each volley.

The match kicks off 4pm Greenwich Mean Time and lasts about 2 and a half hours.  Sign up for your free season tickets here and watch it live on the internets!

To get a flavour of what it’s all about, check out last weeks match between Jason Santa Maria & Derek Powazek. Jason also wrote an interesting account of the match here »

Grip Wrench

Grip Wrench

Ah great, Rex’s animated series Grip Wrench is now online! All 10 episodes are on there, featuring Hollywood hardman, Vietnam veteran and fearless patriot – Grip Wrench.

This is Rex’s favourite episode ‘Keep Safe with Grip Wrench’ is embeded above, I’m a big fan on Conad the Barbarian, sounds like gonad, probably one of my favourite testical gags to date :)

Grip Wrench

You can also download a tonne Grip Wrench goodies (meat) for your iPhone and computer here »

Follow Grip Wrench on Twitter

Why not follow GripWrench on Twitter, latest tweet – “Eating a piggy for lunch. His face is crunchy! Ha! Ha!”…

Doodles on white sofa

Also Rex has posted a few pictures of Julie’s white sofa that she bravely let us all attack with sharpie markers during her house warming party. I think it maybe needs another round to completey fill in all the white space…

Done Manifesto

Done Manifesto

Some wise words about getting shit done – The Cult of Done Manifesto by Bre Pettis and Kio Stark, illustartion by James Provost.

  1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
  2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
  3. There is no editing stage.
  4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
  5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
  6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
  7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
  8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
  9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
  10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
  11. Destruction is a variant of done.
  12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
  13. Done is the engine of more.

Via: Frank.

Kevin Dart

Illustration by Kevin Dart

Kevin looks like he’s been busy drawing his 007 inspired character Kimiko Suzuki (Yuki 7), he makes up his own wonderfully titled (I’m sure Ian Flemming would be proud) fictitious movies and illustrates the posters, generally with a good amount of bikini clad Bond girls in ;). I’m loving – The Deadly Bikini Girls of Shark Island, Mr. Broccoli should take note and put a bit of sauce back into the Bond franchise. Check out his illustration portfolio & blog here. Also you can buy his prints from Fleet Street Scandal.

Illustration by Kevin Dart

You can tell from his style that he used to work as a background artist – he did the BBC Olympics 2008 indents (the ones with Jamie Hewitt’s Monkey).

Illustration by Kevin Dart

He’s working on a book of his Yuki 7 movie posters (not released yet) and is doing a unique poster style for each regional release. I love this French version, which he says was “inspired by an exhibition about street posters from the Paris rebellion of 1968, as well as a bit of Saul Bass.”

Cargo – portfolio site

cargo collective portfolio site

Pay close attention to this post dear blog readers – this portfolio site is 100% free and 200% awesome! I’ve tried out many portfolio systems over the past year, this is head and shoulders above the rest and won’t cost you a penny to have a play, can’t say fairer than that eh? It evolved out of the system that runs the SpaceCollective community, so has a fair fine heritage.

Cargo is largely much like all the others, but what makes it so briliant is down to a few key features like:

  • A strong focus of design and visuals – it’s all about the images
  • Navigation is a full page of projects thumbnails, the defacto best way of naviagting visual work
  • Simple enough for the novice, but enough advanced features to keep the seasoned developer happy
  • Unlimited – uploads, projects, customisation, fun.

What you get:

  • A choice of excellent themes to style your site
  • CSS editor to fine tune or completey customise your site
  • Well maintained forum with lots of top tips
  • Free Hosting
  • Ability to set up a custom URL (www.example.com)

My Cargo porfolio site

I’ve been playing around with it for a week or so, you can see the quick & dirty portfolio I’ve knock up here »

Here’s some other great portfolios I’ve found made with Cargo: Folkert Gorter, Josh Pangell, Stephen Cheetham, Kitchen, or just check out the Cargo Gallery.

It’s is in public beta at this stage, you can request an invite here. There’s talk on the forum of bringing in a flickr-esque annual subscription for a ‘pro account’, with a similar price tag – $25. Sound fair to me, would be happy to pay that.