BIGsplash

Being a member of BIG I got the opportunity to contribute an image into their slideshow for the GLUG networking event evening on the 24th Feb' at New England House here in Brighton.  I'm guessing but thought what ever I choose, the image would probably be flashed up onto a wall as part of a rolling sequence of works from other members.  So I rummaged about and put together some previously saved elements to produce this splashy eyecandy ...

Engraved Barak Obama

Finished portrait in the style of Copperplate Engraving like on dollar bills depicting Presidents - Lincoln, Jefferson etc. This for me was a steep learning curve to create digitally.

I  tried the regular engraving plugins for photoshop but these fell well short of what I wanted to achieve.  However photoshop's own 'Liquidize' filter worked well once I got the hang of it, using its brushes I dragged parallel lines, drawing them over a template layer of Obama's image.  Once I got the hang of it I found this to be the best method when it comes to that authentic look and feel of the genuine article. Not a bad effort.

Those plug-ins mimic only the photo-gravure styles so really won't do for copperplate style at all because they fall short where lines need to follow the undulations and contour shapes, instead photo-gravure only produces a pattern effect to light\dark areas.  Just too flat for what i had in mind.

I could bash away in finer nuances about the fact that one doesn't come across this sort o'ting in the busy instant gratification world but time is a comodity so I'll just say A~WHAMBAM~BOOM! is now available as a limited-edition of 200 signed prints. Poster size: A3. Cost: £40 inc' post and packing in tube.

Ebook available free

My Ebook for kids: Hello, I'm the Wide Mouth Frog and I eat flies
Last month i got the great news that it's now out!  It's available free to download along with about 150 other titles from: uTales.com
You will need to Sign up there which gets you 15 days of free access to all titles (extendable by inviting others to join, or pay a monthly fee of just $9.99)  Then you'll need to download-install their App (it's optimized for the iPad, iPhone and iPod) I'm reliably informed it works on a laptop - i guess that means an imac computer and not a pc yet.  Still, early days, and uTales have plans to make this App run on other e-readers.
Once you're done, you can search my ebook's title or access it here!

Have a very merry and thrifty Christmas :)

Pulp Detective update1

Private Detective Henry Reed sits reading the newspaper's rising crime stats in his crummy little tenement office.  He's about to find a whole lotta bootlegging trouble that goes all the way to the crooked mayor of Baycity and other low-lifes on the take when he's hired by the voluptuous gangster's moll and wannabe movie-starlet Dorah Farr.

That's my opening pic to a well crafted short story titled: The Runaround (crime detective fiction aimed at boys reading age 9 to 16) and it was a most satisfying illustration job, not only for its detailed depictions of 1930's depression era America, but also for the minimal art direction from the editor who left me free to imagine which of the 12 key scenes required to make the plot pop off the pages - keeping in mind the appeal of the Horrible Histories series of books.  My loose pencil roughs were immediately approved before I worked them up in full colour at print size: A4 and uploaded the job in 3 parts as the work progressed.  He said "they're great, fantastic job and many thanks"  and promptly paid me in full with agreements in place, and also a firm promise of a 2nd assignment when this new venture is successful ( !.. Positive Mental Attitude.)
This project exceeded all my expectations, really it did (still does) and so now have a frustrating wait to see the first issue in print with my illustrations laid out on the pages.  I can't imagine exactly how they will look, no doubt they'll be re-sized with some cropping here and there.  Anyway, Pulp Detective issue 1 is expected sometime early in 2012.  I'll blog more when I know more.

Detective 1930 era

  I was invited to submit sample illustrations for a new magazine venture.  The first issue is scheduled for early 2012 and the target readership will be aimed at boys age 9 to 16.  Can't give much away at this stage but it will feature a series of 3 illustrated Crime/Detective stories set in Prohibition era America 1930's - think: Gangsters, Bootlegging and you get the picture.  The publisher's very detailed information guide called for a visual style similar in vein to Horrible Histories though not strictly so.  They wanted (from descriptions as supplied) depictions of their two hardboiled Detective lead characters, one on the street (A4 portrait) and the other in his office (A4 landscape.) -

The publisher also wanted to see Character-sheets so here's same two Detectives -

A handful of the other 16 main characters were also asked for, so here's how I imagine 3 members of the Irish gang -

Additionally and to demonstrate an action scene, I submitted this car-chase shootout pic -

Altogether I submitted 8 samples and their reply was quick and positive but couldn't give me a definitive answer until August 12th (deadline for all submissions.)  So now I have a month of waiting ..!

kiddEbook

Occasionally an opportunity presents itself. I got an email from Utales, went something like, "...create childrens ebooks using our new online platform..." Once more gripped with curiosity, I tried it and damn! if it didn't get me all fired-up with an idea to write and illustrate that classic joke about the wide mouth frog.  Subsequently realized there's maybe 3 other versions as kiddy books out there, only one however is available in the ebook format which is sufficiently different - relief!  In the main though these are fairly dumdown, where as mine sticks close to the funny original.

Writing and illustrating took me the whole of April before finally ready to upload the pages and hitting the 'Publish' button there.  Utales is still in development so my ebook won't be available yet for Amazon's Kindle ereader, but here's some page previews -

 

Other preview pages I've put up on my site: www.doodlingjim.com (navigate to 'Kids' ) 

The artwork started life as thumbnail sketches.  These I scanned into photoshop then worked them up some more before sizing up to fit 'A3' while at same time reduced the ppi down as low as 50 before converting to low quality jpegs - yup, real blurry! - for use as templates in Illustrator where the Brush-tool came into it's own as the tool-of-choice for drawing the crispy-smooth lines (with the wacom tablet pen.)  Then imported back to Photoshop for the colouring in.  Could bang on but really that's it in a nutshell. 

Finally, all pages were uploaded to the Utales' assembly platform where I then pasted the story's text.  Worth noting the font choices there is limited at present to what's generally available with online browsing, and while I could have rendered a prettier text as part of the artwork I opted instead to keep to 'live text' because of the multi-language possibilities that epublishing brings to global audiences.  Pension sorted!  :)

Hey, I'm on twitpic!!

I'm a Twit - just added Twitter-picture-widget-thing  to left column here (Blog) for no particular reason - just convenience i guess, as can upload my pics via email so.. far so why not !?
Intime this maybe will become indispensababble ..!

Branding and Packaging

  Since my last bloggings, I've been so busy involved with design contests among the international, mainly German community of designers.  All fascinating stuff but that aside, it's time to share with you some of my resulting eyecandy -

 My Battery idea for Coca-Cola's new Zero Sugar Can.  Specifically had to be black colour and orientated at the male consumer in soft drinks market.

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 Livery, Logo and a Name for new coach travel company within Germany.  I chose the name: ''BusGepard'' ('Gepard' is the german for Cheetah) and first took the precaution to insure that web address was available before designing.  I couldn't decide if red or yellow might be better!?

Greenpeace Logo concept

I was too late to enter my logo into Jovoto's open graphics competition (read the Brief and stuff here.)  I mixed up the deadline date with the 'vote by' date so instead I've posted it here early! -

My idea on Greenpeace's Brief was to visualize the Energy Renewables Policy - as set out by the German Parliament, in the form of a simple and friendly graph, and for it to be the key Greenpeace logo regarding that policy.  My graph could be updated during the coming decades reflecting progress of the policy as it runs closer to 2050.

I also imagine an interactive version of the graph, similar to an App or Widget, where the user will zoom in revealing sub-divisions indicating year, month of each stage of the policy's progress, with related news links etc.  I would hope Greenpeace could develop the App and feature it as a key online marker to their 'watch campaign' !?

Communicating the possibilities of a real and sustainable future needs a simple graph you can both read and use, and my logo identifies that message.

Remember.. You saw it here first!

Book Jacket design contest

Here's my artwork entry to design a hypothetical book cover of Tadeusz Borowski’s remarkable collection of concentration camp stories: 'This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen'.  I'm probably shooting myself in the foot by telling you but if you want to have a go at designing your own, here's the link to all the facts from where you can download a pdf of the contest rules which also includes this link to read excerpts from the book for inspiration.  Here's my book jacket design entry ...

The gas in the title refers to 'Zyklon-B' and was originally used as a delousing insecticide.  A poison later used by the Nazis to gas over one million people in concentration camps such as Auschwitz.  The German word for poison, incidentally, is Gift, hence poison gas is Giftgas - as you can see on the label on the airtight containers in which the poison was stored.  I took this label's design as the starting point for my inspiration ...

Closing date for entries has now been extended to September 2010.