Poking through some of the darker recesses of my hard drive I came upon this; one of the first pieces of Flash interactive animation I ever did. It is pretty simple and strangely hypnotic. Give it a mousing and if you feel the urge you can now send it as an e-card. Click on the pebble to start.

Monster-T

Here you go.  A T-shirt design for the rolling Threadless.com T-Shirt competition. Sadly no one wanted it so it didn’t get printed. That would have been cool though the real point was to stimulate some self generated work which it did. It was great fun to work with a limited palette and I’ll try to do some more when I get a chance. In the mean time I posted this as a postcard on my e-card site.

Salt of the earth

If all the oceans evaporated the remaining salt could form a layer more than 120m deep. Or so I was told. This is an Illustration for a DK See for yourself  – Water book.  All Done in Xara Xtreme with the help of bitmap textures.

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I have the initial version of an e-card site up and running at:

Squeakycards.com

I’ll be adding to it in 2010 and building it up into something special I hope.

The Guys enjoying their new gadget - a portable sawmill

I did this one years ago and just stumbeld upon it while rummaging around in my drives. I was given a few photos and a small brochure picture and asked to come up with a scene. It took the best part of a week to do and the client was pretty happy…Well they did ask if I could rotate the scene because they thought it was done in 3D  (it was artworked in Xara Xtreme and probably roughed in either Painter or TV paint. I can’t actually remember which.)

The client was VERY specific about the Orange colour.

Elephant roller skating rough

I photographed the doodle on my phone and loaded it into  Xara Xtreme. Once there things got quite a bit more colourful.

The final coloured Elephant on roller skates

Moody

Ah Autumn. The leaves fall from the trees, the nights draw in, and young ladies in halloween costume stand too close to electric radiators.

A bold use of colour and more importantly darkness, two things that paying clients seem to be adverse to.

A table light in 7 shapes

Things are quiet here at the Squeaky Voice at the moment as I am working my bits off during waking hours. Pretty much seven days a week. I’m glad to have the work but maybe a little time off would be nice too

The light illustration got to final artwork before the editor realised it should have been a theatre light (despite brief and approved roughs) Oh well. stuff happens. It’s a shame because the illustration was probably the most cost effective thing I’ve done in years. It is only made up of 7 shapes.
As it is rejected I can post it here. Usually I am contractually not allowed to show any work I produce until after the books are published which in this case is next year sometime.

Right. I’m off to artwork a ‘planter made of car tyres to show ‘ Barry and John stuck some car tyres together to make a plant holder’ – Oh joy.

Dragon bursts out from monitor

Dragon finds out about birthdays

Strange job this one.  The client had already chosen and commissioned and artist but must have got cold feet because they requested more samples from other artists. I was ‘lucky’ enough to be one of them. Even though I knew the Illustrations were doomed it was a good opportunity to do a little experimentation while being paid a little money.
In this case my experiment was to try to work faster by using flat colour and lines only where needed. I think it came out well and is a technique that is now finding it’s way into my day to day work.

A Dragon waves it's tongue

Xara Xtreme has updated to version 5…….

Like a lot of upgrades nowadays it was hardly worth the bother. Companies seem to focus on new users (Read Hobbyists) so long term niggles and bugs are ignored because users have found ways to put up with them and the don’t sound sexy in the sales blurb. On one level I can hardly blame them they are just trying to make a living.  But as a victim of shrinking budgets the only way I can get by is to work quicker. To me that means fewer clicks and sharper tools -  exactly what the software designers seem not to be delivering and that makes me very frustrated.

Deep Breath….

Case in point. I stupidly got all excited about the:

‘Improved ‘rapid sketching’ support for the Freehand Tool.’

The first real drawing tool in about 10 years? Not really. All it does is to stop the line you are drawing connecting to the previous one by turning the auto join feature off for half a second. Well that is what it should do but because the auto connection settings default to 12 pixels it doesn’t work if you draw that close to the previous line. It also makes life hell because if you do want to re-draw a section of you line you have to wait half a second before you are able to. This really ruins your flow and is not at all rapid. I can’t really believe that this was tested by anyone who actually draws with a stylus.

All is not lost however. A couple of users have created a little app called XaReg which allows the user to monkey with Xara’s registry settings and get the tool a bit more rapid. I have turned the end hit detect down to 1 from 12 and turned the auto join to 75 milliseconds from 250 and turned on auto deselect on so I don’t get control points after drawing.  A usable tool- Hurrah! ( Though why these settings aren’t available from the main app I’ll never know.)

The Dragon above was done to test this tool, previously I’d have to press the escape key between drawing every scale. Now thanks to XaReg life is indeed a little nicer.

In my opinion the best ever vector drawing tools are still Expression 3.3 which is no longer being developed. (You can find it FREE from Microsoft if you dig around – Not Expression Design which is a filleted version for Microsoft’s web design suite and therefore crime of the century) I think Expression came out in 200o and it is amazing that no-one has come close since.

Enough ranting – I’m off to draw stuff

…Time passes and I calm a little.  Just to clarify for the record. Xara Xtreme Pro is the best vector software out there but Expression does have better freehand brushes.