I am currently working on completing my freelance site NeedStyle which has gone down well so far with the community on Forrst. I am also working on a theme site called NeedThemes alongside Sevenoaks based company Decode, where authors will be able to sell their own WordPress, Tumblr and vBulletin themes.

I would just like to say a huge thank you to everyone at Fubra who have enabled me to go freelance. I have never worked for a company and enjoyed my work so much. I have made so many lifelong friends at Fubra who I now surf and socialise with. You don’t get that in many companies.

I’d like to start off my new career in Freelance design with a quote from a favourite artist of mine – ‘Vincent van Gogh’

“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”

As I was mainly trained in illustration in my college and university years following other illustrators through their websites and Twitter has become quite the habit. I thought it was due time to show off a collection of some of the best illustrators and their freelance sites on fordoing.

Matt Hamm – @mrmatthamm

Matt Hamm is a professional web designer, web developer, illustrator. He is the Creative Director & co-founder of a small web design studio called Supereight Studio based in Guildford, Surrey alongside Pete Orme.

Joe Sciglitano – @joe_sciglitano

Joe “Shiggy” Sciglitano is an Australian based illustrator and designer doing children’s books and stuff. He’s recently added graphic design to the list of awesome things he does.

Kev Adamson – @kevadamson

Kev Adamson is an award winning freelance illustrator, web designer, graphic designer and animator. He has been working in the industry for about 7 years. During this time he has built up a massive reputation for producing original and professional work.

Howard Lyon – @howardlyon

For the past 13 years Howard Lyon has worked in the video game industry as an Art Director and as a concept artist and freelance illustrator for clients such as Wizards of the Coast, Blizzard Entertainment and Electronic Arts.

Emma Anderton – @Andhertoonz

Emma Anderton lives and works in the North-West of England and has been a professional freelance illustrator since graduating in 2005.

Rod Hunt – @rodhuntdraws

Rod Hunt is a London based Illustrator & artist who has built a reputation for retro tinged Illustrations & detailed character filled landscapes for UK & international clients spanning publishing, design, advertising & new media, for everything from book covers to advertising campaigns, theme park maps & even the odd large scale installation too!

Matt Dixon

Matt Dixon is a freelance illustrator and concept artist from the UK. He has a long association with the games industry working on games including Harry Potter, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon and Pirates of the Caribbean. He now works as a freelance providing illustration and concept design for print and digital media.

Christian Ward

Christian J. Ward was born 30 years ago and has been pretty much drawing ever since. Christian is currently found in London, often sports a beard and is currently favoring sharp pencils, Promarker markers and Photoshop CS.

I always sketch a full layout of what I want my final piece to look like then take a little longer on sketching each character.

Depending how much you can envisage your finished characters depends on the quality of the sketches you want to work from.

First I overlaid the main base colour vectors onto my sketch lowering the opacity on each layer to show my sketch and each individual layer underneath.

You can use gradients on your layers but I chose to keep this husky pretty simple and block coloured. Adding small lighter/darker streaks of hair to the dog will add a little texture to your character.

Keeping your colours bright does make your character stand out a lot more. If you are using greys like in this illustration try and keep them all highly contrasting to each other. After creating pretty much hundreds of vector layers on this Husky I was done with him.

You can check out my final piece below with 4 husky’s and even a sled. These illustrations took me in total around 9 hours.

A quick sketch I did of Marilyn Monroe. Couldn’t help myself she was beautiful.