1. Buy a Spotify ad to tell Nick at work that he is a cock every 3 songs2. Pay for the assassination of Michael Mcintyre3. Make and star in my own Evil Dead movie4. Wrap Graham Norton in bubble wrap and push him down Ben Nevis5. Buy some good looking friends to play Halo with6. Buy a helicopter and project animal porn onto Downing street7. Buy 6 iPads and use them as place mats at my table8. Sue George Lucas for soiling my childhood with Indiana Jones 49. Pay for the Outnumbered children to sit in on meetings with David Cameron and Nick Clegg.10. Hire mercenaries to take over SeaLand11. Buy some love just to prove the Beatles wrong!

Add your own in the comments section if you have any just as awesome ideas.

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 am writing this blog in response to Ryan Carson’s post ‘The Backstabbing on Twitter has to stop‘ on Think Vitamin. He feels that negative comments directed at a person/website should be stamped out of Twitter altogether, so in other words no flaming allowed. When Twitter started up it was pretty much a few designers sitting around being lovely to one another and telling fellow designers how awesome they really are. Twitter is an ego boosting tool for designers and that’s how Ryan Carson wants it to be kept.

So why is negativity good?

The best things can come from being as negative as possible. Take Ebenezer Scrooge for example, never has there been a more negative character. Three different ghosts came into his house and absolutely flamed him about how rubbish a person he is. We all know what happened at the end of A Christmas Carol, it ends on a massive positive with FAT turkeys all round. Simply because he took the criticism and put it to good use by changing his attitude.

I find there is too much pussy footing around in the web design industry, I see terrible tutorial after tutorial being churned out. ‘Check my cute dinosaur illustration Tutorial’ which actually looks like a deranged toadstool but there it sits with its 356 ReTweets and 46 positive comments! Not one of these positive comments is going to aid this poor idiot who drew the deranged T-rex!

Yet that is all I see. Positive comment after positive comment.

Mate that is awesome can’t wait for another! or Once again you amaze me with your skillz!

Telling the guy that his cartoon freak is actually a freak is the best thing to do. A good example is of when I started a UK surf site I spent a couple of months building the forum and I thought it looked pretty ace (I hate that word as well). So I went and posted on what is probably the biggest surf forum in the world MagicSeaweed for feedback. It did not go down very well, they hated it they didn’t just hate it they decided to tell me every single thing that was wrong with it.

So I hid myself away for a week feeling sorry for myself until one morning I woke up and realised how much I had actually got it wrong. Their flaming of my site had actually helped me not waste any more of my time with it.

Criticism is just as important as positivity and we cannot be picky about what criticism we get.

I design sites but do not code, I have a basic knowledge of code and have built sites in the past. But for the company I work for I do not need to code, I am surrounded by a team of highly skilled and knowledgeable people that are experts in front/back end site building. I try to keep my knowledge up to date by learning from them.

I find it all slightly disrespectful to all designers like me who work in teams of people to have these so called heads of web design or professionals who find it so hard to believe that designers cannot or do not build the back end of their designs.

You could compare it to a manager of a football team (soccer for all you yanks) It is never essential that they were a world beating football player on the pitch, you just need to understand what goes on. If you were looking for a defender for your football team and you had two football players one who was pretty good up front and also quite good in defense but the other was a far superior defender you would not discount him because the other guy was slightly better all rounder.

If you want to design for anything, you have to understand the medium you are working within. For web design it’s usability within the browser.

In the end a designer that can code does not automatically become a better designer.

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.

Then a day before we left to go on a  New Year trip to North Wales Steve put his new idea to me, yearblog.co.uk. Steve had created this site with the aim to post 1 blog everyday for a whole year. So that would be 365 blogs in one year! For some reason being the mugg that I am, I wanted in right away.

Luckily enough Steve new the solution for allowing multiple blogs on the same domain (using either sub-domains or sub-directories), in the form of WordPress MU. He therefore created harryford.yearblog.co.uk for me. We both officially started our blogs New Year and have now been writing them for 5 days.

If you would like to get involved and create your own Year Blog please contact Steve at YearBlog.co.uk and make sure you follow his blog aswell.

Another year long blog idea I have seen grow quite popular is the 365 day design blog. Where designers create a unique piece of design every day for a year.

A few example blogs:

http://www.jarvisaddison.com/

http://365daydesignchallenge.blogspot.com/

http://kandicepoirier.tumblr.com/

The music with the trailer is awesome, perfectly suited to a modern cutting edge Robin hood movie. So turn up your speakers sit back and take in this fast and furious trailer.

If you had followed my previous Robin Hood film set posts you’ll appreciate the quick snippet of the Castle blowing up in the background. Check out the castles building process here.

You can check out all of Stanley Laus’ beautiful artwork on his Devient art - http://artgerm.deviantart.com/

You can check out all of Stanley Laus’ beautiful artwork on his Devient art - http://artgerm.deviantart.com/

]]> http://fordoing.co.uk/2009/12/inspiraing-artwork-by-stanley-%e2%80%9cartgerm%e2%80%9d-lau/feed/ 0 http://fordoing.co.uk/2009/12/norma-jean-baker/ http://fordoing.co.uk/2009/12/norma-jean-baker/#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:06:06 +0000 Harry Ford http://fordoing.co.uk/?p=581

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