Fordoing » Illustration

Freelance Illustrators and their sites

Harry Ford — Sun, 16 May 2010 16:19:34 +0000

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.

Husky Illustration

Harry Ford — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:03:16 +0000

First off sketch your characters/dogs in Photoshop if you have a Wacom or sketch on paper and scan in your drawings. After I had my pack of sketched Husky’s I dragged them across into Illustrator to colour in.

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.

Inspiring artwork by Stanley “Artgerm” Lau

Harry Ford — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:36:22 +0000

Stanley Laus is one of the most popular artists in Deviant Art his page now has 7,519,784 views and nearly 2000 comments. Him and his friend Kendrick Lim a game designer who worked previously at a Tokyo-based game studio, founded Imaginary Friends Studios.

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

Norma Jean Baker

Harry Ford — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:06:06 +0000

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

SixCrayons non-toxic designing

Harry Ford — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:42:43 +0000

I have recently been putting all my time in to a new front end web design site for designers and developers alike, SixCrayons. It consists of six categories Design, CSS, Javascript, Flash, Illustration and Apps/Widgets. I wanted to create a really high profile web design site. A place where novice and professional designers would want to join in and contribute to.

So far we have had a huge response with around 30 designers and companies now writing articles for the site. Web companies like Fhoke have now written two great posts and I hopefully look forward to seeing more from them in the future. Developers from companies like Redweb have written and are writing posts for SixCrayons. It is an exciting time and we will hopefully enjoy watching SixCrayons grow in to a very large competitive web design resource.

I have also created a weekly web comic called ‘No Soup Allowed’. It is about a bunch of little web designers and their mini adventures and exploits. You can keep up with their weekly adventures here or grab the rss feed to have it delivered to you.

If you are a web designer/developer and would like to write for SixCrayons please submit your details and I will contact you straight back.

I hope you enjoy the site and if you know any web designers or developers please get them to contact me at SixCrayons to get them involved.