Dog walking branding startup

Recently created a business card and web logo for a startup dog walker. I chose to do the font by hand to add a more personal and friendly feel to the business (and to avoid possible copyright claims for font usage). The area where the person is based has a lot of lush green areas and Willow trees, so I wanted the card to reflect this.

The real challenge for this type of brand work is that the client did not want something which was too much like a cartoon, as most dog walking and pet related branding trends towards. While at the same time ensuring that it did not look too corporate, such as a banks branding.

Revised changes.

revised text and colour changes, the lime green variant is currently being used as a vinyl for the van, when it has finished being printed and applied to the van. I will be able to post photographs of the finished product. 

Coffee Mug

Was tasked to create an initial design image for a rough diagram of a domestic product for some marketing

students. Perhaps this could encourage to take up some 3D programs or search for some worthwhile experience in the design industry?

Self Initiated Project Final Images

The project personally turned out to be a great success, it took me roughly four days to get the final images done, with balancing my hours at my day job. I now have another string to my bow which I will proudly add to my portfolio to boost my storytelling, story boarding and my general all round skills as an illustrator.

I'll be uploading these on my other sites soon though I will want to upload the full sizes of each image under a new section. I believe it is now time to move to another time and build my own personal website from scratch.

Best used with either the 'screen' or 'soft light' filters under blending options in Photoshop under a mid level opacity setting. Don't forget to set layer masks if you with to take parts of the image away.

Self Initiated Project Working Progress

I've illustrated a small short story! cute and tragic, dark and bright. I have attempted to combine my vector and design skills with my restrained illustration style to create a personal way of image making. I beleive with the constantly evolving design and creative industry, multiple format outputs is necessary.

I already had a rough idea of what I wanted to do in my head before I started story boarding, something restrictive and dark that I could play with. With roughly twenty panels after some edits, I had a base for what I wanted to paint. Originally I was going to make the character a human child, though for multiple reasons I chose a minimalist looking animal instead, Better character design for this context of plot, cute looking animals are also great to use in stories! The other reason why I changed the character was because It would look too similar to the indie game LIMBO.

First step was to draw out the base of the image in 'Corel' very simple and easy to use brushes that work perfectly with my tablet. After the inital drawings were done, I exported all of them into .psd files and switched over to Photoshop.

Next I added textures and final touches from stock which I take with my camera (I'll attach the stock image for free in my next blog post it's a perfect rock texture for caverns) and vectors if needed for the monsters.

Emblem Update

After many revisions and attempting multiple colors, It was decided to use a monochromatic color palette and something for the design to rest on. A shield was used, not completely finished yet there are some minor things that need to be looked at such as the eyes or possible use of text, emblems on a transparent background.

Final Emblem design used, uploaded into player made 'legion sets' for an MMORPG that I'm fond of. The transparency was tricky due to only old format .targa or .bmps being accepted and the finite space of 256x256 pixels. But it was a fun personal project.

Student Marketing Commission

I've recently assisted a group of marketing students, who go by the ALIAS of 'Team Iconique' to assist in creating their designs of a new product for L'Oreal Paris's Wildcard Contest. Based on their market research I was tasked to design two products, a 'Gloss Perfector' and a 'Wave Perfector' alongside other promotional material.

One of the team members works part time at my day job so I was able to discuss this work conveniently as well as messaging online, which proved useful to receive constant feedback from the team on initial ideas and prototypes. After the initial product designs were finished it was on to designing the press advertisements for their presentation.

I enjoyed this part of the project the most as I was able to show up my photo retouching skills, inverted high pass filtering, color and curves adjustments, gradient map and channel mixing.

With regards to my photo retouching skills I have been meaning to upgrade to Photoshop CS6 so I can make use of the oil brush filter tool for retouching hair properly, though with the Adobe suite packages being discontinued and creative cloud thriving, it is currently not in my budget to upgrade at the moment.

Final Pieces used, a variety of models such as phone apps and online advertising were produced for their contest entry, everything can be found on their presentation entry at this link on youtube.

Sketchbook

(Late) Happy new year to all, asides from my diligent practice in digital painting I tend to keep my traditional drawing in check on a regular basis. Here are some photographs from my special ' black ink book' featuring sketches in my editorial styles.

Dark Knight Speed paint

I've been keeping up with practising for my speed paints, I looked into some more tutorials and painting techniques in some art magazines.

no reference or stock material used, I painted this entirely from my mind. 

Software used: Corel Painter.

Photo Retouching

Hi everyone, posting some examples of photo retouching that I have been practising in Photoshop.

My intentions were to make the cup of coffee appear warmer and more inviting, an image that could be used at a coffee shop.

Envelope Designs

While applying for an intern ship I was required to design an A4 sized envelope to see if I was suitable for their requirements. The first steps proved to be the most challenging because of the stock and template for the envelope, with no success with a template design online or from a printing company, I decided to make my own to exact measurements in In Design.

my first idea was this hypnotic al pattern which I submitted in various scale sizes and colour variants, patterns produced in Photoshop CS5.

My second idea is this creative design that I found inspiring from sound and vision's illustrations, who have also produced similar work for music companies. In comparison to my first idea I also submitted this design in other scales and colour variants due the paper stock. Unfortunately the designs were not quite what they were looking for as the logos appeared static and placed while they were looking for a design that would gel into their logo's some more. It was quite a large learning curve for this small project and I have gained a lot more professional skill doing these.

Clean Illustration, produced using Illustrator CS5

logo process for personal portfolio and blog

I have recently added a personal logo tag for my professional art portfolio, the process in the image is from top to bottom. I had difficulty with the fonts in the beginning because of  difficulty finding a strong font that was also legible for logo, using thin fonts for a subheading was not suitable for the logo either. The end result of this design is 'SVW ARTS' with a spot colour transition to differentiate the two words without needing to use too much word spacing,.

logo design

I've been working on a temporary logo for an art collective I am founding known as 'all for one'. The origin of the name came from the collective starting with three people and played on the concept of the three musketeers 'one for all and all for one'. I proceeded to vector a musketeer sword from stock imagery and multiply it to make the sword cross shape, from there I chose a couple of colour palettes and played with a font I selected from a handful of others which were visually similar.  Heroic condensed is a successful font for a logo and I tried to warp the text to form a better shape, however this was ill-advised by a friend and the type should be left as it is so it can be better read and recognized as a logo, less is more so to say. The final decision was to choose a final colour scheme, however depending on what work and where I can put logo I could use any colour scheme and background I wish to suit the imagery and publications of the collective.

WIP 2 Star Wars

I've added more detail to a previous speed painting, may need to refine a few areas later on. I'm also thinking of toning down the stars brightness judging from looking at the image at a distance.

My goal from these practices would be to obtain various styles of working and to increase my productivity in image making.

Digital Painting

Works in progress, sketches of illustration from artists I find inspiring; such as Ashley Wood. A Wacom Intous 5 touch was well worth the money I am able to illustrate with such ease of use and it couldn't be more fun to use! I'll post my practice sketches for now, the next step will be to work more on my personal projects with techniques and skills which I am acquiring.

Maybe I could learn some flash on my day off when i'm deeper into my personal work, it's always been a software I've wanted to use in terms of my own work and future site/ online showcasing.

Redesigned CV

I have redesigned my curriculum vitae tonight, after further studying of digital design and discovering how a designers/artists CV should be. Although I was trying to be unique and dynamic with my original CV in the past I recently discovered that this can often be an ill and fatal move in self promotion. A solid professional CV design to the right with a minimal choice of fonts (heroic condensed ltd and Arial).

My next steps will be, after further study of design, come up with new personal work demonstrating my ability. In the future I will replace the work I have done at university entirely and keep my portfolio in theme with what clients expect.

My CD cover submission

My inspiration in this piece came mainly from minimalism and modern digital design, 'where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject though elimination all non'essential forms, features or concepts'. Additionally early 60/70's minimalist art movements which can also be seen in advertising campaign from those eras, coherently more modern minimalism such as 'sound of design'.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/soundofdesign/sets/72157624314996547/

My original thoughts in my previous post was nice however I wanted to stick to my affinities a bit more and do something illustrative with vectors, maybe something else next time with typography.

Website Banner

A friend asked me to do the typography on a website banner for her for a cake company based in the Netherlands, which gave me a chance to improve my type skills to use and show my interest in typography, the effects on the final banner may be edited out later.

http://designcakes.nl/

website currently under construction.

What I'm up to :)

Remember in my older post about trying out for a web comic known as 'The Other Sun', well after much chasing through e-mail and keeping in regular contact with the companys owner (gargler network) Richie Page, I am pleased to announce that I have been taken on board as one of his comic artists, so far I am on a trial basis and have one commission to do for him this month which is going to be a paid gig!

http://garglernetwork.com/sites/

Additionally I am working on my illustration for Whirlygig's upcoming book 'Icons of the 90's' and the icon I am choosing to illustrator is none other than Rowan Atkinson who we all know as Mr Bean.

http://whirlygig.me/

My cousin who is an author, Martyn Smith got in touch with me recently and offered me to illustrate his short story entitled "A Grim Noel" upcoming for the holidays, when the book is published I will get a split commission based on sales, it will look great for my portfolio so why not? so far no permanent work position yet but I am looking while doing these.

other than the commissions which are all going grande I'm looking into digital classes online and looking through 'computer arts' and 'mymodernmet' for inspiration and techniques to help improve my skills, the most recent issue of computer arts comes with a graduate showcase from Shillington art college, really talented stuff from there, the students level or work is driving me to improve my own illustrations.

http://www.computerarts.co.uk/computer-arts-graduate-workshops-2011

Be sure to check out my portfolio for you consideration. http://scottwillders.daportfolio.com/

Jobs and Internships

helo hello! its been too long since my last update, I've been looking for work in and outside of art lately and I am pleased to announce I will be applying for an internship at London Print studios!

http://www.londonprintstudio.org.uk/

which is going to be run by Karrie Fransman, a comics artist who has featured in the Guardian and the times, and is currently working on her first full length Graphic Novel 'The House that groaned' due to be published.

I am also trying out to be one of the team artists on the web comic franchise which shows great promise. I will be working on three separate briefs within the next couple of days, fingers crossed

http://theothersun.com/

Im on a couple more sites

website made just for our exhibition at new blood and showcase for our class.

http://ucaillustration2011.wordpress.com/portfolios/scott-willders/

I am also branching out my portfolio to foreign websites such as 'pixiv', a japanese

website similar to deviantart from which my work can become very popular

http://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=3103591