Just recently, me and my fiancee watched “Coraline”, the movie, together. In case you didn’t know – it was directed and written by Henry Selick, a director who worked with Tim Burton on such classics like “Nightmare Before Christmas” or “Corpse Bride”. It is based on a novel by Neil Garman and kept in a surreal, Burton-ish style of animation. The story is basically about a girl who thinks her life sucks, finds a magical door to the Other World made with dolls that look like her parents and friends, except that everything is just too perfect. Until the day that Coraline is asked to put the buttons instead of her eyes to stay forever. She refuses and everything turns into a nightmare. Very scary nightmare.
After watching Coraline, I felt so inspired by the animation and how everything looks in that movie that I decided to do a quick recap of Burton/Selick combo most known animated classics and keep it in case I needed some illustration inspiration. Now, I’m sharing this collection with you, have fun!
Continue reading ‘Inspiration: Tim Burton and Henry Selick’
Published on
May 13, 2009 in
Design;
Recently in my home city there was a contest held by Coca-Cola, UMK Kraków, ASP Kraków and BrandStorm Agency for designers and artists. The task was to design regional promotional special edition Coca-Cola can using the draft provided by Coca-Cola Poland and the guys at BrandStorm. I did a design for this contest, but unfortunately I passed the deadline by two days due to the fact that I was out of the town for the weekend (deadline passed this Monday). I’m angry like hell, because there was a Macbook Pro 17″ to win (no, I wouldn’t carry it with me, I’d use it as stationary computer at home, using my 13″ Macbook as a mobile device like I do now). As Romans used to say, alea iacta est, and there’s nothing I can do about me being too late, but I decided to share the design and the process behind it with you.
Continue reading ‘Concept: Coke side of life’
Published on
March 17, 2009 in
Daily;
As promised, the mini-tutorial / reference about how my blog’s mascot, the cute robot I-404 a.k.a. “Eye” was born. If you’re looking for detailed tutorial about how to do digital painting of a robot like I-404, you might not find everything you would like to see here, because I won’t cover the whole process in details, but I’ll show you my workflow and how everything was put together.
Small disclaimer, before we start — I’m also a beginning illustrator, I mean, I always drawn something on paper, but just recently I started to digitalize my works, so if you’re a illustrator with experience and want to give me some tips on how to improve my workflow or the tools I use, feel free to drop me a line in the comments. Thanks in advance!
Grasp the idea
The idea behind I-404 was simply getting a mascot for the site, just to put some more life than just plain text in it. The I-404 is the robot which tells you when you gone wrong way on my blog and allows you to go back where you were before or suggests you the different exit. I-404 is currently visible only on the ‘File not found’ page, but I hope to incorporate him here and there in my blog’s layout so you can get familiar with him.
I wanted it to be a robot, because I simply love robots. I love the whole idea of anthropomorphic androids that will be dedicated to help people where they can’t help themselves. As a kid I watched Star Wars and Stargate with my father, who’s a science-fiction geek since when I remember. As a teenager I read enough S-F novels by P. K. Dick, S. Lem etc. not to b influenced by futuristic visions of androids. Also, robots have become a big part of popculture around us and we can’t help it. That’s why I decided a robot will be an icon of my site.
Continue reading ‘Tutorial: How “Eye” was born’
So I got to design holiday cards that were to be sent to customers and friends of my company. The requirements were to make branding blend in nice and don’t use Christian symbols, cause our customers are not only Christian/Catholic and we didn’t want to hurt somebody’s feelings. Anyway, it was my first print work since my old business cards, so it was quite a challenge, to be honest.
For the branding, I didn’t want to expose logo that much, so I decided to make our branding font and colours more visible than the logo itself. One of our branding colours is pure cyan, so it fitted perfectly for winter-themed postcard. I also used winter-themed illustration of snowflake, since I thought things like Christmas tree would be too Christian (did I mentioned already that sometimes “political correctness” makes me sick?)
Anyway, when I look at it now, I think I could’ve aligned the text, logo and tagline a bit better, but overally I’m quite happy with the result. Any thoughts from your side?
