This week, the UK’s new Pound Coin entered circulation – Its biggest change in 34 years. While I do have an interest in coins, going to one of a handful of locations to clamour for one of the first in the country? Not that interested. A fancy quid will crop up in my change soon enough.
Left: Old and Busted (1983-2017). Right: New hotness (2017-).
Anyway, money. At work, we have competitions and offers. Some of them have cash prizes, so I had to draw us some coins. The best way, I decided, was to do them in Illustrator with the 3D effect – this let me draw it once, then copy and paste, repeating, resizing and rotating the graphic to add variety.
My 2015 custard coloured coins – Make it rain!
I’m going to briefly go over how to make a 3D coin in Adobe Illustrator, then talk about the new Pound Coin graphics I created last month.
In this post i’ll cover this year’s Hourly Comic Day entry, a few tidbits of extra info, a handful of examples from other partakers, and bring up a hithero unmentioned comic batch I did…
Let’s jump right in, and elaborate after: Click the image below, or this link right here, to check out my diary comic for 1st February 2017!
Kate Beaton, Canadian comic artist extraordinaire, regularly doodles diary comics when she goes home to the family for Christmas. They’re all very charming – when it comes to family, you just can’t write this stuff. Click the example below to visit her full gallery, around 40 comics strong!
Judging by the frames, I think she draws them digitally.
So last Christmas (2016), laying about with time off and laid up with a wonky hip, I had a go at my own Christmas comics. Same rules as the hourlies – Take notes, draw later.
My final count nearly matched Kate’s: I completed 35 festive comics!
A small sample of six (click to view):
Click here or the image below to go and have a gander!
A cover image lovingly prepared in under half an hour.
My company has giant cheques. You know the ones; when there’s a donation to charity, or someone wins a cash prize, you see a photo in the paper of a happy chappy holding an oversized rectangle.
We had a number of big paper cheques, supplied by our chosen bank, rolled up in a fat parcel tube. It was decided that we needed something better, ideally personalised with our own branding, and more hard-wearing.
This is what we came up with.
Taking shape
The basic layout of all cheques is the same, so I took a lot of measurements of the big paper ones we had, with both tape measure and ruler…
This time next week, the 24 Hour Show will kick off.
At the Bradford Playhouse on Friday night, Bradford Uni’s musicals society (BUSOM) will learn what show they’re performing for the paying public exactly 24 hours later. Everyone stays up all night, learning songs and lines, building set (safely!), painting, rigging, sewing… and eagerly anticipating the breakfast butty run.
I thought the show poster had featured on this blog already, but my post about the 2014 event pre-dates it. Let’s rectify that right now. Behold, the 24 Hour Show 2016 poster:
Lauren is an editor by day, author by night. An old friend, she’s been co-writing one of my (eternally in development) comics. Lauren’s been compiling a collection of short stories with her friends and peers, which is about ready to self-publish. The cover art was already sorted – I was called in for the publisher’s logo. That final pro touch in the bottom corner, you know?
Being fascinated with history and archeology, she decided on a Celtic style. Plenty of research was done via Google Images (filtering out the Scottish football team of the same name), finding a surprising amount of ancient finely-carved nudity.
Click for the full uncropped image if you really want to see a bull’s, ahem, “bullocks”.
We agreed that a face / mask would be neat. Lauren liked the Lord of Glauberg statue… but the product needed to work on laymans like me. The Lord reminded me of Mugatu from Zoolander, so was vetoed.
Now THERE’S a comparison you didn’t expect to see today.
The winner of this round was a Celtic horned god of nature, known as… *checks spelling* …Cernunnos. That’s him at the top of this post, on the same artefact you can find that bull.
This is my sixth Hourly Comic Day comic, and the first one featuring me at my Graphic Design job! I actually started there in 2014, but as the last 2 years have been weekend comics, you didn’t get to see owt.
This Christmastime we flipped the big switch: The new Caravan Guard website is now live! My previous post was prompted by the building of this all-new, responsive domain, which I can now talk about a bit here.
To be clear, I didn’t code the company site. It’s a sprawling, multi-functional, many-legged beast that our experienced resident web developer got to build from the ground up! No, my weight went into creating and renovating images for the frontend (and lots of testing on desktop, tablet and smartphone)… the baubles for the tree, as it were.
Google change their search criteria all the time. With more people now searching on their phones than on PCs, Google brought in a big new rule on April 21st: If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’ll suffer in search results.
I ran this site you’re on now through Google’s mobile test… yeah, I already knew what it would do.
GAH! (click for full size)
Tiny hard to read text, miniscule hard to click links, and the background image mysteriously gave up.
