Presenting Santa Claus and the Christmas family. Originally requested by a user of the IStock forums, Santa and the rest of the family members were drawn separately, layered and colored before being placed together as a happy legion. As you can see I did not employ my standard outlining to this one in order to keep a very soft-edged look to it despite the blaring christmas colors. I think I lost a few years of my life on this one lol, but it’s worth it. The image carries a higher price-tag than the norm due to every image being a strong element on it’s own. Were you to purchase the EPS and pull it apart, you will see that there were no shortcuts used or tricks employed outside of create, cut, paste and group.

The files can be viewed in detail and bought at the following locations:

IstockPhoto.com – ID: 10943811
Dreamstime.com – ID: 11521567

Who is the River Queen?
The River Queen is a piece that I got inspired to create from my friend’s fiance who continuously schools us at Texas Hold’em. My intent was to make her race ambiguous but to keep her as relative to her inspiration as possible.

Medium and method of creativity
As usual I took a trip to the local Barnes and Nobles with the sketchbook in tow and sketched the happy lady with her hand raised. Once I had the image together, I took her home and scanned her then found a poker table online for inspiration. The table was drawn and scanned similar to the lady and the method I used to make them vector was to trace the lines first using the pen tool and connect the points to make shapes. The River Queen is 100% comprised of shapes no lines, in order to make the increase and decrease of her size clean without compromise. It is the same methodology I use for logos.

The River Queen can be downloaded at the following links:

- IstockPhoto – Stock vector | File #: 10354380
- Dreamstime – ID: 10637614

One of the most popular requests I have been receiving for web design has been for a blog. The reason people seem to be asking for this is because they are being told by others that it is a good source of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and will lead to them being prominent on Google. This can be true but you should realize that a blog isn’t going to automatically do this for you. Your blog needs frequent, informative posts to be worth anything on your website. Continue reading »

The key to designing a good website is to have a plan in place and execute it. What seems to happen with many new websites being subpar is the lack of an ingredient in the formula. Sometimes you will find a functional website that is ugly as sin, other times you will have a beautiful website with archaic or useless functions. Then there are the ones who have a bit of both but no direction, they either have way too many options or a lack thereof. Nothing is worst than a confusing website, especially those that ion loses you when you can’t figure out how to navigate to the particular pages. Maybe he has a hieroglyph to represent “About Us” but you don’t think to rollover it to see if it will give you the English variation. This is a complex problem being that it can either be the fault of the overbearing Art Director, the naïve Web Designer or the hands-on business owner who knows nothing of the Web but thinks he does. When the problem does arise however, everybody loses, the Art director will blame the Web Designer, the Web designer will not get a referral and the business owner will receive zero return on investment. So how do you avoid this? Continue reading »

I am an artist by nature so I tend to draw a lot. One thing I have had to learn through trial and error is how to bring my drawings into Photoshop, color them and maintain ALL the lines that were made whilst drawing it. In the past I used to scan it in, place the layer to multiply and then color on a bottom layer but that had it’s share of problems. For one I had a hard time blending one color seamlessly into another, and I could not color my lines a nice sepia brown or gray due to multiply adopting whatever color was beneath it. So I am presenting this tutorial to help any of you out there who have had this issue. This is the definitive way of bringing in line art for coloring in Adobe Photoshop. Continue reading »

Adobe Photoshop is the king of illusion. It allows for bad skin to appear flawless, plain landscapes to appear lush and boring squares to have nice torn edges. Being that t he torn edge look is one of my favorite effects to abuse, I decided to share my method of accomplishing this through Adobe Photoshop.

In this tutorial we will be utilizing layer masks, the lasso tool and layer styles. If any of these are new to you, this is a good method to practice the use of each in a meaningful way. Continue reading »

Look at any “Web Competition” or “Award Winning” website and you will notice something strange about them. Chances are you have never seen anything like them or they are so simple and strange you wonder why they work. The thing is, they were probably created via design over status quo. What I mean by that is, most people use another person’s website as an example of what they want theirs to be. What this does however is it limits the creativity of the designer. The project yields  a version of the example website, which was actually a version of another person’s site. This leads to the clones we all see in web design throughout the world wide web. Not necessarily a bad thing, but are websites even designed to be logical to the western brain? Probably not, they were only designed to work. Continue reading »

In the competitive world of Graphic and Web Design, one of the most important things to learn is when to divorce onseself from the craft. Artists by nature can become very attached to their work so this is probably one of the toughest things to accept when working professionally.

What you have to realize is the difference between working for an individual and working for oneself is the ownership of the craft. Take for example an instance where a painting is being done for a family. While doing said painting you want to do it to the best of your abilities since you were hired based on what was shown as your quality work. During the painting, a family member may ask you to leave off his/her acne or make his/her nose a tad different. It is their painting so you oblige. This is different however if you were doing the painting as a portfolio piece and the family are paid models that are at your service. Continue reading »

Right now one of the biggest problems for small business owners is attaining capital. The general public is reacting to the economy by spending less and it affects everyone on both the production and consumption sides of things. Banks have become tighter on loans and anyone without near flawless credit are being refused. Foreclosures continue to climb, businesses are cutting hours and downsizing in order to maintain and everytime you turn on the News you are reminded of this. If not you, maybe someone in your family is feeling the squeeze of the times. Add it all together and it is enough to sober your mood no matter your situation.

These are the times to get aggressive with your business and build a foundation that will bring you to the forefront post-recession. With the world quickly moving away from print media and more towards the speed and ease of the internet, if you are one of these businesses without a website, you may want to think about getting one now. The quickest and most cost-effective method of doing so is through purchasing a pre-designed web template and having a web designer tweak it to your identity. This should be one of the first investments you make with your company due to the habits of young professionals of today. For example, when a person is told about a company, one of the first things they will ask is “do they have a website?” This is due to the ease of typing in the URL and researching the company for oneself. Continue reading »