How They Did It — Ed Emberley Edition

For this week’s How They Did It, I had to share another great gem from Lynda.com. They have pro­duced a fan­tas­tic doc­u­men­tary about artist and author Ed Ember­ley. He is an icon for chil­dren and adults around the world. I love his books and they are an inspi­ra­tion to all artists of all ages.

Watch more at http://www.lynda.com/tutorial/86560?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=viral&a…

Award-winning children’s book author and illus­tra­tor Ed Ember­ley is truly a national trea­sure, hav­ing drawn nearly 100 books. The warmth of his fam­ily and his 17th cen­tury home are an essen­tial part of his work. In this install­ment of the lynda.com flag­ship doc­u­men­tary series, we go to Ed’s home in Ipswich, Mass­a­chu­setts, to meet him and all of the mem­bers of his tal­ented fam­ily, includ­ing his wife and author, Bar­bara; chil­dren, illus­tra­tors Rebecca and Michael; and grand­daugh­ter, record­ing artist Adrian Ember­ley. A gen­er­a­tion of chil­dren have learned to draw using Ed’s draw­ing books and we watch as a new gen­er­a­tion puts crayon to paper. At 80 years young, Ed is push­ing ahead and we meet with his team as he works on his newest iPad app—with graphic artists that, as chil­dren, learned to draw with his books.

Friday Freebie: Illustrator Cocktail Glass

New Years is just a cou­ple of days away, what bet­ter way to cel­e­brate that with a free drink! Or rather a free Adobe Illus­tra­tor vec­tor cock­tail class. Remem­ber, if you’re design­ing, don’t drink and if you’re drink­ing, don’t design.

Down­load the cock­tail glass here.

Free to use for per­sonal or com­mer­cial projects. Just give me a shout out if you do.

How They Did It — (The Daily Monster Edition)

This week’s install­ment of How They Did It will focus on the extremely tal­ented artist Ste­fan G. Bucher. He is the artist who has cre­ated hun­dreds of mon­sters and released them on to an unsus­pect­ing world. Don’t worry his mon­sters are cre­ated with ink and cre­ativ­ity, not weapons and dis­carded body parts. This mod­ern day Dr. Franken­stein of art has cre­ated amaz­ing work. Check it out, you’ll be glad you did!

A part of the great doc­u­men­tary about his work from Lynda.com

Some other resources about Ste­fan G. Bucher:

• Stephen Bucher’s YouTube Channel
• His Blog
• His Web­site

How They Did It

I thought I’d share some more cool videos that show the behind the scenes process in some great design and art projects. Note these aren’t how to videos, they are more art­ful than hands-on, so sit back and enjoy, because they are still worth the time. They give you a greater appre­ci­a­tion of the skill and craft that goes into cre­at­ing these works, which will help us all a being bet­ter at graphic and motion designers.

Taras Lesko builds a 7FT Gun­dam Mk-2 out of paper.
This is fun, watch­ing Taras Lesko build his model of a 7FT Gun­dam Mk-2 (okay, I have no idea what that is, appar­ently some kind of robot) cre­ated with paper is pretty cool, I am not sure what you uses some­thing like this for, but I sure enjoyed this video. His paper model was made up of 1250 parts on 720 pages of paper, for a total paper weight of 10lb (4.5kg)!

“7FT Gun­dam” — Ulti­mate Paper­craft from Taras Lesko on Vimeo.

Tat­too artist Shawn Dees shows how he cre­ates his art
Shawn Dees does great work in this video. The Samu­rai is pretty sweet.

John C. Thurbin cre­ates a cool illus­tra­tion in time lapse/stop motion.
This is pretty fun, the song is awe­some and so is John C. Thurbin’s work. The illus­tra­tion reminds me of The Illu­mi­na­tus! Tril­ogy by Robert Anton Wil­son and Robert Shea.

Chris Van Allsburg Interviews

I am a huge fan of Amer­i­can Illus­tra­tor, Chris Van Alls­burg. His books are amaz­ing in their sto­ries, tech­nique and skill.

In this inter­view, Chris Van Alls­burg talks about his big break­through, his books, and their trans­for­ma­tion into movies. You can see full the full inter­view here.

Here is a nicely made ver­sion of one of Van Allsburg’s great books, “The Wreck of the Zephyr.”

How They Did It

Here’s another assort­ment of videos show­ing the hands on exe­cu­tion phase of the design process. Yes, I know that a good magi­cian is not sup­posed to reveal their tricks, but I love videos that show how great artists weave their magic spells.

Please note, these aren’t how-to videos, they are more art­ful than hands-on, so sit back and enjoy, because they are still worth the time. They give you a greater appre­ci­a­tion of the skill and craft that goes into cre­at­ing these works, which will help us all a being bet­ter at graphic and motion design­ers. For hands on train­ing check out my favorite sites, Lynda.com or the Tuts+ Net­work.

Sci­ence Machine from Chad Pugh on Vimeo.

T.J. Thom­son designs a cen­ter spread for his Col­lege News­pa­per
Chadron State Col­lege’s stu­dent T.J. Thom­son waxes poetic about design and we are treated to a time-lapse video of his pro­duc­tion technique.

Glennz Illus­tra­tion Process — Mr. Tree by Glenn Jones
Last week I showed his great video North­ern Cel­e­bra­tions. This week, watch mas­ter illus­tra­tor, Glenn Jones as he makes a cool T-Shirt design based on Mr T. He’s com­pressed 45 min­utes of design good­ness into 3. It’s hard to catch but I like how he uses the roughen fil­ter to make his vec­tor Mr. T Chia Pet look organic. A good trick to remember!

He sketches the design with a Wacom Tablet and then he turns that into a guide layer, then he goes over it with the Pen Tool in Adobe Illus­tra­tor. He must have a black belt in Bézier curves for sure! Be sure to check out all of his videos on Vimeo, they’re awe­some!

Glennz Illus­tra­tion Process — Mr. Tree from Glenn Jones on Vimeo.

Digital Ephemera

It’s Wednes­day, so that means ladies and germs it’s time for another install­ment of dig­i­tal ephemera. Which is a col­lec­tion of inter­est­ing bits and bytes I’ve run across on the infor­ma­tion super high­way in the past week.

Mid-century Mod­ern & Tiki

• Retro Cock­tail Hour: A great weekly radio pro­gram from Kansas Pub­lic Radio. Host Dar­rell Brog­don spins Ultra-Lounge, Exot­ica and cool mid-century tunes. Sim­ply amaz­ing! Mr. Brog­don has an ency­clo­pe­dic knowl­edge of the topic and his digres­sions are almost as good as the tunes.
• Mon­sters Attack! 26 Epic Retro Hor­ror Movie Posters

Good Design resources, tips and tricks

• 50 Pow­er­ful Time­savers for Web­de­sign­ers. A great col­lec­tion of tips, graph­ics and other dig­i­tal good­ies from the lads and lasses at Smash­ing Magazine.
• Have designer’s block? Check out this help­ful arti­cle on how to have an idea from the ever use­ful How Mag­a­zine blog.

Free­bies

• Shame­less Plug… my tree bark textures.
• Hump­back Whales Pho­to­Shop Brushes… insert Star Trek IV or Moby Dick joke here.

Illus­tra­tion

• Vin­tage Children’s Books my Kid Loves… a fab­u­lous blog from Bur­gin Streetman

Great sites worth explor­ing

• Harvard’s Michael Sandel’s amaz­ing course in Moral Phi­los­o­phy can be watched for free. Not  design related, but well worth check­ing out and invest­ing time in this thought pro­vok­ing work.

Finally some­thing really cool: the video for the song “Card­board Houses” by IG88 from Kurt Lorenz on Vimeo

. I love the archival imagery jux­ta­posed with the cut­ting edge music.

“Card­board Houses” by IG88 from Kurt Lorenz on Vimeo.

If you have any cool design, art, tiki or mid-century links or thoughts let me know. Leave a comment.

Design Somethign Every Day 22/365

A silly doo­dle of mine com­bined with an even sil­lier show in Las Vegas! Donny & Marie, again? $255 per ticket… seriously?

Design Something Everyday 20/365: Star Wars Kids

When I was grow­ing up I loved watch­ing car­toons, I still do, but their power seemed much more inti­mate when I was younger. I watched all sorts, but I began to notice that an entire sub-genre of car­toons became all the rage when I was grow­ing up. It would take  a pop­u­lar series and re-imagine the char­ac­ters as either babies or chil­dren. I remem­ber think­ing that this was rather odd. Per­haps it was my first burst of crit­i­cal think­ing about pop culture.

One exam­ple of this sub-genre that I always found par­tic­u­larly weird was the show The Mup­pet Babies. Imag­ine the infan­tiliz­ing of Jim Henson’s bril­liant Mup­pets as dia­per clad t0ddlers. Many of my friends enjoyed it,  find­ing it irrev­er­ent, but I always found it rather creepy.

In this vein, I imag­ined what “Star Wars Kids” would’ve been like. It’s Luke Sky­walker embell­ished with a Wiki Com­mons image of the home world of the iras­ci­ble Sky­walker clan, Tatooine.

In case you’re won­der­ing here’s the Mup­pet Babies, in all their glory (please note the Star Wars ref­er­ence  at the :16 mark, talk about synergy!):

Tatooine Image Link

Here Comes the Sun…

A lit­tle illus­tra­tion I did in prepa­ra­tion for spring. Though in Seat­tle with our rain, spring seems very far away.

Design some­thing every­day 17/365