Animal Alphabets F for Faun

I'm partaking in #Animal Alphabets challenge on Twitter to practice my digital painting. I'm a little late to the party as they’re now on F, but better late than never. I'm trying to develop a softer children’s publishing friendly illustration method. I'll be trying to do one each week. You can follow my progress here! 

As per usual you can bookmark my website, follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, subscribe to this blog and/or connect to me on Linkedin.

Soreen Squidgy Fun new activity cards

The penultimate set of Soreen Squidgy Fun activity cards will be available to download this month. As I've said before if you have a young family this is a great resource for you and it's free. Once you've tried it you should let Soreen know what a great idea it was and that they should produce some more, providing they hire the same illustrator again. That's the important part. Without the same illustrator it's a deal breaker! Got it? Good!

Here are a few small snippets from the upcoming activities.

I am currently available for commission so get in touch if you have a project you'd like me to work on. If you want to keep up to date with what I'm working on you can bookmark or subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter, or connect to me on Linkedin.

Revisiting old work

 I was asked to rework an old design from two years back which I did for YMCA called Smart Start Club. They'd originally specified what they wanted in the design but the feedback regarding the knife throwing main character (Sporty), the elephant and the lion wasn't favourable. I think attitudes towards circus animal acts have changed over the past few years and as for the knife throwing perhaps some parents were concerned their kid would want to give hurling knifes a go! Whatever their reasons I was asked to make some changes and I was happy to help.

The original art

The amended art

The client seemed happy with the end result and hopefully so will the people buying their product. If you'd like to know more about this project I have talked about it on a previous post. 

I am currently available for commission due to a delay in another job. If you need my help please get in touch. You can also keep up to date with my projects via this blog, by connecting to me on Linkedin, or following me on Twitter. 

Thanks for stopping by and I hope the rest of your week is awesome!  

Soreen Squidgy Fun new activities available.

Four new activities are available to download on the Soreen Squidgy fun website. Family Olympics, Bouncing Bunnies, Show Jumping and Target Practice. This means I can share some of the illustrations I worked on!

This is from Target practice.

A small section from Bouncing Bunnies.

A small section from Family Olympics.

If you would like to see the illustrations in their complete state please visit the Soreen Squidgy Fun website and download the cards. It's definitely worth doing if you have a young family and want to get them active in a fun way! 

As always you can subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter, and connect to me on Linkedin. These are the best ways to keep up to date with the commissions I'm working on. You should also bookmark my website. Go on! You know you want to. Thanks for stopping by! 

Upcoming work

I'm a day late with this post due to it being my birthday yesterday, and as a treat I decided to take the day off. After all it's not everyday you turn 28 (plus 9).

I just found out I'll be working on some more Smart Start Club work for the YMCA. I thought I'd share some images from the previous project which went out to day care centres and was designed to get children active through play. Each card had a theme with an accompanying illustration on the cover. On the inside of the card you'd find the game.

The cover for the theme Deep Blue Sea. 

They asked me to design a recurring character for the project. They named him Sporty!

It was a great project to be involved with and I'm looking forward to working on this new set of illustrations! If you want to see more work from the Smart Start Club project you should pop along to my website! 

If you want to keep up to date with my exciting life of daring do and more accurately what I'm
working on you can subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter and/or connect to me via Linkedin. You should also bookmark my website! If you have any projects which you'd like me to work on please get in touch, although I am currently booked up. I can't give an accurate date as to when I'll be free but it should be early April. When I have a more precise date you'll be the first to know, unless you're not following me online in which case you should be! Thanks for stopping by.

Skill 2 Play Sports projects

Another week goes by seemly faster than the last and another post describing the epically exciting roller coast that is my life is published for your viewing pleasure! OK, I might be over selling it as all I have to show this week is work from the Skills 2 Play Sport project I'm working on. What can I say, I like a dramatic entrance. You should see me in real life. If I don't have a smoke machine and an AC/DC track to announce my entrance to a room I'd rather not enter!

Skills 2 Play Sports is a set of resource cards designed to teach primary school kids a specific sport or set of skills. Since 2013 gymnastics, athletics and aquatics have been some of the skills covered. This current set I'm working on now is covering climbing and orienteering. As per usual I can't show any of the current set until it's launch but I can show some of the cards from the older sets.

These cards are from the aquatic set. They had a specific style they wanted me to work to but it wasn't too far off what I did anyway so I had no problems adapting. The tricky thing for me was to fit all the activities into a small space whilst making it fun for the kids!

With any luck I'll keep getting these to work on for many more moons as I am a massive fan of repeat work! Hint hint hint.

Time for the shameless self promotion portion of the post! You should definitely bookmark my website, subscribe to this blog which will be updated every Monday, follow me on Twitter and/or connect to me on Linkedin. I am currently booked up with work but I will announce my availability via the previously mentioned sites as soon as I'm free. Possibly accompanied by an AC/DC track and smoke machine!   

Work for a friend

I'm coming to end of my run with Soreen as I finish off the remaining illustrations for their final batch of activity cards. I can honestly say I'm going to miss working on these and can only hope that they're popular enough to warrant more in the future. Hint hint hint! I can't show any new work until it's released online and I don't want to repeat myself as I spoke about this a couple weeks ago here. Instead I'll share a piece I did for a friend back before Christmas.

He wanted me to do a banner for his business which I dutifully did. I must admit working for a friend caused me a lot more stress as I did not want to disappoint. I'm happy to report that this wasn't the case. Well, he hasn't said anything to suggest this was the case and I'm happy to leave it that way!

The reason I mention this now is that he recently posted it on his business Facebook page and it also conveniently gave me something to talk about seeing as I can't show any new Soreen work until April and May!

As per usual if you want to see more of my work check out my website and remember to bookmark it. If you want to keep up to date with what I'm working on you can subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter and/or link to me on Linkedin. If you have any projects you would like me to work on I'm available from early April so get in touch and I'll pencil you in.

Thanks for stopping by and have an awesome day. I know that may be tough as it's Monday but try!

The do's and don'ts of contacting me!

I had a number of business consultations with a great guy at the end of 2015 who gave me much to think about in terms of running my business. One of his suggestions was to incorporate more of myself and my sense of humour in the promotion and presentation of my site as it was pretty sterile at the time. My contact page is still looking very plain so I designed this comic style illustration explaining the do's and don'ts of contacting me. What's nice about this in my humble opinion is that it will serve as my next promo piece I send out attached to emails. Two birds one shot gun. That's the saying right?

Regardless of how successful this is as a promo piece is was fun to do. I'm fairly please with the unity of the colours which at first caused me some head aches. All I need to do now is add it to my contact page! 

If you liked this visual nugget you can see more at my website, and if you want to keep up to date with what I'm up to you can subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter and/or link to me on Linkedin. 

Soreen squidgy fun

I have just finished the latest set of illustrations for Soreen's squidgy fun activity cards which I will be sending over to the relevant people very soon. I can't show any of that work here and now as these resources are not out until April 2016 and I don't want to end up on anyone's naughty list. I can however show a few bits and bobs from the previous resources which are available to download now.

The purpose of these activity cards is to promote an active lifestyle to families. The following examples are from different cards and not in sequence.

If you've got a young family then these resources are targeted at you. You can download all the current activities here, with two more sets of activities on their way! You can also see more of the work I did for them on the Soreen squidgy fun website!  

Now comes the shameless self promotion segment or the me me me portion of the post where I point you toward my website and hint very strongly that you should bookmark my site, link to me on Linkedin, follow me on Twitter and/or subscribe to this blog. If you are interested in working with me I should point out that I am booked up until late March so early April is the time to pencil me in. I don't think that hint was strong enough. CONTACT ME HERE. That's more like it! 

Focus!

There has been a sea of distractions these past couple of weeks what with it being Christmas and new year. Oh, and some movie came out which I may or may not have seen on multiple occasions. With all this going on I haven't actually got much done, but it is the Holidays. The only guy working this time of year is Santa, and the folk at my local supermarket which seems a little unfair.

In the last couple of days I have been thinking about the year gone by and what I would have liked to have done a little differently. The main thing was marketing, or to be precise the lack of marketing. Once work got under way everything else took a back seat. I don't want to come to the end of my current run of work and find that there's nothing on the horizon due to the fact that no one knows I exist. A mail out schedule has been written up starting this month with email samples. I wanted to start with postcard mailers but my past self sabotaged that plan by creating pieces of work which don't quite fit right on a postcard. That past me is such a ****. By next week I should have some samples ready to send off to a small number of potential clients. Gone are the days where I took a free style jazz approach to marketing. I'm not kidding. I used to throw stuff out there and hope it stuck.