Larkin Toads

Cars v Bikes

Another AOI possibility, this time trying to show some of the environmental impact of vehicles vs cycles. Doesn't really have a visual London connection at the moment though so I'm gonna come back to this one...

yet more ambigrams...

another AOI competition possibility...

Illustration ambigram...

some more ambigram developments and experiments...

Dombigrams

If you want a real design challenge, try creating an ambigram of your name, I spent about 4 hours on the one I've made for my blog title. Here are some of the development stages for mine, created in Illustrator...

AOI competition - image update

Here's the pretty much final London eye/bike wheel image and I'm quite happy with how it's turned out overall, but I may yet still tweak colours and textures a little further. All the elements are much more 'readable' now so hopefully the whole idea is clearer. Anyway, I've started to work up some other possible ideas now so that's it for the moment with this one...

NOOBLOG

Ok so seeing as I've been encouraging my 3rd year degree students to set up blogs this year, I figured I might as well finally get on with doing one of my own. I know, I know, time to start practicing what I'm preaching, right? Ha ha! Besides, it'll be quite interesting to have an outlet for some of my own personal thoughts and opinions on the subject of illustration as well as sharing some of my own working practice and methodology... Watch this space!

AOI competition - works in progress

Thought I'd share some works in progress I'm producing as possible entries for the AOI cycling in London competition...

Initial rough developments:

Works in progress:

idea 1:

I'm fairly happy with how the bike map image has turned out so far, a fairly simple idea with equally simple execution. I produced this quite rapidly (about 45 mins from start to finish) using illustrator and then a little bit of tweaking in photoshop to add texture. I drew most of the line work as strokes with thickness and an extra outline by using the appearance palette. I may add some more text to this and I'm also toying with the idea of doing a screen printed version of it too...

idea 2 developments:

current work in progress:

A completely different approach taken with the London eye/bike wheel image which is still very much an early work in progress - I'm going to draw the bike wheel and frame to make the forks and spokes clearer and tweak the carriages further. I've used scans of some monoprints I did a while back to add texture. The whole image is composed in photoshop and currently has around 16 layers with lots of use of channels, masking and blending modes...