So, it’s time to “fess up” and let you all in on what I’ve been doing for the past 6 weeks or so. I’ve been developing a game for the iPhone / iPod Touch for release on Apple’s iTunes App Store. It’s called Hiqup and it’s a logic puzzler with the basic premise being the same as peg solitaire (jumping pegs to remove them from the board.) But there’s a whole heap more to it than that including teleports, bombs, jumpers and blackholes. And there are several different types of board to play:

Pieces – Remove as many pieces as possible from the board.
Time – Complete the board in a given time limit
Special Spaces – Complete the board by ending up with pieces on the special marked spaces on the board.

The final version will have 40-50 different boards so there’s plenty to tax the brain Each board has a gold, silver and bronze medal to achieve and you need to get a medal to open up the next level.

Plus there’s a “Classic” mode with 10 different standard peg solitaire boards for those that want an original feel.

More information can be found at http://www.hiqup.co.uk and you can join a release notification mailing list if you want to know when it’s finally released (hopefully sometime in September with any luck.)

Oh yeah, and it’s only going to cost $1.99

Due to having a pile of them sitting around doing nothing, I’ve decided to drop the price of the Take Me Away tees to $28.00.

You can get them in my Etsy store if you’re interested:

Take Me Away Tee

If that listing comes up as sold check my store’s main page as I’ll re-list the item again.

Got a big surprise this morning – a pack of iPhone/IPod Touch wallpapers made from my digital work that I uploaded to deviantArt yesterday has been awarded a Daily Deviation today. For those not familiar with deviantArt, every day the gallery directors choose a selection of pieces (around 20-30) to bring to the attention of the wider deviantArt community and today one of the pieces was mine.

I created the pack on a whim yesterday, to be honest. I wanted to get some of my work onto wallpapers for my own iPhone and then thought I might as well upload it. I’m in shock that it’s been picked, I should see a whole heap of traffic to my deviantArt pages today. Great way to start a Friday!

If you’d like to download the pack just click the image above and you’ll be taken to the deviantArt page. Then just click on the Download link to grab it.

I’ve got a lot of stuff going on in my head at the moment, a lot of ideas, a lot of thoughts. A lot of things I need to do. It’s getting on top of me a little, knowing where to begin and what to “pick off” first. It looks like I’m not producing much at the moment but I am doodling a lot, it’s just that I’m not happy with the strength of what’s coming out. Plus there’s something else I’m trying to organise, and that’s taking longer than I hoped for.

Hopefully some of my ideas will work and I’ll start churning out some new stuff soon. I feel some pressure all of a sudden because a piece I did recently, That Special Someone, has proved to be the most popular thing I’ve posted on deviantArt to date, by a very long way, and i’ve been quite taken aback by the response to it. It was a quick doodle, if I’m honest. I didn’t over-think it, it just happened. It’s one of the few times where I’ve been pleased with a piece as soon as I’ve finished it, generally I start hating a piece just before I’ve finished it and can only appreciate it objectively a few days later. Trying to re-create the freedom in that piece I’m finding difficult. I didn’t have to try with that and now the harder I try to capture that freedom again, the further away it goes. I need to stop trying

Also Saturday was a tough day, truth be told. I had to have my cat Bod put down. He was 15 years old and I had had him since he was born (his mother lived in the shared house I lived in). I’d known him longer than my wife, I was fresh out of my teens when I got him, and it was weird letting go, even though I knew it was for the best. I didn’t want him to suffer. I do miss him, though.

Around an hour ago my first screen printed tees arrived featuring my “Take Me Away” design. They look fantastic (my wife’s already stolen one for her own use!) I haven’t got around to taking “proper” shots of the t-shirts yet but will be doing in the next couple of days with our kind friend who’s offered to model for the photos. Until then, the picture on the right shows the t-shirts (click it for a bigger version).

The t-shirts Sky Blue ladies fitted t-shirts and they’re a heavier weight fabric. I have the following size available:

• Small – Dress size 8-10, chest size 38cm / 15in
• Medium – Dress size 10-12, chest size 41cm /16in
• Large – Dress size 12-14, chest size 43cm / 17in
• Extra Large – Dress size 14-16, chest size 45cm / 18in

Ethical and Environmentally Friendly!

I was determined to start as I mean to go on with t-shirts and looked high and low for a neat screen printing company that is not only ethical but environmentally friendly and hand prints the t-shirts. Fortunately, I found one and they’re helpful and knowledgeable to boot!

The t-shirts themselves are made of organic cotton (so no nasty pesticides) and the inks are waterbased. This means that there are no PVC or phthalates, CFC’s or HCFC’s, aromatic hydrocarbons, lead or other heavy metals in the inks and no solvents are required to clean the screen printing setup afterwards. There’s nothing toxic at all in these inks. Much better for everybody, including mother nature!

Buy One Today!

This first run is limited to 25 shirts only and there are still some available in all sizes. They are priced at £20.00 GBP ($40.00 USD) which I know is expensive but these are quality t-shirts made with nature in mind and they’re very limited! If you would like to purchase one just drop me an email at info@moopf.com telling me what size you would like. I’ll then email you back confirming if I’ve still got free stock available in that size and give you details required for payment. I can accept payment via. Paypal at present.

Shipping to the UK will be £1 GBP ($2 USD) per t-shirt and for elsewhere it will be £2.50 GBP ($5 USD) per t-shirt.

I’ve been meaning to get some blank vinyl toys for a while now to customise them and finally ordered some early last week. Many companies sell these vinyl toys/collectables and some, including kidrobot, sell blank versions for you to customise yourself. kidrobot’s toys include the mini Munnys (the two on the outside in the picture opposite). I also got a Jamungo Sqwert (that’s the one in the middle).

Yesterday I completed my first munny (see the picture opposite – click on it to see it bigger at Flickr.) I painted it with Uni Posca markers and then finished it with clear acrylic spray to give it a nice, glossy look. Each of the munnys come with a mystery accessory and “Seb” (as I’ve called him) comes with a funky pair of glasses. As a first attempt (I’ve never painted or drawn on vinyl toys before) I’m really pleased with how it turned out.

Expect to see more customised vinyl toys from me in the future. They’re enjoyable to do, if fiddly, and the Posca markers work well on them. Enjoy!

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, I was away last week visiting my in-laws and am just getting back up to speed now. But, I’m going to quieter than usual for a while longer I’m afraid whilst I concentrate on getting something ready for launch in a few weeks time.

All will be revealed in due course!

I had a really nice delivery of Moleskines arrive the other day. They include some small cahiers, some large cahiers and a couple of volant sets. The cahiers have a mixture of lined and ruled paper inside with some black covers and some buff covers. I’ll be hand customising them with my doodles over the coming weeks and selling them in my Etsy store. My first two, however, were pre-ordered by my children (well more like “Daddy, I want one and can I have a space man” kind of thing). I completed those first two yesterday (click the images on the right to see them in more detail.)

I’m customising them using Uni Posca paint markers which work really well on the cahier covers. I haven’t tried them on the volants yet, which have soft oilskin covers, but as these paint markers seem to work on just about everything, I don’t think it’ll be a problem. I’ll probably start work on some of the smaller ones over the weekend so keep an eye out for them arriving in my Etsy store soon covered with some original art!

In part one of this irregular series charting how I go from pen and paper to digital design, I got to the point where the sketch was finished and I was getting ready to fire up Adobe Illustrator. In this part I’ll bring the sketch into Illustrator and do the basic outlining.

Drawing It Again

OK, so I start with my sketch. There’s the one I’ll be using opposite. It’s a simple character that I’ll use for the rest of this series, taking it from this sketch to a finished piece. And no, don’t ask me what the finished piece looks like as I haven’t done it yet – I’ll be doing the steps as I write these articles! Most of my sketches are just simple lines – I don’t tend to sketch in shading although that does help some people to visualise their design. All I’m really trying to do with my sketches is get a basic feel for a design and leave the “fleshing out” until later.

So the first step is to scan it. I’m not too interested in the quality of the scan, so I don’t need to scan it at a massive DPI or get high quality lines so I tend to just scan in black and white or grey-scale. I’m going to use this scan as a guide to re-draw my design in Illustrator so quality isn’t important. If you click on the image above right you can download a higher resolution version of this sketch if you’d like to have a go at my process for yourself. Feel free to join in!

In Illustrator I’ll now place this image on a layer using the File -> Place option. Then I’ll select it and make it slightly transaprent (so the lines wash out.) I find that this makes it easier for me to the follow the design whilst checking the lines that I’m drawing with the pen tool. Then I lock this layer and start a new layer above it which is what I’ll draw my outlines on.

I use the pen tool with a stroke weight of 1 and no fill, on this stage we’re just getting a rough outline in place so stoke styles etc. can wait until later. I don’t tend to worry about accuracy at this point either, I just want to get the points in and I’ll then go back and tweak all the anchors to smooth the shape out. My only real piece of advice on this point is to use as few anchor points as your design will allow. There are a few reasons for this but mainly you can get better flowing lines with fewer points and they’re easier to tweak afterwards.

Actually, I lied, there is another tip that I find makes it much easier to do the outlines. When you first place an anchor point it will have two handles, one on either side of the point. If you just place another anchor point now your line will get all curvy and out of control as you’ll basically be drawing a bézier curve. So once you’ve placed an anchor point put your mouse pointer over it and click it (you’ll see a little arrow appear by the cursor). This removes one of the handles and means that the next anchor you place will control the line between the two rather than there being two control points.

So after quickly doing the outline I’m left with something like the picture opposite. You’ll notice that I haven’t bothered with the pupils yet. I don’t tend to at this stage as I’ll pretty much ignore the original sketch pupil positions and create ones that fit with how I feel about the design later. So now I use the Direct Selection Tool and start tweaking the anchors to smooth out places where the lines aren’t smooth or tweak the design. I tend to continue with this process past this stage as well, tweaking here and there as it’s suprising how much your feel for a design changes once you start adding colour and detail.

And voila the simple design is outlined. I can now turn off the sketch layer as I’m no longer going to need it (although I don’t delete it just in case I want to reference it for any reason.) I also move the eyeball outlines onto a separate layer to separate the main lines for the design and the detail lines.

If you’d like to download the Illustrator file for this (I’ve saved it in CS2 format and zipped it up) then please click here (around 1mb in size). Feel free to play around with it. I’ve left the sketch in as well for you to reference.

From this point we move to putting in some colors and I’ll go through this part next time. Hopefully some of you who aren’t used to Illustrator found that useful – often it’s getting to grips with the basics that’s the most daunting and then it all becomes much easier

I’ve been getting into my new collection of Uni Posca paint pens over the last few days and have finished a couple of new paintings that use them exclusively. Where The Bugapillas Are is basically a larger (12 inch square, deep-edged canvas) rendition of an ACEO I did a little while ago. It’s an evolution of that piece with more detail, I guess. Unfortunately I made the mistake of varnishing this picture after I’d taken the photos and scans of it. I now know that Posca paint markers don’t react well with the varnish (it’s the same varnish I use on my acrylic work). You just have to scratch this up as a learning experience when it happens!

The Dreamer is from an idea I’ve had floating around in my head for a while (it’s quite apt, when you think about it) and is something I feel has mileage for future work – there’s a lot that could be done with the simple concept of seeing inside the character’s head. I’m definitely going for the “feel good” factor with this train of thought, however. This piece in on an 8″ square, standard edge canvas.

My new canvas supplies arrived yesterday so I’ve now got lots to play with. Expect some more new work soon! And also expect to see The Dreamer appear, in one way or another, on items in my Etsy store in the (hopefully!) not too distant future.