He's behind you!

Everyone loves Chelsea, right.
Especially when their goals come in the form of daylight robbery.

Well, you know what they say

...You've got to pick a pocket, Eto'o.

Eto'odinho

Rough Shapes

Finished

An Executive Decision

A little doodle I did coming home from the Earl of Camden, having watched the Manchester United - Arsenal match

Oh, Bendtner is coming on. Our enemies shall be fear stricken.

Update

Fan club

A ringing endorsement.

Especially for you,one of my favourite tees by my boy @krlawson the best illustrator ☆ twitter.com/patrice_stylis…
— P A T R I C E (@patrice_stylist) February 9, 2013

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle

For those of you wondering about the title, I'll take it that you didn't read the initial post about the t-shirts, and for that shame on you.
Yes, you.
I know who you are.

For those of you who've just had a hearty chuckle, due to remembering the Officer Barbrady reference I made before, welcome back.

It's been just over 7 weeks since I thought of making a little doodle into a piece of free advertising, and I'm glad to say it's finally come to fruition. So here's how it all happened

You may have noticed that often my work draws inspiration from film, sport or other strands of pop-culture, and this occassion followed that trend. A friend at work had mentioned the Jack Johnson song "Better Together", and I began to think of the world's great double acts, Petit and Vieira, Bert and Ernie, Bangers and Mash etc, but then I got a bit hungry, and moved on.
The next day, on a train journey to work the idea from the day before flashed into my head, and I could vividly see tea and biscuits as a cute couple, so I knocked out a quick sketch, and it just seemed to fit. Perhaps the food theme had stuck in my head, subconsciously.

Power couple

I thought that from this doodle I could come up with a quick animated sketch, and possibly do some sort of promotion around it. For those of you that know me, I love clothes, and had a bit of experience screen printing, so everything seemed to fall into place.

Layout phase

I contacted my secondary school's art department for a bit advice on how to set up a screen print, and they graciously offered their facilities. I headed over with my sketchbook and spoke about how I planned to layout the design, and once that was settled, photocopied it. Sizing was a bit of a problem for me, as I wasn't sure how the design would finally look until the print was done, so after a bit of guesswork we blew up the image by 180% onto acetate for it to be laid onto the pre-prepared silkscreen. I must give thanks to Karen Plummer and Graham Sayle for their help on setting up the equipment, as my printing skills are somewhat rusty, having not been put to use for about 10 years.


After a good 5 minutes of shining a bright lamp onto the image, I was almost ready to go but I had to ensure that only the necessary areas of the screen would allow the ink through, so started covering the borders and any gaps with brown tape, and left it to dry over night.

Silkscreen

Coming back to the screen today, with it having dried out overnight, I decided to test the print out on a pair of vests, some t-shirts and a tote bag. I used black textile printing ink, that I picked up from Cass Art. I put a couple of sheets of newsprint inside each item, in case the ink pressed through to the other side of the fabric, and then applied the ink with a squeegee. I let them dry for about 20 minutes, took them home and ironed on the reverse of the design.

Pretty straightforward stuff, really.

Here are the end results

Hot off the press

L to R: Vest, T-shirt, Bag

Like the handwriting?

I think the first batch came out fairly well, but I've already realised what I want to do to tweak them. Mainly to do with the positioning of the design, and how much pressure to apply with the squeegee (I love that word).


These were intended for my own use. but I've had one or two of you guys ask, so if enough people are interested, I'd consider making a couple extra to sell on, but I'd need to know by Saturday, as I'm printing again on Sunday.


Let me know what you think of them, here in the blog, or on my new Facebook page, or Twitter feed. I'm all over the place.

@KarlDrawsStuff

 Karl(DrawsStuff). x

Mumette

Now this is a story all about how my life got flip turned...
No wait! ...Neither the time, nor place.

This is a post about my work with Mumette, so pull up a chair, put on your reading glasses and take it all in

The story begins at a mutual friends birthday party, and allowing me near a laptop with WiFi. I was initially tasked with song collection, but decided to show Sundae Afternoon to a new, and captive audience. I ended up Bookmarking the page and the night continued without much further talk of animation.

A few weeks later I received a message from said mutual friend telling me that the owner of the laptop, Emma, had been looking for someone to assist her with some illustrative work for a website, and my name had come up in conversation. This coupled with the blog site being saved on her Macbook made me a pretty accessible option.
A few more weeks followed, and on a late winter evening, over some hot chocolate *standard*, Emma told me what about the Mumette project.
I doubt I can do it justice but essentially, Mumette has been launched to help a demographic that has been overlooked, and possibly even marginalised. This group is young mothers, roughly aged 18-25. She told me how the sites that currently are either targeting the high end "yummy mummy" market, where as others struggle with cluttered website design. What Mumette would do is establish itself as the ideal site where mothers could share experiences and advice, attempt to abolish a negative stereotype around young mums, and also recognise the needs of their particular audience.

Whilst the planning behind the project was very impressive, there was yet to be much visual work done. The feedback I received was that there needed to be a strong visual identity that was integral to the site, with a clean and modern feel. I would be tasked with designing characters that would portray a sense of youth, but overall something different that wasn't very prevalent in other sites. We discussed the "7 Questions of Character", a technique I mentioned in my Sundae Afternoon journal, and the overall view was that it would be a young woman, with a low-income job or possibly unemployed with aspirations to become a good parent, and also embrace their youth. After the meeting we went our separate ways and I got to thinking more about how to design the characters.

I took to the Wacom, and had a bit of a block. I realised I'd never developed any female characters. I suppose you put a bit of yourself into your work, subconsciously or otherwise, which manifests itself in the fact that aside from the mother from Kitchen Kapers all my characters, in my films, have been male.

I took Wesley Louis' advice, and tried experimenting with shapes to get facial features. After a bit of mixing and matching I came up with a set of 5 designs. I wanted the character's to have elements of realism to them, and not be overly stylised which may have hindered the variation in my design, but I felt that they would be easier for an audience to relate to. I'm not saying that people can't relate to cartoons but I assumed that as the character is interacting through movement, unlike animation, the viewer might not want to work as hard to engage with them.

Fab 5?: Early stages of development

From here, we narrowed down the selection initially to three characters, that would be representative of young women from, both,  slightly varying backgrounds and at different stages of motherhood. I began trying to create alternatives and finalised versions of the characters, and came up with the following.

Amy: "... Her long hair will be her security blanket..."

Megan: "... Going to be a stay at home Mum and avid Mumette"

Katie: "She's wearing a big baggy shirt dress to hide and sign of her pregnancy."

 

 

 

Mumettes

After more email discussions, going back and forth, the characters had a bit of a redo. There was a bit of dissatisfaction on both sides that the "Mumettes" didn't feel very energetic, and lacked a bit of a spark. Personally, I think this was due to the nature of the character design, and my focus more on proportion and incorporating the fact the characters should be pregnant, than giving them more personality and vigour.
On realising this, I searched for more reference photos that had the aspirational vibe that we were after, and in addition to the visual information from the graphic designer, came up with a livelier approach.

Megan: A bit more movement

Megan: Smile

Katie: More variation

Katie: Poses

After another briefing, we decided that the first design was all but done, so I started to put more emphasis on the second character. She needed an bit more of a youthful demeanour and to be less frumpy. Focusing on the character's pose made me lose sight of  the colour palette, and while she had a look of her own and was no longer flat on the page, she didn't have a similarly carefree attitude. Fortunately, a quick-fire of emails, and having a couple more reference images led to slight alterations and a finalised look for the character that we were both happy with.

There were changes to the brief at different stages but they were all manageable, such as the reduction in the amount of characters, and the way that they needed to be modified for later use. I think I'll have to spend a bit more time life drawing, but moreover, people watching to get some more doodles done, so that I'm more au fait with creating new characters, or designs. Overall, it was a lengthy process due to my own schedule at the time, but I feel it will put me in good stead for future work. I hope you all check out the site, and that some of you can engage with it as it's a great project, that I'm sure will speak to so many people.

MUMETTE

Feel free to comment below.

Karl

T is for turtle

While "T" is undoubtedly for turtle, it is also for T-shirt. I've been doodling a couple of things lately that I quite like the look of as stand-alone images, and I'm toying with the idea of making them into T-shirts. I've consulted with a couple of people, namely Tom and Boyce, and it seems screen printing seems to be the way to go.

I've dabbled with the squeegee in my youth but those there back in the days when LCC was known as LCP, so needless to say I have a bit of reading up on the matter to do.

I figure that these illustrations may be a catalyst for some animated stings, and also shameless self-promotion, so I'll keep you all posted.

Till next time,
Stay DENCH or get Frimponged!

The first of many?

I write this piece in the hallway of my house safe in the knowledge that I've finally completed my first illustration job.
I've been working for a website called Mumette, which aims to provide a forum for young mothers. I met the founder, by chance at a friends birthday party and now so not underestimate the power of business cards (or saving your blog on someone else's internet favourites).
The end result should be two characters used for the site.
Good times for the ol' CV, and here's hoping the site takes off as from what I've heard it's found a real gap in the market.