I got a tip from some of my pals who are recently parents over the Thanksgiving holiday- the kids dig penguins.

I’m told it’s because of a Facebook-like site designed for kids called Club Penguin, which I checked out breifly, but I don’t really know much about it. What I do know is that I am lacking in penguin-related designs in my Zazzle shop, so I made one for my morning doodle today and did a few different colors.

I like these little graphical designs of animals in candy colors. One of these days I might compile them all into a pattern, or maybe just do a series with one pattern for each animal.

Tags: animals, art, doodles, penguin, vector

I haven’t been posting them, but I’ve been playing with seamless repeating patterns since the beginning of the year. While it’s mostly been flowers and other sort of geometric shapes, there was this one file I started with the intention to fill with as many unique, organic shapes as I could, and this pattern of sea critters started to take shape. It took me a three or four sesssions to finish it (over the course of several months!), but it’s finally done!

I learned a little trick while I was working on this one. I kept testing it out and in spite of all of the unique shapes, I was still really aware of exactly where the tiles were seaming. I had overlapping shapes, but it wasn’t until I started using certain motifs over again within the tile that the rhythm finally broke up enough for me and the pattern started to feel more natural to my eyes. The tiling isn’t 100% invisible, especially at this small size, but it’s a lot better than where it started (I don’t see any strong path of  white running through it anymore, for instance), and I’m really proud of this one

Tags: animals, art, ocean, patterns, sea life, vector

I spent the weekend doing just about anything but drawing. I slept a lot, I watched cartoons, I raked the yard clean of leaves. I think last week was just too much- too busy at work, too emotionally draining- and I needed a vacation from thinking.

Now we’re on to a new week, and I’m feeling recharged and ready to start a Very Big Project at the beginning of November. And I drew a toucan.

I stumbled across a neat little trick in illustrator that I probably already knew, but forgot. I made these fern leaves and grouped them so that I could easily fill the tree with foliage. I had it all one color, and then accidentally selected an individual leaf within the group with the white arrow. So I shift-selected a few more and changed the tone of just those leaves. I think it worked pretty nicely to give the cloned fronds a little more variation.

Tags: adobe illustrator, art, interesting, technique, vector

Tags: art, cute t shirts, illustration, robot, t shirts, vector, zazzle

Three seamless patterns I made this morning

Surely there are more productive things I could be doing with my time. Especially because I can see the potential to sit around for hours moving individual elements in these patterns this way and that to keep any given pattern from looking too…tiley.

Fortunately I’m ultimately just not that obsessive, and thus I managed to make these fun little patterns in between waiting for video to render, or uploading some commercial to the server, or, y’know, whatever it was that I was supposed to have been doing this morning .

I have tiles suitable for desktops and backgrounds for websites. Shoot me a comment and I’ll make them available.

(previously, Seamless Repeating Patterns)

Tags: doodles, illustrator, monsters, patterns, seamless, vector