I thought it would be cool to walk you through some of the steps I took to create this album cover for Tuf Luv. This isn’t a tutorial as it only briefly goes through the main steps… all the work done between those steps is left out. Bare in mind, this is an album cover, not a mixtape cover which are too often is filled to the brim with cuts and glows. 

1. First we have the original image. The photographer has taken care of the lighting that they want on the cover along with a few effects. This is the picture I got sent to work on. Photo credit: @ShinesFresh

2. Now to open the canvas for the front cover and work out what placement of the photograph works best. I went for him to be in the middle. This was the maximum the image would shrink to and fit on the canvas otherwise I would have opted to show more of the image. One thing I didn’t like is the lampshade, it ends up looking like a black box at first glance, but more of this later.

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The South Cheshire Chamber Business Awards were held at Crewe Hall, a truly amazing venue. I had never been to a black tie before, so to be honest, I didn’t know what to expect. The night started with me feeling quite socially awkward as the room filled up with faces I didn’t know, and dressed up looking glitzy.

After finishing the 3 course meal the awards started. I was slightly nervous… After seeing who I was up against I honestly thought I had no chance, after seeing a name on that list I thought they had it in the bag. As I started to hear Jo from Bentley speak about the winner, that oddly enough sounded like me, I was in a bit of shock… did, not, expect, that. After that everything is a blur lol. I went up on stage, collected my award and did a speech from the top of my head in front of 200+ business owners, had a few pictures and sat back down, still in shock. The nerves had gone but I was still shaking like crazy! After the awards were over, it was all go, pictures, interviews, networking, buying mum glasses of wine, the lot!

Well done to all those who won this year, including CTC Physiotherapy who I shared a table with, such a great bunch of people (we had the lucky table!). And to all those who were nominated, as Dr. Gav said to me before, you have already won by being in the book that so many business owners read through. There’s always next year

It’s a great feeling to have this type of recognition for my business. I did things the odd way round and started my business by working with clients overseas, mostly in America. However, I’m now trying to work locally, to make local businesses and individuals look awesome, in person and in pixel. This award will definitely kick start that!

I have a lot of people to thank, for giving me support and believing in me to get the job done. Firstly to all the clients who chose to work with me and trusted me with their hard earned cash – especially those who have worked with me from the start, throughout the price rises! Thank you to my parents and friends for backing me up and supporting me throughout. Redshift radio and the hub for getting me into the local offline networking that I hadn’t been involved with before. And finally to Jo and all the Judges from Bentley Motors, I’ll see you in five years to collect my Bentley GT

Liv

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I’ve been working on some artwork for the Heatwave Festival which takes place around Australia in Febuary with Tech N9ne, D12, Obie Trice and others on the line up which I can’t yet speak of. Anyway, recently I did a vinyl wrap design for the VIP bus. Here’s some work in progress pictures for you. Somethings had to be moved around by the printers, as I’m so far away and no exact template of the bus was available.

Tech N9ne himself shall grace this bus with his presence.

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Prominant contacted me about doing his cover artwork for his latest release again, which is always a pleasure. We went for a more album cover look like with his previous release; All Jokes Aside. I loved the picture used on the front cover, it’s just such a cover shot so I extended the image to work with the cover size and go to work editing it to make it a little grungier to contrast with his brightly colored tee and hat. The idea behind the faint images behind me is to create distortion, like an addict rocking back and forth, seeing double etc. The text was kept simple to give it a bold impact.

There’s also a matching flyer (below) and @prominantva‘s twitter page.

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This is a personal piece started today and surprisingly managed to finish within 5-6 hours. Record time for me. The purpose was to generally just practice illustrator more.

It’s a vector/illustration based on the Walther P1 which is a revamped version of the P38. General issue for German police and soldiers, post World War II. I love the look of this pistol, it’s in my top 3 favorites (yeah I know right… sad that I have a top of favorite pistols). The vector was done with a reference image and by looking at the Walther itself. Image used is below (after ‘Read more’). It was done in the style of the Chinese propaganda posters. They’re s

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Recently I’ve seen a lot of vectors of people which have smoothly blended skin tones and are half cartoon, half life like. I decided I wanted to give it a go but to keep the skin tones harsh to create an abstract effect. Once I was complete I chose to change the colors to purples/blues to further the abstract look.

This is my first time doing a color vector – as you can see in my blog my others are simple black & white ones with one color to make it pop. I’m no illustrator but I’m trying to get to grips with Ai more. This took me a fair few hours but they were broken up so it wasn’t too bad.

It could do with a clean up but… How did I do?

// Brown Version

// Purple Version

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