New Year Resolutions 2012

Well, that's annoying, I just typed a really long Blog post and bloody lost it. That was a great start to my new blogging era. Arrgh! OK lets try again and this time type into Notepad before pasting into Blogger...

So, it's 2012 and I know it's a cliché but I made a few new years resolutions that I think will be easily achievable. In fact, I've already accomplished two of them today. The first was to start my blog, which I did and I lost it and now I try and type it again (Déjà vu) and the second was to get back into mountain biking.

I cycled a measly 4.8 miles today and Oh my God, I was so out of breath it nearly killed me. I blame my heavy mountain bike (not the fact that I'm simply unfit!) I must get my old bike with a nice ultra light frame fixed so I don't have to be put to shame by my better half again.

"They say slow and steady wins the race, but Nicky looked like she was going to fall dead before the finish line!"

Now onto a creative note, I finished a personalised picture the other day for my friend's 8 year old son. He's an avid Ben 10 fan, so my friend requested that I produce a Ben 10 picture for his bedroom wall. He suffers from autism, so she requested that Ethan be portrayed as the character of Ben 10 as he would relate more to the image. It took me approximately 15 hours to complete. Here's a JPEG of the final artwork file and a brief explanation of how it was done.

First of all I scanned a photograph of Ethan's face and imported it into Adobe Illustrator, I started off by using the Vector pen tool to redraw on separate layers all of his facial features.

To achieve the right skin tone, I used the paint dipper tool to select the colours from the photograph. This gave it a great cartoon effect.

Once the face was complete it was just a case of drawing in the rest around. I produced a mood board for inspiration before I began so I could develop the colour scheme, characters and shapes from there.

After much research I found a close matching Ben 10 style type font for his name. If you are planning on producing some Ben 10 style art work I highly recommend the 'Agent Orange' type font. If you Google it, there will be some free downloadable links.

I had it printed A2 poster size yesterday and I'm really pleased with the outcome. It's so rewarding when you produce work on screen and then see the results in their printed format.

I'm planning on getting it framed tomorrow and can't wait to see his reaction when he see's it. I'll try and get some photographs of it once framed and hung on the wall.