Design Forums Competition

I have been a member of designforums.co.uk for a few months now and was asked if I could make a blog entry about their new contest launching today. Certainly sounds like a fun idea, I might enter myself. Hopefully any designer folks of any media reading this now will consider entering as well!

I'll let Tony and Sean take it from here!

Contest details


- The competition will run for six weeks in total (two week application stage, four week runtime)
- The application stage will require people to submit Name, DOB, Location, their area of design and one random word to the pot.
- Two words will be chosen at random to form a fictional company name for the design brief.
- Entrants are then free to create anything they like, from branding, through to illustration or video promotions for the fictional company.
- When the entries are submitted, entrants must also submit a small (paragraph) brief along with their entry, explaining how they interpreted the company name.

The main competition stage will run for four weeks, and at the end, the entries will be collected, given to our guest judges and evaluated.

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CLICK TO SEE THE PRIZES

The winner will receive;

1 x Wacom Intuous 4 XL Tablet

1 x Corel Painter 12 

500 x premium business cards supplied by Stationery Direct


Second place will receive;

500 x premium business cards supplied by Stationery Direct

1 x years FREE gold hosting supplied by OneSixTwo.net


3rd place will receive;

500 x premium business cards supplied by Stationery Direct

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If anyone has any questions at all, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us.

Thank you for your continued support and we hope to see you around the forum.

Tony (tony@designforums.co.uk)
Sean (sean@designforums.co.uk)
www.designforums.co.uk

Well, I'm intrigued. Think I'll give it a shot! And of course if you're a creative yourself, hopefully you'll consider doing so as well.

As of right now, after weeks of writing dissertations and development, I'm off to plan comic pages and animations... FINALLY.

Dissertation, Lizard Cops Art and Pigeon Head

Yeah, the title isn't exactly the most creative thing I've come up with. Shaddap, I've been using most of my brainpower scrambling to get this dissertation done the past few days.

I'm pleased to say that it's going very well though. It's been quite helpful that a lot of the discussion points in my dissertation were looked at beforehand in my other written modules. Basically, I'm discussing how success can be defined and how that can be applied to the practice of webcomics. If that makes sense. IT BETTER MAKE SENSE. IT'S ALL I'VE WORKED ON FOR THE BEST WEEK.

Anyway, I've wanted to update this blog after my rather... dispirited entry (I'm starting to feel much better after throwing myself into this writing and I'm hoping to improve further after I can work on artwork again) but due to the amount of time spent writing, I haven't let myself get distracted with creating art. So it's been a few weeks since I've drawn much else.

However, before I threw myself with little abandon into my dissertation, I managed to scrounge up my finished entry for the Lizard Cops fanart competition, which is currently under voting now. I don't think I'll win but it was fun to do! Plus, I've wanted to draw Stanley and the dog character for a while now.

I wanted to keep the look quite close to the original show so I tried to do the background in a similar style to Rachel's. Although I couldn't resist colouring the lineart of the characters, I just can't seem to leave it black for some reason. Hmm.
Stanley only gets serious business if his doughnuts are threatened. Or if someone takes away the last pink sprinkled one, like dumbass dogboy here. Who no doubt will be too scared to leave his house and buy anything ever again.

"First the handbags and now THIS?? WHY??"

This was a fun interval to work on. Thanks for the opportunity, Miss Normand! Also go watch Lizard Cops if you haven't. I've linked it a million times now, JEEZ.

I hope to upload an entry with more Crumbs artwork once the dissertation is handed in, as well as share an exciting development... although that last one might need to wait for a bit. There will definitely be more Crumbs art in the future though, I promise you all that.

Until then, here's a selfie of me and my pigeon mask. I've meant to share this on the blog for a while now.

Drained

I try not to bring in my life problems on this blog unless I can find a way to be creative with them. Lets Emmanimate is mainly to share any artwork, development and progress on any projects I'm working on as well as the finished result. It's generally meant to be a professional place for my work... or as close to professional as I can make it anyway.

But long story short, I've been drained in every way possible. Emotionally, physically, mentally... just a series of events in the short space of a month, varying from recovering from surgery to life changing events, that have basically left me with no energy and very little drive to do anything productive. This is the first time in weeks that I've actually drawn something and for a cartoonist, that's hardly a good thing.

The problem with me is I'm not a particularly open person when it comes to my own emotions. They're always on the back burner because I don't view them as important in comparison to other people. I'm the funny person, I'm here to cheer people up, to be there for them. Not load my problems onto them. Unfortunately, this often means they fester inside until... well, this happens. A long time of little productivity, if anything. So instead, I've taken the time to quickly sketch out a small vent piece that has helped me a little bit- to see a visual representation of how I've been feeling. Seems a bit dramatic but it's mainly to get the 'feels' out in a creative way rather than letting them stew any longer.

I've had this sort of idea for a while now, where the colour slowly drained out of a person, leaving them as a sad shadow of themselves instead. It's pretty much on the nose to how I've been feeling. I normally use bold colours and lines but it seemed out of place for something like this, hence the sketchy lines and the blocking. Kind of adds to the whole 'not feeling like myself lately' deal, you know?

Oops, I actually meant to remove the 'Fuck it' on the shirt. I think I felt especially crap when I wrote that. Ah well, might as well keep it. If anything, it adds to the whole thing. Feel free to give any suggestions and comments, this was just to vent but I'd still like to learn how I can improve.

Thankfully, I seem to slowly but surely be coming out of that funk. Every day I feel a bit better and I'm just aiming to get back to my work mentality, where I can churn out a lot of art and be able to focus on that. Hopefully that'll be the case once the bloody dissertation is out of the way. Which I'm meant to be focusing on right now. Ugh.

So yeah, hopefully I haven't made myself look like some overly dramatic wimp. And if I have... eh, we all need a whinge from time to time. Thanks for reading.