While browsing the beer aisle in the supermarché here in the French Alps on Monday, on my first skiing trip, I received a phone call from Lizzie at Germination, the company behind the London version of the event.

“Good news — you’re in!” A great way to start my holiday off, knowing that I’d be one of the eight starting competitors in the showdown on April 4th. Plus the prizes are something to look forward to… My poor Wacom pen is gaffa-taped together now, so the replacement tablet and pen’s going to be very welcome.

If you’re around in London that weekend, come on down to Elephant & Castle and support me and the other guys (but cheer louder for me!).

For those of you interested, here’s my process for getting ready for the tryout…

Initial Sketch (24/02/2009)

I received an email last Tuesday night letting me know that I’d been accepted for a trial to enter Cut&Paste, and that I was to come up with a 15-minute design on the theme “Bliss”, with an optional challenge that it should be a t-shirt design.

Out came the notepad straight away, and after a brief brainstorm, I came up with this, which is a kind of ‘blissful unawareness’. The guy’s strolling through some post-apocalyptic landscape while listening to music, which transports him away into his own mental paradise.

Practice #1: 15 mins (24/02/2009)

This dreadful first attempt is a clear indicator that I had no idea just how much can be achieved in 15 minutes if you don’t panic and rush…

Practice #2: ~30 mins (24/02/2009)

Whereas this one’s an example of what can happen when you get carried away and decide to ignore the timer. Actually, it was a case of taking the image as far as I would have liked it, and seeing how long that took.

Practice #3: 21 mins (25/02/2009)

Refining the previous image, trying to find ways to cut some minutes off my time. It’s getting there…

Practice #4: 15 mins (27/02/2009)

The next couple were strict 15 minute tests with my decent design, trying to get as much done as possible while still furthering the illustration.

Practice #5: 15 mins (27/02/2009)

Practice #6: 15 mins (28/02/2009)

My final practice, finished about 10 minutes before I had to leave my flat for the real trial… I realised that I could save myself an easy minute or two by drawing the smoke with my Wacom instead of a series of ellipses — believe me, over 15 minutes, a one minute time-saving is a massive advantage!

Trial Entry: 15 mins (28/02/2009)

And finally, the final submitted image. I’m mostly happy with how it turned out, but there’s a few things I would have liked to have done a little differently. Unfortunately, the trial took place on a Mac — currently as a PC user, the keyboard layout and the terrible default Mac mouse got me pretty stressed out, which means I didn’t get to intersect the man’s shirt, nor did I have time to clip the background to a t-shirt shape. In fact, with 20 seconds remaining, I went to crop the image and couldn’t find the icon in the CS4 toolbar, so my final submitted image was actually about 10,000 pixels square. Oops.

© Rob Barrett Design.

For those of you who don’t know what Cut & Paste is, it’s a design competition taking place in 16 cities across the world in which 2D, 3D and Motion designers battle it out in 15 minute create-from-scratch rounds in front of judges and a crowd of fans and well-wishers. Over a few stages, the contestants eventually get whittled down to one grand winner (for each category), who — along with receiving some sweet prizes — gets a place to compete against the other 15 winners in a global final in New York.

So, I’ve been given the theme for Saturday’s audition, I’m coming up with ideas, and I’m having a go at some speed sessions in Illustrator. I’m down to 30 minutes to get from blank page to presentable design, so I’ve just got 3½ days to knock 10 minutes off my time now…

© Rob Barrett Design.

I’ve put together a set of 10 vector symbols for you to use in whatever you like. Commercial use is fine, but for my own curiosity, I’d appreciate it if you let me know where you’ve used them. Enjoy!

© Rob Barrett Design.

I just found out a few minutes ago that my Twitterlove Bird won the Styl.eti.me Vector Twitter Mascot competition.

Thanks a lot to the competition host, Roger Byrne (@styletime) and the judge, Chris Spooner (@chrisspooner).

I’ve been following VectorTuts in my RSS reader for a while now, and I often get excited about a tutorial description, only to find it’s a ‘PLUS’ — so this prize is certainly going to come to good use!

Nice work, all the other entrants as well — lots of varied styles there!

© Rob Barrett Design.

Given what my holidays have been like, I think this wallpaper I made this morning is a fitting tribute to the pastime I feel I’ve been sticking to most for the past couple of weeks… So, join me in raising a glass bottle to the next twelve months — here’s hoping it brings bigger and better things for all of us!

I’ve catered for the most common resolutions of my visitors, according to Google Analytics, but if I’ve missed out a lot of you, let me know and I’ll add more sizes.

© Rob Barrett Design.

In a few minutes that I had spare, I doodled a couple of birds to offer up for use, and sent across the best of the two for consideration. It didn’t get taken up, so rather than let a sketch go to waste, I decided I’d illustrate it for a tutorial of how I like to use Illustrator.

This is also the method that I used to create the cover images for the Adam Eason CDs.

Step 1:

Firstly, I took a photo of the sketch and loaded it into Photoshop (I’ve not installed my scanner yet since I reformatted my PC, hence taking a photo and not a scan). This first image is the sketch that I submitted.

Step 2:

I wasn’t quite happy with a few bits in the first draft — the tail was too short, and the eyes made the bird look stoned! So, adding a couple of new layers in Photoshop, I used white and black brushes to paint over the parts I wanted to edit. At this stage, I also decided to group the sketch layers and set that to Multiply, so that I could throw down some colour underneath, to get a feel for the final look.

Step 3:

Happy with the last stage, I loaded up Illustrator and placed the sketch into the bottom layer. I locked it and set it to 50% opacity, so that I could work over the top of it.

I then began to use the Pen tool to loosely draw the bird. I say ‘loosely’ here — it’s best to be as accurate as possible from the start, but at this stage there’s still lots of time for refinement. Just getting it drawn is the first priority.

As you can see, I made quite a few changes to the sketch here. I didn’t like the feet clutching onto a branch — I thought it would make a stronger and more versatile image to have the bird standing on the ground, reaching out to pass the heart, so I reworked his feet. The eyes were an accidental discovery — I created the circles for the basis of the eyes, and then decided that I preferred the look of them being wide open, so it stayed like that. The mouth got tweaked a little as well, to look less awkward.

Step 4:

Here’s the lengthy part. This is where I take my basic lines, tidy up the curves, so that everything flows nicely, and then where I make the nice, varied line-widths.

So, using the white arrow Direct Selection Tool (press A) and the Convert Anchor Point Tool (Shift-C), modify any lines that look like they’ve got any unintentional angles and points within them, so that they curve smoothly.

Next, to create the variable width line, lock all objects and layers except the specific line you want to work on. Select it (Ctrl-A / Cmd-A), copy it (Ctrl-C / Cmd-C), and paste behind (Ctrl-B / Cmd-B). You now have two copies of that line, one on top of the other. Using the Direct Selection Tool, select one end of both lines (so you have two anchors in your selection. Join them with Ctrl-J (or Cmd-J) and select ‘Corner’.

Now you’ve turned the two lines into an outlined shape. Invert the fill and stroke with Shift-X to set black as the fill. Now if you move any other anchor points on the object, you’ll see the shape of the line begin to emerge. This takes a fair bit of work, playing with the curves, to get the line to look smooth throughout, but that’s the simplest and easiest technique that I’ve found for varied widths. If you don’t want the line to come to a point, simply seperate the end anchors before joining.

Step 5:

At this point, just before adding colour, I then take a look at all of the lines and, using the Knife tool, slice off any segments that are overlapping — i.e. if a line should be receding behind another, then that is the one that’ll get chopped up (TIP: Hold Alt/Option when you start to use the Knife tool, and you’ll get a straight line).

Then just delete (or hide, if you like) the sections of line that you won’t need to show in the final image.

Step 6:

Not much work to go now! I now create a new ‘Colour’ layer beneath the ‘Lines’ layer and roughly block out the main sections of colour as set out in my Photoshop sketch (it doesn’t need to be neat, as the edges of these block are hidden behind the black lines).

Step 7:

Time to add the finishing touches… Create a new ‘Shadows’ layer above ‘Colours’, and select shades of your main colour blocks. Draw out the shapes of the shadows as sketched in Step 2. You can also add a ‘Highlights’ layer, as I did for the heart. Depending on the number of shadow/highlight depths you want, this can either be a very short step or an incredibly long one.

To add the final touches, I drew the stripes on the bird’s legs in a dark brown, and set the edge of the tongue in a dark pink, to take some focus away from it.

Final image:

© Rob Barrett Design.