Happiness

Another Unstruck illustration for Alex...
This time, the question is: 'If misery loves company, what does happiness love?'

The Unstruck project is a collaboration between questioner, writer and illustrator. Alex gets 7 questions a week - one each morning, and half an hour to write an answer for each. He then hands his answer over to an illustrator who has half an hour to produce an illustration. It's an exercise in speed and generally squeezing out some creativity - for him, on a daily basis, for me, occasionally, when I volunteer, or am asked.

This one wasn't so easy. I think it's a lovely piece, and of course, happiness is a beautiful thing, but how to illustrate that? Decided to take the somewhat easy option and go for a typographic piece, based on the text of the article, and the idea of what 'happiness loves'...

Alex says he'd like it on a t-shirt. Which is definitely a compliment.

Pattern-tastic

Well, the repeat pattern urge struck me again, and I spent far too long last night drawing this drawing which didn't even work very well in the end. Oh well.

It was inspired by this old tile which I saw during the day. I love those amazing elaborate cracks which appear in old ceramics. But through a combination of laziness, and actually genuinely feeling like it looked better that way, I didn't entirely fill in all the gaps.

Unfortunately due to my lack of perfectionism and choosing a very elaborate pattern, it doesn't EXACTLY match up at the edges, as you'll see if you look at the full view. Oh well. Another lesson learnt for the future!

Here's the tile which inspired it all...

Here's the one main section which will repeat...

And here are a few examples of the pattern.

 

 

UPDATE!

My friend is a delightfully technical game art designy type who knows all about repeat pattern textures. He kindly applied by pattern to a sphere, which I find irrationally delightful, even if it does make the errors in my repeat a bit more obvious...