Unleash the Kraken!!!!

Hooray! Our ImageKind shop is open, so you can now purchase prints of many of the wonderful eVille illustrations. Please take a moment to check them out. We appreciate all of the support we've received over the last year. There is still a rough road ahead of us. Many startups don't make it very far past launch. We hope we're not in that bucket, but only time will tell. You can see our prints for sale here. The Kraken above is one of my all time favorites. There was the opportunity to make him dark and super scary, but our game requires a certain level of contrast for the images to be seen in thumbnail form. Besides, I eventually decided that a giant pink monster on a lovely summer day was far more humorous. Someday, I'd love to see him made into a plush toy so I could throw it on people while yelling "UNLEASH THE KRAKEN!!!!". It's the little things in life :)

 And of course, if you have time, you can check out the game on Facebook.

The Pit of Despair

Working on eVille has given me a great opportunity to brainstorm fun ideas for various card art. The Pit of Despair kept coming up while we were trying to think of cards that could protect your buildings, but for the longest time, no one could figure out how to make a pit interesting. We weren't trying to recreate the pit from The Princess Bride, which really was a torture chamber. We really wanted it to feel more like a booby trap. The trouble is, everyone thinks of seeing a pit from the top, rather than the bottom. Jason finally came up with a brilliant sketch. I illustrated it, and must admit that it has become one of my favorites. Unfortunately, this type of card is more downplayed inside the game, and so the artwork cannot be appreciated as often as others that are in the spotlight. Hopefully we'll be able to sell prints of some of the card art soon, allowing fans to take their own favorites home. You can see more art (and have some fun too) by checking out eVille on Facebook.

A Little Post Valentine's Day Round Up

Over the last year, I've been working more in illustration than ever before. I still end up doing lots of User Interface work, because well- it needs to be done, but most of my joy comes from completing an illustration. My current project is eVille, a card and location based Facebook game. Now that the game is live, I hope to share some of the pieces I've contributed to it a little at a time. These are two from our limited edition Valentine pack, The Florist, and Bad Cupid.

It's difficult for me to grasp where exactly I fit in the illustration world. Almost all of the pieces for the game, including the ones above, were originally sketched by Jason English, a extremely talented concept artist. I don't have the right kind of mind for translating an image in my head to paper I suppose, but when it comes to taking the sketch and making it come to life in digital form- that I can do. Both are vector images created in Adobe Photoshop.

You can see these guys in action inside the Facebook game here.