A possessed arcade machine sits in a desolate futuristic landscape - populated by tentacles and thorny vines.

The tragic tsunami in Japan made me think about what Japan means to me. This is something of a reflection of how I felt about Japansese culture as a 14 year old when it had the strongest impact, a heady combination of sakura trees and neko girls.

I wrote a lil something something for this vectortuts+ article about using social media to reach a wider audience under my DeviantArt pseudonym 'MisterISK'. A bunch of other rad vector artists had their say too, its worth checking out the article just to have a gander at their artwork!

My illo 'Black Magic' is in supercool industry book 'The Mighty Pencil vol.1'.

The book is an industry only publication, so if you’re in a position to commission illustration, if you’re an art director, art buyer, magazine editor etc, then email themightypencilillustration@gmail.com and request a free copy!

I'm gettin' all emotional o'er here.

If you wanna read the mini article it can be found here at the ComputerArts gallery.

A robot collects samples of mushrooms from the forest floor in this cute vector illustration.

1 - Setting up

For this tutorial I will be demonstrating on two circles. Draw the circles using the ellipse tool (L). To use Add they must overlap. Select them both with the Selection Tool (V) by clicking and dragging a square over them both, or clicking each with the Shift key held down.

2 - Apply Add

Open the pathfinder (Shift+Ctrl+F9 or Window>Pathfinder). With your shapes selected click the first icon, Add.

The result:

The shapes have been merged! As you can see, the new shape has taken on the colour of the topmost selected shape.

Add can be applied to as many shapes as you wish to select, but they must all overlap with at least 1 other shape, if a shape is not overlapping when add is applied it will be grouped with the other selected shapes.

1 - Solids on a gradient

To create texture on a gradient it looks good to use solid colour shapes. I find you can create the nicest effects by taking colours from the gradient for the solid shapes.

2 - Gradients on a solid

Gradients can be used to create texture on solid colours. Alternatively you can just use solids on solids set to different opacity as above.

3 - Gradient on gradient

If you have a good eye for colour gradient on gradient can be very effective, otherwise it can look really ugly.

Hopefully you now have some new tricks to try out on your illustrations :D

My submission to the 2011 Lloyds TSB Art of Nurture competition. Theme: We act wisely.

1 - Catch all widget class

To access the uppermost widget class style li.widget

Below is an example of widget settings. If you don't know CSS then you can learn it here.

li.widget{
border: 1px solid #d0d0d0;
background: #f5f5f5 url('images/sidebaring.png');
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: top;
width: 190px;
padding: 10px 10px 10px 10px;
}

2 - Style individual widgets

To style an individual widget add them to your sidebar, then use Firebug or look in view source to find the name of the widget container. Once you have found the name (probably something like recent-posts) you can style it using li#recent-posts.widget

Below is how my old recent posts widget was styled. Mine was called recent-posts-3 I think because I added and removed the widget 3 times during site development.

li#recent-posts-3.widget{
border: 1px solid #d0d0d0;
background: #f5f5f5 url('images/recentpoststop.png');
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: top;
width: 190px;
padding: 30px 10px 10px 10px;
}

3 - Styling the widget titles

Widget titles are styled by #sidebar h2{}. To remove titles simply add display:none; to this.

This tutorial should get you started styling widgets, I made it purely because I struggled to find out how to do it on my own, hopefully it works for you!