Satzuma : Design & Development Projects Update Summer 2016

ORANGE WITH A SPLASH OF BLACK

“its black and orange!” That was the first thing I noticed when I received my current employer shortlisted me and sent me a link to their web address! What's not to love about black and orange – as a kid orange used be my favourite colour and now I practically dream in it. I felt that it has been long overdue that I should post a blog update with regards to some of the creative projects that I have had the honour of working on in the past couple of years. These range from designing Air applications, websites, characters, product videos, intro's flash animations (now Animate CC) and many more.

Bit of Action Script 3

THIS WAS AN AIR APP AND BROWSER DEMO
FOR DIY PHONE CASE PRODUCT

Stand design at the Harrogate Show - TETO!

My Rufus illustrations for the book cover artwork!

Website Interface

Packaging for the Smartphone Joystick

Above, I have added the interface design and the screen grabs of the working iDesign application, this was built in flash and written in AS3. The other projects cover the trade show picks, illustration, UI and some packaging.

Not Just Design And Development.

Satzuma is a company that cultivates a think different approach, be it in marketing and design or its approach to business. Having the opportunity to work with like minded team and being at the forefront of the creative process has given some invaluable experience in creative direction, hiring staff, working with freelancers, collaborating with business development and of course, recruiting fellow design interns!

"Satzuma illustrates three important skills; Do one thing well, make it a fun thing and think different"

- Guy Kawasaki, Former Marketing Chief of Apple

"I have worked with Jimm for over 6 years across hundreds of commercial projects. Jimm's ability to produce my ideas or concepts quickly by carefully listening and understanding to what I need or want commercially makes the difference. His design skills by hand and computer combined has always produced highly creative and unique pieces of work which has formed one of the main corner stones of our business."
– J Ramm, Satzuma LTD

Thanks! :-)

Simple Custom Cursor For Your Stencyl Game

The following block shows a simple method for making your own custom cursor.  Please refer to the Stencyl community help section for further details on coding blocks.

General Gist : this little 'how to' covers some basics for making a custom cursor in Stencyl. In a nutshell, you need to hide the default operating system cursor and swap out for your own custom cursor, which will be an actor type.

Part 1 : Graphics
1 ) Firstly you will need to draw your one custom cursor in graphics program of your choice. I used Adobe Illustrator to draft up this pointer and exported it as a .PNG – Dims 29px 27 px, remember to save your .PNG in logical place in your project folder.

Part 2 : Importing a Cursor As An Actor Type

1 )Open Stencyl and navigate to your game project (assuming you have already made a project)

2 )In the upper left corner press on the “Actor types”and create a new actor. You will then need to add a frame and import your newly created cursor!

Part 3 : How To Make it work

1 ) Click on 'actor behaviours' and create a new behaviour! This will be a basic behaviour to make your Cursor work in your game.

2 ) Click “add event” in the top of the panel. Add > When updating

3 )You can either navigate through the code blocks manually or you can search for them. Using the image shown. Thats how to make a basic Cursor in Stencyl! Don't forget to attach the block to the Cursor Actor, the green button in the top right will allow you to do this - “Attach to actor”

Block for making custom cursor

Run game!

Bug with cursor full screen * untick fullscreen mode!

Please take into account that the flash player from Stencyl ( when tested from the game ) game glitches in full screen mode. The main default operating system mouse will still be visible despite having the cursor hidden.This could be an apparent issue with the flash player. - Dated from May 2016. Try unticking the full screen mode... Not the best

Notes : this bug happens on a iMac OSX i5 10.9.5

#stencyl #flashplayer #cursor #simple #pointer #codeblock

Bring Out Your Beasts – MONSTER DRAW...

Bring Out Your Beasts – MONSTER DRAWINGS

Felt compelled to draw some vile things and a little less of the London Underground (although I will be coming back to this very soon) I have been getting my brain monsters and design down on paper. Most of these sketches, doodle's, drawing have been captured on a traditional cartridge paper using both my mechanical pencil and graphite.

I think it has to be said that I get a level of satisfaction from drawing the grisly details of creatures, be it afflictions, boils, wounds, teeth and any other visceral part of the anatomy. Drawing this gives me sense inner rhythm , a hum or chord in which my body and mind tunes into. It's gives me sense of focus and relaxation which I can only graze upon with these few words.

Take your time to have a browse, I have been feeling quite inspired to do some more creature design and studies since going to the zoological museum at UCL. Elephant skulls are quite fascinating to draw and also strange without flesh. That's for another day.

It's Blurred?

Thank you for looking and reading. To view more of these pieces of artwork you will need sign up to Patreon to see what that walking affliction might to look like, thank for you support. (You will need to pledge $5 or more see this post)

https://www.patreon.com/posts/

All artwork Copyright JD Odell 2016. Please do not use, distribute without my prior consent.

Thank you for reading

London Underground Drawing - Crowded Northern Line in Rush Hour. "Mind The Gap"

Tube drawing captures the folly of the London Underground

I have been traveling on the London Underground for years and despite the fact that it is a travel nightmare, most people avoid social interaction and a bit smelly! It is a fascinating place.

I felt inspired to draw a scene of the rat race capturing the annoyance, the displeasure and the all round chaos that unfolds in the morning and evening's getting from A to B - you should hear some of the expletives I mutter under my breath. With this drawing I felt compelled to share a sense of immense overcrowding, irritation and the general lack of personal space.


In this picture
None of these people are faceless numbers, each person is an individual with a story to tell. To pick a few faces out of the crowd: you have the builder getting to the site with his huge toolbox, both him and it covered in bits of muck and plaster. You have the woman in the middle trying sandwich herself on the already crammed train and the other woman to the right desperately trying to force herself and her luggage onto the carriage, in doing so obstructing the doors so nobody gets to where they are going but ironically she is frowning at someone else. You have the 'Turtles' (i'm guilty of this) sticking their backpack into other peoples personal space and also reducing the total capacity by a few – oh the joys. And lets not forget that stranger on the left holding a bin liner with a sword hilt inside... weirdo. This is all but a fragment of who and what travels the perilous London underground. These brave souls must venture to their place of work battling odours, the ignorant and tourists with selfie sticks, whats not to make you blow your lid!

This picture was illustrated on my travels from South Wimbledon to Honor Oak Park.

Happy new year all!

If you would like more information on this drawing be it a print or a commission feel free to get in touch.

London Artwork!

Working With PHP Include : First Baby Steps For Designers - Making A Low Maintenance Website

Experiment With “Include” PHP

Maintaining a large website such as Satzuma can become time consuming.  Using “include” can take the website to the next stage of modular design. Imagine having to write 1 line of code into a php file instead of having to copy & paste the same piece of code across 70 pages, worse still… imagine that piece of code had a typo – across all 70 pages! You start to get the idea – the horror. Using PHP include can reduce the time consuming method of copy and paste, shorten time, and take your website to that next stage of design (Or look at a CMS system). With this Include method, the information you amend in one file can change across multiple webpages, just to name a couple of ideas you can use this for navigation, footers, banner adverts and much more. I cannot emphasise how much easier this will make your life when working on larger projects. Change once to  update many!

How To Go About It


As a rough example we are going to make a footer module. We also have the main document that will  “include” pull in, integrate, import a file from your website.

This tutorial/experiment will assume you already have prior knowledge of setting your website up with root folders etc, if you need some more help with this please follow these tutorials.

https://helpx.adobe.com/dreamweaver/how-to/first-website-part1.html 

Or PHP



http://php.net/manual/en/tutorial.php

You Will Need: 

 - The main file (The parent/master)
 - An external footer file (why not add some styling to your html?) 
 
 - one line of code, which you will embed into the parent folder. 
 
 - A space to upload/test your experiment. (domain and hosting)

Stage 1 - Parent File

We will treat this file as the master file, the parent which pulls in the external modules to construct the page. Remembering that if you are using this modular method for constructing your website it will make life much more efficient.

Why not call your parent file ‘master.php’ 



This image shows (with straying CSS, bleurgh! ) the master.php and Product-footer-test.html working together... or popping out of the bottom. 

Stage 2 - Footer File


I have used the footer in the example, as this area of the website has frequent updates with new products and information constantly being change and added, and it is spread across the entire website… As you can see, all styling is added to this queasy example with the accursed table! Any changes or modifications will be included in the master file once you add the “include” piece of code to the master file. So what you change here (the footer file) will be visible once you come to uploading all of the files and testing the file. So... Design and build your footer file and add you styling to it.

Stage 3 - The Simple Piece of Code to Paste Into Your Master PHP file. 

The image below shows in red where the piece of "include" code sits. So, imagine you have made a hollow space on your webpage, in the hollow space you are going to add this code to the bottom. As shown. 





Product-footer-test.html"); ?>


This will call on the footer module and all of its elements.  Once you upload your files you can see whether the footer has worked.

This visual diagram will show how the principle will work leaving aside how the coding works for the PHP include.

Hope this helps, I plan to use this much more in the future.

Happy designing...

Business Card Sized Mini Prints. Artwork samples & illustrations. 1st Run

Mini Printed Pictures

I printed these mini business card sized pictures with idea to hand them out as sample prints to prospective businesses and to canvas for private commissions. Being pleased with the general quality of these miniature reproductions I am offering the last of the first run (1st Run) to the open market. Being satisfied with result of this batch I intend to print another batch although the characters and prints themselves may well be different in the next set.

Displaying the complete range of the first run

Top left to right : Bloated Zombie, The Poet, Golemn the cat, Madman's throne,
Gorian, Tulip, White hare, and the reverse of the card

About The Collection of Artwork

The collection of a printed cards consists of a range of illustration work taken from my portfolio, also available for viewing on JD illustration - my commercial illustration portfolio blog. Drawings and artwork vary from monsters, folklore to everyday characters. Some of the pieces have featured in exhibitions in the North and South East Cornwall.

The White Rabbit

The Poet

Gorian - The Miserable Imp

Can I buy These Cards?

Yes, although these cards are now in limited supply and once the first run from which there were 50 cards, there will be no more of these cards (1st Run) . Should you wish to purchase these cards I will sign the reverse before sending them to you via recorded post. The other 'Samples' do not have a signature which were sent out for canvasing purposes.

Please contact me for further information and which cards you would be interesting in buying from what is listed above.

http://jdillustration.jimmsdesign.co.uk/contact-freelance-illustrator.html

Artwork Update - Fantasy & Folklore Art : Manticore, The White Hare and a Faun

Artwork Update : Fantasy & Folklore

I felt it was time again to add some of my fantasy and folklore artwork to Blogger as it has been a while. I have been busy on the illustration and design side of things so that can only be a good thing, but this does take me away from working on my own personal updates. So, I have selected a couple of pieces of artwork for your interest. 

1 ) The Manticore : this is my rendition of the Manticore, a mythological beast with human features, the body of a lion and scorpion's tail. This depiction of the Manticore is based on a rewrite of a bestiary which was originally written by monks in the middle ages, which is a close as you could get to the original description of the mythological beast (how dare you! it's real I say!). Should you ever get the chance to read a classic historical bestiary I would recommend it - I don't know what those monks were taking but it seamed give them some fairly outrageous ideas! I also get the impression that most of these Monks didn't venture further than their chapel grounds, let alone visit the far east where they believed these creatures roamed free - so knights beware. I think one of my favourite inserts which I remember suggests : a virgin should cuddle a unicorn to cure a particular affliction... good luck finding a virgin!  

Red Manticore Illustration JD Odell

2 ) The White Rabbit (Hare) : I have written about this piece of artwork in previous posts and listings. This drawing was produced for a folklore exhibition I held in Looe in 2011 - with this animal being based on classic folklore "should you follow the rabbit your misfortunes will begin" the smugglers, sailors in Cornwall were superstitious in the day and this nasty legend was based on the misfortune of a young girl.

I wanted the Rabbit to look cuddly and enticing yet conceal an air of hidden malevolence to it, after all it is essentially a poltergeist. The artwork was produced using markers, pencils and PS.

The brief link below tells more of the 'White Hare' . Watch out when you next drink in the Jolly sailor in Looe - me and my partner are staying in a cottage on West Looe Hill

http://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/england/cornwall/white-hare-of-looe.html

White Rabbit - Don't follow it!

3 ) The Faun Sleeps : This was another piece of fantasy artwork! This image depicts a faun sleeping in the dirt with its younger siblings nestled around him. I was fairly happy with the drawing aside from the environment looking bleak and lack of colour depth in the image. In hind sight I also wished I added more texture to the picture to really pull you into the scene, the browns all merge into one as it stands which is fine although I wander what it would have looked like with more to it.

At the very least... does the image make you want to lie down on the soft ground?

The Faun Sleeps - are you feeling sleepy?

I am more than happy to offer my services as a fantasy illustrator and artist be it for personal or commercial projects. For more information about my service please feel free to browse my website and contact me via my contact page. I can offer a range of skill with my main focus being in gritty details and commercial experience. My artwork has been used for print publications, marketing and graphic novels.

http://jdillustration.jimmsdesign.co.uk/

All artwork is Copyright James (Jimm, JD) Odell please do not reprint or distribute my artwork without prior consent. 2015

Folklore, monsters, creatures, fantasy, horror, drawing, artwork,