e Type Jag Car Cartoon Caricature

Jag Car Cartoon Caricature

Recently did a series of 12 car caricatures and a logo for a car building website and its various sub sections, and this is one varied to make a sample cartoon by adding a driver.... the E-Type Jag, in the style of our Heavy Metal Garage Cartoon series.

These aren't vector designs like most of our commissioned work is, but were done in blue pencil, inked in black pens, scanned, then colored in Photoshop to produce the transparent background PNG files in the way you do a comic...

Also did Toyota Celica, Mazda RX3, Ford XY GTR, Valiant Charger, first Holden Sandman , Holden Torana, 1971 Holden Monaro, 1962 Corvette, BMW e21, early Ford truck and a modern tuner style Mustang.

We can be contacted at  Art & Technology and do design work to customers requirements.

Xtreme iPhone 6, Does it Bend?

Most things can be reinforced and made unbreakable.  The Show XTREME 4x4 and host Ian Johnson are all about that.

.... the guy Apple should talk to about making a really tough, unbendable iPhone 6.

Project Studio Monitor Speakers, Then and Now.

Studios used to have huge 15" woofer based main monitors, Yamaha NS10 bookshelf speakers and 5" Auratones on the mixer bridge, as the picture above from 1986 shows.

There are many stories of classic albums being mainly mixed on the Auratones, while the main monitors were just used to impress the record company executes, or during tracking.

Small Project Studios now rule, and everyone has one.  The current fashion is to have them based around powered 2 way monitors with 5" to 8" woofers.

But that isn't what we have. We were using an old 30W channel Hi-Fi amp with passive 8" 3 way bookshelf near field monitors, larger 10" 2 way tower type far monitors, topped off with our Auraclone and some tiny 3" computer speakers. All these things modified or rebuilt.   The switch box selecting them is a DIY unit using the case from an old PC printer selector unit for instance.

But the point of this article is the tiny computer monitors for checking low end playback. They are what we use much of the time now. And we have recently rebuilt them from 4 ohm 3" 2W units to 8 ohm 2" 10W units using SWAN B2S drivers.

Used thin MDF to make new baffles for the smaller drivers, cut the plastics and put it together with contact cement and some hot glue.

Why?

An Auratone and our Auraclone is too Hi-Fi to now judge the low end delivery platforms.  As most of our videos and music will be listened to on a Laptop, Smart Phone or tablet with built in tiny speakers, if you haven't got a bass sound with enough upper harmonics, it will just disappear.  Also if the midrange sounds are too bright, that is all that comes across.  Putting a high pass filter in the Master output at 400Hz or 500Hz helps too with this worst case,

We also put tracks on our cheap Android phone with a mono speaker and that has proven instructional. So much so that we plan to get a replacement Galaxy Phone speaker (they are about $3 on eBay, which appears to be a 32 ohm unit?) and connect that into our monitor set up and see how that compares.

The world has changed. Hi-Fi isn't a thing any more, and people use much smaller audio systems as the lowest common denominator. The low end reference needs to change.

We can be contacted at Art & Technology, and check out our YouTube Channel or our music on SoundCloud.

Rough Starting Scribble to Final Rendered Illustrations Video

We have put up another 3 minute sketches to final video on YouTube.

The main purpose of these isn't so much to show "how to draw", but to show that the really, really rough starting sketch is a part of the design process, and not indicative of the final quality work.

They are rough because we cannot afford to spend a lot of time refining the initial starting concept, as it may not be the one used.  To put that another way, if the initial sketches were refined, the customer would have to pay for several finished illustrations, rather than the one they want.

The instrumental music in this is also unlike most of our stuff, in that it doesn't have any guitar in it. It is all Arturia Arp2600 VST and drums, all put together in Reaper using a Roland Midi Keyboard Controller.

We can be contacted at Art & Technology

The Youtube Music Video Demos

We now have a few video at our Youtube channel.

They combine our original music with samples of our graphics, how they were made,  or a demo of some technical article from our main website, Art & Technology.

Currently the most played video shows initial rough sketches, a few progress steps and the final illustration for a series of our car caricatures.

But that changes. Not always the same.

I find it interesting that these get played far more than just the soundtracks on SoundCloud.  That is really because most of the video have an educational "how To" aspect to them, especially the ones that accompany the articles on the website.

Check them out!