With an extensive library of impressive vector work, it’s easy to forget that James White of Signalnoise is also an accomplished artist. I was initially drawn to James’ work by his collection of skull composites. Relying on traditional technique is a great way to ensure that your designs will be unique and keep you from falling into design trends. The technique in these pieces if very impressive, walking the line between hard and soft (soft textures, hard lines, whispie greens contrasted with deep reds).

Connect with James at signalnoise.com or by his twitter and facebook.

I opened my inspiration folder of amazing album work collected over the last year and pulled out these colourful selections. It’s not always easy to use a lot of colour on a piece and still have it come together and speak efficiently as a piece of design. A plan in mind and careful consideration in your colour choices can lead to some beautiful work.

The Miles Davis cover at the bottom is a great example of a great concept and execution of colour. Cool hues emerge from the centre and quickly transition into warm yellows, reds and oranges. When expanded, you reveal they are being contained inside the cool tones that emerged and faded from the centre.

Tennille Heinonen is an illustrator, painter, graphic designer and photographer from Sudbury Ontario Canada. Her technique is one part traditional illustration and one part digital technique.

In her own words, “I am a die hard fan for Digital Art in every way. I usually start out with sketches, move onto rendering a scanned version of the sketch in Corel Photo-paint and then put it through a myriad of tricks in Photoshop CS3 for finishing touches.”

She cites her major sources of inspiration are Frank Frazetta, Michael Turner, HR Giger, J.Scott.Campbell, Joe Mad, and the talented Adam Hughes. It’s not uncommon to see one of Adam’s works showcased as Tennille’s profile picture on Facebook.

For more info on Tennille and a more extensive gallery visit her DeviantART page.

Tara is a fashion designer in Montreal and painter in her spare time. She was always a gifted illustrator, but she only began painting about 8 years ago while still in design school. Since then, she’s developed her skills and put together an impressive collection of work. Her paintings depict strong women in beautiful backgrounds. From a distance the colours draw you in, but then it’s the patterns and textures she’s meticulously created in her pieces that leave you speechless.

You can view more of Tara’s work on her website.

Retro-futurism has become a popular style for many modern designers, including myself. When researching some reference material, I came across a wide collection of eye-pleasing illustrations by artist Frank Tinsley. Tinsley is the man behind some great science-fiction renderings for Mechanix Illustrated in the 60’s.

Frank’s illustrations reminded me of being a little kid again. Cruising around my parent’s house with my Lego spacestation brickset they bought me for Christmas one year. Maybe that’s the draw I have towards the retro futurism style.

I’ve had a collection of Mitch’s work in my inspiration folder for months now. His talent at capturing the heroic comic characters of our generation creates a rotting, boiling, green jealous-monster in my belly. His talents with the digital tablet are truly very impressive.

I chose to highlight more of his spot illustrations as they have a certain vintage quality and character to them that I love. His polished works are truly amazing. But the imperfections of what look like marker lines is what sells me on these pieces. I would love to see a lot more in this style.

Visit mitchbreitweiser.com and Mitch’s DeviantART page to see more of his work.

Jeff Finley is one of the creative minds behind Go Media as well as one third of the three piece indie/folk/pop punk band from Cleveland, Parachute Journalists. As most would imagine, having 2 of Go Media’s creatives in a band means they produce incredible visuals for their music. Here are some of my favourites.

Enjoy and hit up Jeff on twitter @Jeff_finley and check out his site too, http://www.jefffinley.org/

The first thing I’m going to talk about is how I render my shapes. I usually start with either a shape or a closed path I create with the pen tool. Rasterize it, then select the smudge tool.

Select the middle of your shape and start pulling outwards into open space to extend the shape or do the opposite and pull the open space towards your shape to tighten it up.

Start sketching out how you want your work to turn out. Don’t worry about any of the details yet. Just draw in the darkest portions.

Next, create a new layer. You will be adding some mid-tones right now that will layer on top of the dark spaces you already created. In my example, the black lines are the first layer and the grey sections are the second layer. If I were to turn off my second layer, I would be left with the black shape from above. Just like before, don’t focus on shadows and highlights, just try and get your shapes to look right. You’ll building on them later.

All done? Create another new layer. Now you’re going to do the samething again. Tighten your mid-toned shapes until you’re satisfied that your work is complete and you’re ready to move on to some highlights.

Start by adding some soft highlights where appropriate and then use stronger highlights to focus on the brightest points of those original highlights.

The next step will be to add some depth with some textures and then adding some shadows around the top of the eye socket. Select a soft black brush and paint your shadow then select multiply on your layers palette and adjust it’s transparency. For the texture, there are countless of options available online. Put out a good description of the texture you’re looking for and you should be able to find something useful. Pick one and layer it onto of everything and select the best blending mode in the layer palette. I like to add a layer mask to adjust how the texture works within the artwork.

Now we’re moving onto the eyeball. select the area with the pen tool and then fill in a solid colour. The colour you choose now, will be framing the eye.

Add a layer mask on your coloured eyeball and mask the edges.

In this image, I copied the red eye with the layer mask and changed it to blue. Then I masked out the edges of the eye to bring out the red from the previous layer. So now the blue eye layers over top of the red, but the edges are masked out to bring out the back layer and create this gradient on the eye.

Just like in the previous step, I used a soft black brush to draw in his shadow and used a multiply blending mode.

The highlight was a white line I smudged into place.

The last step is adding a honeycomb texture onto the eyeball. Experiment with different blending modes to get the effect best for your project. Happy painting.

When finished, I added the eye into a poster I was working on for the Abduzeedo World Collabs 4 contest. To view this poster, click here.

I came across this poster series in a flickr group that collected personal project film posters. As I was saving my favourites, I noticed the files I was saving were all created by Hannes Beer of The Living Conspiracy. This collection is an example of how personal projects can lead you towards an impressive portfolio of work you love to do and help you develop your style as a designer. He’s successful at capturing our attention with his colour palettes and texture work and his type choices are spot on. The Black Swan logotype he created is perfect and was the first piece to catch my attention.

If you’re a fan of Star Wars and love design, chances are you know Drew Struzan is the man behind all the coverwork for the series (as well as many, many other movies). Rather than showcase what we all recognize him for, I thought I’d highlight this small collection of TVguide covers. I don’t think many of us have had the chance to see these. Everything about Star Wars is crisp, sharp, clean and bright: except for the cover artwork. They’ve always used a softer hand to give off that “legend” look to their films that only Struzan can deliver. No pictures, but traditional illustration by a master.

A simple title to best introduce the incredible works by Illustrator Grzegorz Domaradzki. It’s an extremely difficult task trying to mix analog illustrations into a poster design and still have it present the type of clean and crisp feel of a vector image. That’s exactly what makes Grzegorz work so inspiring. This is just a small piece of his large archive of work you can find on his site http://www.iamgabz.com/.

I’ve been arranging my files all morning, preparing another set of inspiring design pieces to feature. The set to jump out at me was the Dirty Vegas collection. What amazing covers this band has released. Incredible stylized renderings with a flat white logo at the top. Simple, effective, stunning. I have not done much research on who they hired to create such amazing album covers, so if you know who it is feel free to tell me and I’ll update the post. Cheers!

Living in Montreal, I’ve only found one event that could match the intensity of a Montreal Canadiens playoff game: and that’s a Georges St-Pierre title fight.

Georges St-Pierre (or GSP for short) is one of the most successful and popular fighters in the UFC. He’s famous for being a man of solid character inside and outside the octagon. Many Montrealers have met this local hero and all share the same raving review about how down to earth and grateful he is for the support standing behind him. Josh Koscheck will attest to just how fanatical this city is for their gladiator. He knew he would be booed mercilessly by the hometown crowd, but the look on his face during the weigh-ins spoke volumes to the love this city has for GSP.

This poster is to commemorate all the success GSP has had in the past and is sure to have in the future. I wanted to create something truly stunning to look at. Something strong, reflective of a warrior. I planned to use the same colour palette and styling from the Fender book. I referenced a lot of early century propaganda posters and the vast body of works by the great Shepard Fairey.

One of my illustration assignments back in school was to study the style of cubism and create a theater poster for a fictitious production. At first I dreaded the idea, but once I looked closely into the master’s work I was anxious to start experimenting. I would end up with something completely different than any other illustration assignment and that was cool to me. I ended up creating a poster for Alice in Wonderland and that ended up being my favourite portfolio piece I created while in school.

I decided to go back and experiment with it again because I had received some good feedback on the Alice in Wonderland poster. A piece I created years ago and wasn’t sure I should even have in my portfolio anymore. I chose Adidas as my subject.

So guess what? I won World Collabs 4! I’m so excited to have won this competition.

My good friend at Aoiro Studio and winner of the World Collabs 3: Francois Hoang arranged a poster GIVEAWAY of his winning entry. He received a lot of interest and so I will be doing the samething! Anyone interested should contact me in the coming weeks for information on how you can get your own copy.

For more information on the World Collabs Competitions visit Abduzeedo’s website.