Teefury

Words from jimiyo: I'm a cat kind of guy myself, but I cannot resist the gaze of Hypno-Bailey! You must... You must own him.

Tell us about this design: This is one of a series of vector drawings of dogs.I prefer to base my drawings on my own photos, but occasionally come across someone else's photo which begs to be vector-drawn. Quizzical Bailey is based on a photo I came across on RedBubble. I contacted Bailey's human -- Jenni Atkins-Stair  -- who was more than happy to give me permission to draw her pug.

Tell us about yourself: I'm a self-taught graphic artist and illustrator.I've been free-lancing for most of my career. I'm taking on less paid work these days and putting more time and energy into self-initiated, fun pieces.

How did you get into vector art? A lot of my freelance work required me to redraw logos, maps and other images that came to me as hopelessly low-res bitmaps but which cried out for the crisp, clean lines of vector art. Once I got the hang of it, I enjoyed hand-tracing these images. It became a kind of meditation. After a while it clicked that I could apply the techniques I'd developed to creating drawings from my photos. It was fun to see the added -- sometimes surreal -- dimension that vector-drawing gave to even the most ordinary of photos. My dog drawings seem to get the most positive response.

 MAC or PC?: PC. I got into graphic art about the same time that computers were taking off in the field. Did a lot of cut-and-paste layout and manual colour separations using a huge, clunky arts camera. Fun times. The thought of completing a design project on a computer and uploading it to a printer for a high quality print run was the stuff of science fiction! I do most of my work in CorelDraw and Photoshop. I owned a Mac for a while and loved it, but I'd become too comfortable using CorelDraw so I was drawn back to Windows.

What are a few of your favorite websites? 

RedBubble

Earthmonster

The Online Photographer

TeeFury