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“But how do you really feel about cupcakes, Doc?”

cupcakes have jumped the shark

Cupcakes have totally jumped the shark, but I don’t mind ’cause they are so fun to draw. I feel like I’ve been ignoring my drawing side this year, so I decided to get some practice. I don’t do much computer art, but I’ve always wanted to create a style that sort of mixes my pen and ink art with a vectorized look, but I don’t really want to use Illustrator. I think recently I’ve sort of hit the look I wanted, especially when creating the “cloudcake” pattern that I use for my Twitter background.

cloudcake

The Cloudcake was a design I whipped up as a mockup logo for Ariel Weldman’s Cupcake camp thingy. The image is hand drawn, then scanned and uploaded to VectorMagic.com, before coloring it in photoshop. I thought the basic logo would look sweet as background on twitter, but I was wrong. The tiled image just looked really boring and perfect, and obviously just a bunch of tiles. So I figured out a “trick” (to me it was a trick, but I’m web stupid… to anyone else it would just be how you do it) to creating a dope tile pattern (as seen in the image above). I started with an image (cloudcake), then cut it in quarters and arranged them so the middle of the image was now spread out to the edges. I then added another image in the center, like this:

 

Now when the pieces are lined up it makes the overall pattern:

To really keep it Twitter oriented I snapped a screen shot of my basic Twitter page, and used the same colors they used for my logo. Using this same technique, I also created a LaughingSquid pattern:

Update: Scott Beale from Laughing Squid has given me permission to post my Squid pattern for folks to download and use on their Twitter pages. Follow this link to go the Flickr page and download the size image you want (below is the 100 pixel one).

Comments

5 responses to ““But how do you really feel about cupcakes, Doc?”

  1. […] Popular has created a really cool Laughing Squid background tile for Twitter, which he as uploaded to Flickr. You can see it in action on my Twitter […]

  2. […] May 29, 2008 new trend: cupcakes. Posted by Shana under “Sonoma County”, My dreams, Twitter, vegetarian food | Tags: Ariel Waldman, Cupcake Camp, Cupcakes, Sift Cupcakery, Trends, Twitter |   I have been noticing an increase in the amount of cupcake discussions on Twitter, maybe it is because I am following Ariel Waldman and she has an obsession with cupcakes (one of her many cupcake tweets), but it isn’t just her. There has been a few others on Twitter mentioning them (some saying that “cupcakes” have jumped the shark). […]

  3. matt s. Avatar
    matt s.

    It’d be neat if you find a way to tesselate that image. I like the second version as it is, though. -matt

  4. doc Avatar

    Neat, I learned a new word! “Tessellation.

    Thanks Matt.

  5. […] to one cartoonist blogger DocPop, he believes cupcakes have jumped the shark (passed its prime, outstayed its welcome etc). And […]

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