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

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.

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).