Octopus Coffee Cup Hand Drawn Pen illustration

I bought a coffee the other day like I normally do every day on my way to the studio in Shoreditch, I put the coffee cup down on the desk after finishing it, and thought nothing of it. I have been reading a book, Choose Yourself written by James Altucher, and one of the things from the book was to write 10 ideas a day, which I have been doing since the start of the year, and one of the ideas I had was to create a drawing onto a coffee cup while being in-between illustration projects, it was a good opportunity to use the spare time to work on this particular personal project of Drawing on to a Coffee cup.

The concept for the drawing came pretty easy, Coffee is an amazing warm drink which gives you a little buzz, but at the same time being a liquid, made I think of the sea, and from there the idea was to illustrate a mythical sea creature the Kraken, or a Monster Octopus, and the elements associated with the sea, like pirate ships, the Moon and the sun.

I sketched out the drawing on to the coffee cup as the examples of the photos above and went over them with a fine liner Rotring pen to make the final, and this was the process to draw in pencil and pen a little at a time, to create the illustrated cup in stages.

Once the Octopus Coffee Cup Hand Drawing was completed, I thought it would make a nice animated gif, to showcase the whole of the drawing rotating in a short animated gif. I had some help from a studio friend Nathan Gallagher who works as a photographer which is handy. I set up the photoshoot of the Octopus Coffee Cup Hand Drawing, with lights and my Canon 6d SLR camera, and composed the Octopus Coffee Cup Hand Drawing. I then took the shot and rotated the coffee cup just a little bit each time to build up the frames for the animated gif video. In all, there were 50 frames for the video. Once all the images were taken a photo was uploaded in photoshop, and I made a video from it, which was a 5-second video, which you can see in the blog post above, a great little project which was a lot of fun.