It is the week before the Greek Easter and my baby brother is home from school for two weeks! That means I get to babysit. He knows I love arts and crafts so he suggested we do some Easter Egg Monsters! He got the idea from an arts & crafts book. The book suggested making cute Easter bunnies with the egg shells or monsters, but since he is a 6-year old boy Easter Egg Monsters was the order of the day!

So we saved egg halves like the book suggested, I washed them, dried them, got white glue and tissue paper and we were ready to begin. Trying to glue back together egg halves with white glue is a terrible idea! They just don’t stay together. In the end I taped them together. The tape was covered anyway. Trying to cover the eggs with white glue and tissue paper is another terrible idea. Who ever came up with it should be shot! I know I wanted to shoot myself for following their advice. The tissue paper just melts in the glue, sticks more to your fingers that to the egg and even when you manage to get it to stay on the egg it looks horrible even after the glue has dried. Doesn’t cover very well either. As you can see from the pictures in some cases you can still see the egg even though it’s covered with 3 or 4 layers of tissue paper. My brother got bored with this part pretty easily and left me to my own devices after the first egg! We made a total of 6 monsters and it took me most of the morning to get them covered with tissue paper. Conclusion: next time I will stick to plain old water and flour glue and newspaper strips and then just paint the eggs. The green egg was painted by my brother; it’s his favorite.

When the eggs were finally dried came the real fun part. Decorating them. Making eyes and mouths and horns and hair decorations. He absolutely loved it! It was pretty late in the afternoon when we took the pictures you see here, hence the dark shadows. He enjoyed that part too. Propping them up in the grass proved a challenge that brought on a lot of giggles. He is really proud of the result and everyone who visits the house gets a tour around the dinning table where they are now displayed. All in all I would do this little project again but stay away from the tissue paper!

They can be applied to shapes or text. Once you download the .ai file from below, open it and type anything you want and then go to your graphics styles panel (Window > Graphic Styles) to apply your favorite effect. Depending on the length of your text you might need to do some tweaking. To do that, once you’ve applied a style, just go to the appearance panel (Window > Appearance) and there you will find all the fills, strokes, and effects that were applied to create that style.

If anyone is interested all the typefaces I used to showcase these styles are Google Web Fonts and can be found here: http://www.google.com/webfonts#ReviewPlace:refine/Collection:Righteous|Knewave|Spirax|Rammetto+One|Montez|Paytone+One

You can use these styles for any project personal or commercial. Please do not distribute them as yours.
If you do use them and it’s possible, post a link in the comments below and of course, let me know what you think!

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Download the .ai file here:

I took a course of motion graphics while at university and my professor at the time used to say that every frame of your work should be a poster ready to be printed. I think that this ad for the American National Red Cross fits the bill.

So this holiday season let’s all admire this beautifully designed ad and then let’s give a gift that could really make a difference to someone’s life.

It is expected that emerging artists, students and professionals in motion graphics from around the world will participate. The festival will include: screenings of selected motion work, keynote invited lectures from scholars in the field, and workshops relating to motion graphics and broadcasting software and tools.

The  work is based on the following categories:

• Motion Graphics/ Broadcast Design
• Experimental
• Video Art
• 2D / 3D Animation

For more you can visit IMF’s official website: www.motionfestivalcyprus.com

Below is the video promo for the IMF Cyprus, created by motion designer Tony Zagoraios. Art direction by Ioannis Christoforou and sound design by Renos Papastavros