Cat likes to browse the intertubes for inspiration. For all those people who sit slack-jawed in front of the TV, there are plenty of others enjoying a virtual life google-eyed in front of their monitors, learning how to knit organs, cowering at videos of evil chihuahuas (that's four minutes of your life you won't get back), and writing about how to make a groovy spiral in Illustrator.

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What makes artists and designers similar is their signature style. Cat uses quite a lot of regular design themes and, when in doubt or suffering from designer's block, she can often been seen to reach for her trusty box of tricks. It's always a good idea to keep a sketch book of ideas; an unused design can always be recycled next time around. Not only can this apply to ideas but also techniques.

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Using: Adobe Illustrator CS and any subsequent version.

Here's a quick and dirty way of creating woodcut-style pictures in Illustrator.

This example image was made by tracing a photograph using the technique shown in this tutorial.

Let's create a woodcut circle. First, draw a circle in Illustrator using the ellipse tool ('l' on your keyboard). Press 'shift' to constrain the ellipse.

Now, using your pen tool (type 'p' to select), draw a rough circle inside the one you have drawn by clicking the pen tool and creating straight lines. Do not bother fussing about with the bezier whatnot or trying to be too accurate. After all, you are replicating quite an unsophisticated artisan work.

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Matthew and I are always taking photographs, particularly on a biodiversity theme, and have used these on several of our projects. See Wild on Wight for some of my close up photos of invertebrates and others.

Having our own photo library is great; there is usually a suitable image that we can use to illustrate our or our clients' work. However, sometimes we just do not have what we need. Take Pinkeye Graphics latest job for the Footprint Trust, for example. The brief was to design a series of postcards to publicise the Warmahome project. I had already designed a logo and poster to promote this worthy enterprise and the postcards were to be the jam.

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