Cute Little Factory hasn’t been updated for a long time. What happened to me?
I moved my business to Andreaaustoni.com and my blog to Tumblr.
I’ve been learning portrait and caricature as well as digital painting. It’s a hard but exhilarating journey and I’d like to share here some of my favorite illustrations I’ve done in the past year:

I hope to see you all on Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter!

2011 has been lean and mean so here’s hoping 2012 will bring growth, both personal and professional, to all of us (click to enlarge):

I painted this peaceful Arctic scene. Click for a bigger image:

I made wallpapers for your desktops. Enjoy!

If you’re interested in the process behind the painting I also wrote a post on that.

For a while now I’ve stopped creating tutorials and freebies to concentrate on personal work. If you browse my Portfolio Gallery you will see that I’ve moved away from icon design to focus exclusively on illustration. After trying out different directions (posters, typography etc.) I’ve finally settled on portrait/caricature drawing and digital painting.
In my 13 years as a professional graphic artist those are the things I never really learned so from now on that’s all I’m gonna be doing. My main ongoing project is portraits of characters from TV shows and here’s what I’ve done so far:

Frank Costanza from Seinfeld:

Tattoo from Fantasy Island as The Man From Another Place from Twin Peaks:

Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation starring in his own spin-off series “Swanson, p.i.”:

The last two are TV mashups, remixes of characters from different shows.
Not only does this project allow me to practice new skills, it’s a way for me to pay tributes to the TV characters I love and the actors that play them.

Head over to my personal website and my Portfolio Gallery to see detailed shots and process explanations.

I hope you like my new works and that they inspire you to pursue new directions too, improving your skills and having fun in the process.

Jerry Stiller as Frank Costanza from Seinfeld.
The first in a series of portraits of TV show characters.

More images and info in my Portfolio Gallery.

“Play Everyday” and “Combover” are now available as high quality art prints. Take a look!

The Converter is a unit conversion app designed by Vladimir Kofman. He contacted me to design a new logo for the app’s newest version.

This logo was a lot of work as the design is complicated and full of details. Icons for all iPhone and iPad models were created, resizing, redrawing and optimizing the shapes by hand for each size.

I was contacted by Erich Douglass to design a logo for his Android app Gradebook. The app is designed to be used by students to keep track of school assignments, course work, and their GPA.
Erich sent me links to similar apps and logos he liked. He suggested I concentrate on graphic metaphors connected to school so I sent him a few sketches. I always try to come up with at least three different concepts for app logos, ranging from the most obvious to the most far out. It’s important to stretch your imagination at this stage. As usual, the simplest concept was the best one (#3):

I created the icon based on the approved sketch:

Obviously it was too busy. We decided to simplify it in order to make it read better so here’s the final version:

All in all this was a fun project. I especially enjoyed the quick turnaround which always makes me itch for more and more work.

Here’s Erich’s testimonial about our collaboration:

Working with Andrea as been fantastic! As someone who is new to working with a freelancer, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Once I had sent him my contact information Andrea responded promptly to my request and helped guide me through the process. After describing the application to him, he quickly sketched up a few icon ideas and we proceeded to refine the concept until we came up with the final icon. The results were great and I belive that a great icon will help set my application apart from the crowd.
If I need any design work done in the future, Andrea will be the first person I contact.

I have another invitation to Dribbble so, just like before, leave a link to your portfolio in the comments and I’ll pick the winner, exclusively based on merit.
The giveaway ends Wednesday 13th.

Of course I can use all the publicity I can get so it doesn’t hurt me if you tweet this post but remember that I will give the invitation to the best portfolio.
That’s the only criterium.

UPDATE: The invitation goes to Nora from Catapulta. Congratulations!