"For Castlebound, we took the enemy waves idea from Warcher Defenders and took it to the next level by allowing the heroes to move around the entire screen with auto-scrolling levels, while also making it a solo or co-op experience for up to four players," says Ogre Pixel director Steve Durán.

Another level-up is in the visuals. Whereas Warcher Defenders used pixel art, Castlebound takes a more hand-drawn illustrative approach reminiscent of a children's storybook. That said, the aesthetic still draws inspiration from Warcher Defenders, as the main character, Lenora, is an archer like the mobile game's first playable character. As a co-op game, it also offers other playable heroes designed around different gameplay styles, including Vargus the Mage (also Lenora's wise grandfather), Galahad the Knight, and Quinn the Slingshooter.

Castlebound's charming art is designed to be easy to read

According to Durán, the decision behind this charming art style was that it was also "easy to read for the action gameplay. It does have design advantages because having the heroes represented with 2D sprites and a sticker-esque outline makes all the action to be easily identifiable."

It's also reminiscent of the paper cutouts of the characters in Paper Mario, which gives it license to use a limited set of animations rather than the painstakingly smooth, hand-drawn animations of Hollow Knight.

Similar to Paper Mario is how these obviously flat characters are presented in 3D world, or at least the illusion of one. "Something interesting about the Castlebound’s art style is that all the assets made by our artists are flat sprites exported as PNGs," Durán explains. "The 3D look comes from a configuration we have inside Unity, the game engine we used."

He credits the studio's lead programmer, Marco Elizondo, for using Unity to create 3D scenes that the sprites can be added to, as well as teaching the studio's artists how to create these scenarios with 2D assets and scene configurations.

"Another important tool we worked with are illuminations settings to change environments between day, noon, and night," Durán adds. Sometimes, a lighting change is all you need to make a level feel different, while 3D effects like shadows also add depth.

There's also variety to the enemy designs, which gradually expand beyond the initial medieval fantasy tropes of wizards, dragons, and - true to the studio's name - ogres. Durán confirms that players can also expect to encounter enemies inspired by ancient Egyptian culture, such as mummies, pyramids and sphinxes, as well as from horror culture, such as vampires, werewolves, and mermen. "We also have a secret area that we don’t want to spoil, but it does have some kind of cosmic vibes," he teases.

Side projects kept Castlebound fresh

During Castlebound's development, the Mexico-based studio has also been busy with other smaller projects, releasing titles on Steam during its two-year development, including the cosy hidden object game Hidden Around The World and the GBA-inspired adventure Black Tower Enigma this year alone.

"Castlebound has definitely been for us a bigger development endeavour because we have been iterating a lot of its development features like art, gameplay, and game balance," says Durán. "Moving into different projects has helped us feel 'fresh' during all this time."

Although still a relatively small game, with a roguelite loop that keeps each run feeling dynamic and different, a last-minute Kickstarter campaign has also enabled extra features, including a new volcano area, a secret final boss, and animated cutscenes. Together, they create a more substantial package that will help Castlebound stand out in a busy holiday release schedule.

Castlebound releases on 12 November for PC, Nintendo Switch 2, and Nintendo Switch, and you can download a free demo on Steam.

Ready to get into the festive spirit? Then clear the next three minutes from your calendar, saddle up and watch the film below.

The Invisible Horse (above) was directed by Dougal Wilson, the director of Paddington in Peru and features cameos from Toy Story‘s Woody and Frozen‘s Elsa.

The story is about a boy called Jack who thinks he's too old for Christmas until he discovers what he believes to be an invisible horse. That leads him to get mocked at school, but of course, things soon take a surprising turn.

The short is part of Disney's “Make the Holidays Magic” campaign, which the company says is “bringing together festive experiences, entertainment and gifting, alongside initiatives supporting children and families.”

People are welling up on YouTube, but make sure you watch the piece before reading the comments, because some of them give the twist away.

The Invisible Horse comes just a couple of weeks ahead of the release of Hexed. Given all the controversies around that movie and Disney same-face syndrome, perhaps it shows that Disney's at its most magical when it finds themes beyond witchcraft?

Aside from the brief cameos, one of which led some people to expect a Toy Story spin off, the short is also a reminder than an emotive festive piece doesn't need to rely on a known IP. It just needs a powerful story. A subtle dose of nostalgia can also go a long way to reignite that feeling of childhood wonder among Disney adults.

It's enough to restore one's faith in the festive season after Kim Kardashian's shocking advent calendar.

For more inspiration, also see our pick of the best Christmas adverts of all time.

Kim's 'SKIMS Accessories Advent Calendar' has achieved that rare festive miracle: making a chocolate-based advent calendar look like a sound financial investment. Because what we have here, for a cool $148/£158, is twelve days of tat. Hair ties. Scrunchies. Bobby pins. Keychains. A squishy toy. Something called a 'bra elastic headband'. It's essentially the contents of a lost property box.

Unsurprisingly, the internet is having a field day. A viral TikTok unboxing has attracted tens of millions of views, with its creator becoming visibly more exasperated as each compartment reveals another object you could reasonably expect to find down the back of a sofa, culminating in the grand finale: a furry compact mirror keychain.

It's worth saying that from a branding packaging design perspective, it's almost impressive. It's a nice-looking object with pretty illustrations, and the SKIMS wordmark is striking in a bold, festive red. But there's something beautifully 2026 about taking a handful of mundane objects, putting them in expensive-looking packaging and asking people to cough up the cost of an actual spa day. Like so many of this year's main characters (AI, subscription-based everything, $10 matcha lattes), it's overpriced, overhyped and underwhelming. But unlike AI, that $148 leaving your bank account definitely isn't artificial.

In response to the backlash, SKIMS has emailed customers who purchased the advent calendar: “We wanted to reach out personally about your recent purchase of the Holiday 2026 advent calendar. We understand the product did not meet customers’ expectations, and we are truly sorry. We want every customer to be happy with what they receive, and we fell short this time.”

Believe it or not, this isn't the first time we've seen a celebrity's brand take a hit as a result of an underwhelming advent calendar. Back in 2017, popular vlogger Zoella faced backlash for her own calendar. Like Kim's it contained only twelve doors, all of which were filled with items that might be found down the back of a sofa. Unlike Kim's, it was a mere $60. Inflation, eh?

If you need help restoring your faith in the festive season, check out the magical Disney Holiday Short, which is moving people to tears.

All visual elements I design must serve the story being told by revealing the stakes, the history or the identity of the location. Before I even begin sketching, I always ask myself: “What happened here?” This helps me define my initial narrative intent. Every visual choice made is as much about building an atmosphere as it is about solving challenges related to composition, readability, or credibility.

I like to think that my images spark the viewer’s curiosity, inviting them to form their own interpretation of the scene. Through elements like composition, lighting or colour, a simple environment can tell its own story, inviting the viewer to imagine what took place there.

Below, I’ll share some of the key techniques I use daily to bring environments to life with a strong identity and visual storytelling. If you need to update your tools, see our guides to the best best drawing tablets and the best laptops for drawing.

The world around us is an endless source of inspiration! That is also why I enjoy observational drawing and studying my subjects before creating a unique image from my imagination. I might do this using traditional media directly in my sketchbook or digitally; I like to vary my techniques

I start by establishing the main shapes, then gradually work in the details. It is a decisive step for the rest of the project as during this stage I determine the function of my various designs. Using this process is common in video games.

A. Work in large shapes

After gathering photo references of architectural elements for this world, I begin working on the main masses. 3D can be a great tool for laying out initial, very simple shapes made up of primitives like cubes or cylinders. I model my 3D base using Blender.

B. Adding a precise line

Once I’ve blocked in the main shapes, I start drawing over them with more precise line work. This allows me to refine the designs and add small details like decorations, props, vegetation, etc. This line work serves as a solid foundation for moving on to colour.

C. Bring your design to life

For the final stage, I focus on colours and textures. I aim to achieve a pleasing colour harmony and bring the buildings to life by adding details that suggest imperfection: signs of wear, dirt and stains, etc. I wanted to depict a peaceful and unique place.

I view colour as a tool that lends a unique feel to my images and serves as a key narrative element. Much like light, colour allows me to highlight and draw attention to a crucial element within the image.

Mystery is also a powerful narrative device; it is an element I love to incorporate into my images because it allows the viewer’s imagination and interpretation to run free. Lighting, composition, the depth of the various planes and colour harmony all play a role in creating this feeling and bringing it to life.

Gear up

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Key to the viral success was a novel trailer that breaks a key rule but seems to have really captured people's imaginations in the current climate. It provides a sign of hope for other developers too, if only by showing that there's a still a big appetite for quirky games that display a clear human touch (if you're just starting your own developer journey, see our guides to the best game development software and the best laptops for game development).

Kaleb Lechowski's Drawquarium is an upcoming sandbox game that involves drawing your own fish and then feeding and raising it, and gradually building a cosy aquarium. You can then use your aquarium as an animated desktop wallpaper, if you want, and there are some built-in tools designed to help players focus or unwind.

Kaleb says he was inspired to develop the game because he wanted to bring his children’s drawings to life. That original impetus appears to also have inspired the fictional story of the trailer above.

A lot of people might say the trailer breaks a core rule by not showing any actual gameplay until past the halfway mark in what is a three-minute video. That might not normally be the most sensible way to promote a game, and it wouldn't work for everything. But in this case, the well-executed and emotive nostalgia marketing really paid off.

A post on Twitter has received over 128,000 likes, another over 100,000, and the game picked up 70,000 new wishlists in just a week. A lot of people are saying the trailer made them cry.

"Your trailer made me sob. It was way too relatable," one person writes on Reddit. "I can’t wait to play this little game. Thank you for putting your creativity into the world. We all need things like this that make us wonder in awe at the magic of nature, beauty, and art."

"Bro made a Cannes award winning short film to sell an indie game," someone writes on YouTube.

Kaleb has a background in 3D art for the film industry, and those storytelling skills clearly carry over to the trailer, which works as a self-contained story. But he was still surprised at how well it was received.

"What surprised me most was how strongly the message behind the trailer resonated with people," the developer comments on Reddit. "With AI becoming such a huge topic in gaming and art, it seems like people are really craving something made by humans, with genuine love and passion. I'm honestly overwhelmed and don't even know what to do with all these emotions."

You can download a Drawquarium demo on Steam. The full game is scheduled for release on 13 November.

Alas, the sudden attention has also brought with it the negative aspects of indie game success these days. Several unauthorised copies of the Drawquarium demo have been cropping up in the Google Play store, so make sure you check out the game via the official Steam page.

One of the highlights is Branch's Ergonomic Chair Pro reduced by 10% from $499 to $449.20 . Easily the best mid-priced option we've reviewed, it's one of only three office chairs that we've rated five stars and it tops our guide to the best ergonomic chairs.

There's a similar discount on the beautiful Verve, and 20% of the Duo Standing Desk. Read on for more details.

Branch chair Black Friday deals

Before diving into complex scenes like this, it’s a good idea to grab some inspirational images to build your visual palette; things like the architecture, environment, lighting, composition and mood. For these types of scenes, I like to pre-prep in 3D a bit, building up a library of foliage scatter systems and materials.

This allows me to create these complex scenes much faster and focus on the art, rather than get sidetracked with technical stuff. A fun fact for this scene: it wasn’t originally going to be greyscale. I turned down the saturation during the lighting phase to check values, and immediately got inspired to keep it that way, as it helped push that video was looking for!

Lastly, these scenes can seem extremely daunting to make. I find that the best approach is to write down all your tasks that you need to do to make it: make tower, break tower, make ground, detail ground, etc, so instead of seeing a big task, you see 20 very manageable tasks.

For more inspiration, see our Blender tutorials.

Gear up

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Most of the advertising blitz uses familiar key art showing the game's two playable protagonists: Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval. But some of the best GTA VI ads don't show the game at all. in Vice City itself (that is, Miami, Florida), Rockstar continues to have fun with its many fictional parody brands, and the ads show just what a huge cultural event GTA has become.

To the disappointment of all those real brands that are GTA VI trendjacking, Rockstar doesn't do product placement, and it's also quite selective when it comes to real-world collaborations. Instead, the game will feature hundreds of parody brands.

Some of these have crossed over into real world advertising, with billboards and digital displays cropping up in Miami for the likes of Crowex watches, Beige shapewear and Dix makeup. The game's takeover of the Miami Heat's Kaseya Center has even included outlets for the fictional fastfood chains Burger Shot and Cluckin' Bell.

Many of the ads continue Rockstar's penchant for using innuendo as a sharp social satire on real advertising, cutting through to real messages that brands are often communicating albeit in more euphemistic terms. "Always come early," the watch brand Kronos declares. "Suddenly You Are Big Enough," proclaims jewellery brand Kowalski on an ad showing a diamond-heavy engagement ring.

It's been estimated that Rockstar's total global promotional costs could reach up to $200 million or even $300 million over the game's full launch cycle. I've seen some people wondering how much adverts for fictional brands like Dix and Juice Loose can contribute to the cause if it's not clear what they're promoting (there's a small logo and QR code in the bottom of some of them).

But this is what makes them so ingenious. They avoid traditional game marketing fatigue by showing the setting rather than the product. GTA is known for its satire of American consumer culture, and fictional companies, ridiculous slogans, and parody advertising are a core part of its identity. Putting these brands out there communicates the game's tone without showing a single mission or gameplay mechanic.

By blurring the line between marketing and world-building, the ads also create intrigue among newcomers. When people see an advert for a bizarre fictional product with no obvious explanation, it generates curiosity and conversation, which becomes the marketing.

But, ultimately, they also reward existing fans who recognise names like Ammu-Nation, Sprunk, eCola, or other in-universe brands. For long-timer players, these are inside jokes that make them feel like they're being invited back into a world they love.

An advert for a kids' cartoon called Macca & Friends reads "Coming November 19 on Weazel”. The real message is clear to anyone who knows Weazel as the in-universe media company since GTA IV. This kind of advertising doesn't just promote a product; it makes people feel like they're part of the phenomenon. They deepen immersion, keep people talking and cement the game's status as not just the most-anticipated video game of all time but perhaps the most hyped entertainment product in any category.

The iPhone 16 burst onto the scene with the promise that it was the latest and greatest iPhone for photography, and I lapped it right up. 2 years later, I have a confession. The Camera Control button and I rarely make contact, and when we do, we often fall out. My beloved Action Button could never.

I'll admit I was swept up in the initial glamour of the Camera Control button. Watching an Apple Genius effortlessly demo the tech had me fully indoctrinated. 'I will use that scroll feature every day', I naively thought. How efficient. How innovative.

Nowadays I tend to avoid the Camera Control button, having learned my lesson trying to use it at gigs. (Pro tip: balancing a drink under your chin while desperately trying to zoom using Cam Control can lead to major beer spillage if handled incorrectly). At times, I'll use it to make taking snaps a little easier, but on the whole, I scarcely employ the help of its various touch-sensitive capabilities.

But according to prolific leaker Instant Digital, I may have to get over my distaste for Cam Control, as future iPhone models will reportedly do away with the Action Button. Typically used to control the phone's silent mode, the Action Button can be set to an array of functions such as Focus, Voice Memo, Flashlight and more. Reports suggest this feature will soon be merged with Camera Control, supposedly streamlining these quick actions under one touch-sensitive roof.

Whether it's the simple functionality of the Action Button or the tactile haptic feedback of its gentle buzz, I find myself reaching for it far more than Cam Control. While I'll be sad to see it go, I'm intrigued to see how Apple will continue to evolve its iPhone models. It feels like the loss of the Home Button all over again, but I have mourned that and moved on. I'm sure I can do the same for the Action Button.

For more Apple news, check out our MacBook Pro PROLED hands-on review or take a look at the best Mac for content creators.

Our top pick for graphic design is the MacBook Pro 14-inch (M6). It’s a brilliant all-rounder for almost any creative job. However, depending on what you need it for, other laptops are worth investigating too.

So in this article, I've highlighted the best laptops for a range of different tasks, based on hands-on testing by our reviewers using real design software. For further options, see our guides to the best laptops for graphic design and the best laptops for CAD.

The best laptop for graphic design

The MacBook Pro has been the default laptop for designers for years, and nothing has yet changed that. The M5 model came first by a clear margin in our Photoshop benchmarks. Its screen is sharp and colour-accurate, and the battery comfortably lasts a working day. Now Apple has replaced it with the M6 version, which went on sale on 6 November.

We haven’t tested it yet, but it’s a spec bump rather than a redesign. Apple claims up to 30% faster graphics, and it adds Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. Crucially, it costs the same as the M5 model, which rose to $1,999 / £1,999 in Apple’s June price rises.

So my advice is: either buy the M6 at full price, or pick up the M5 if you find it heavily discounted over Black Friday. Alternatively if money’s no object, Apple’s new MacBook Pro with a PROLED XDR display starts at $2,899 / £2,899 and adds a touchscreen. Our writer Daniel John called its OLED panel “the best laptop screen I’ve ever seen”.

The best laptop for CAD and animation

The ProArt P16 is the best Windows laptop we’ve tested for creative work, and it's our top pick in both our laptop for CAD and laptop for animation guides.

If you're using CAD, the fact that this laptop runs Windows really matters. Revit and SolidWorks don’t run natively on macOS, while the P16’s Nvidia graphics and 64GB of memory give you plenty of headroom for large models. The built-in dial is handy for zooming and rotating, too.

If you're an animator, meanwhile, the star is the screen. It’s a colour-accurate OLED touchscreen, and as our reviewer Erlingur Einarsson says: “The 120Hz refresh rate is a welcome upgrade too, especially for animators and video editors.” The RTX 5070 also speeds up rendering in GPU-heavy tools.

The ASUS ProArt P16, in short, is pretty much everything a creative professional could hope for However, if you need even more power, ASUS also sells a version with an RTX 5090 and a 4K screen for $3,999.99.

Read more: ASUS ProArt P16 review

The best laptop for 3D modelling

The 16-inch MacBook Pro is the top pick in our 3D modelling laptop guide. You get a big, sharp screen, plenty of memory and the kind of battery life that 3D-capable Windows laptops can only dream of.

When our reviewer Rob Redman tested the previous M4 Pro model in Blender, Cinema 4D and Maya, he was impressed by its rendering speed and smooth viewport. “Simple things like dragging and dropping materials, which can be a little laggy on some systems, are perfectly smooth,” he says. The M5 Pro builds on that with a faster chip and Apple’s latest GPU cores.

Two things to bear in mind, though. First, if your pipeline relies on Nvidia’s CUDA or Windows-only plugins, you’re better off with a Windows machine. In which case, the Acer Nitro 16S AI is our best-value pick, while the RTX 5090 inside the Alienware 16 Area-51 is ideal if you need maximum rendering power.

Second, the MacBook Pro 16-inch (M5 Pro) is a lot of money, and the price climbs quickly once you add memory. If you have a lot of money, though, there's a very nice PROLED XDR version with a touchscreen costing $3,399.

The best laptop for Cricut

Looking for the best laptop for Cricut? Then here's some good news. Cricut Design Space isn’t a demanding app, so you don’t need to spend a fortune on a laptop to use it.

Cricut recommends a minimum of an Intel Core i3 and 4GB of RAM, but 8GB is a more comfortable starting point, and 16GB will help with complex, multi-layer projects. The IdeaPad 5 2-in-1 gives you 16GB as standard, which is why it tops our Cricut laptop guide.

The 360-degree hinge is the clincher. You can fold the screen back into tablet mode and tap, drag and resize your designs directly on the screen. It also has a good range of ports, including USB-A, which is handy if you’re plugging in your cutting machine or a USB stick full of SVG files.

It’s a bit heavier than a regular laptop, and the screen isn’t the brightest or most colourful, but neither matters much for crafting.

The best laptop for drawing

The PZ13 is a Windows tablet with a detachable keyboard, and it’s the top pick in our drawing laptop guide. The big selling point is that ASUS includes the stylus, keyboard, stand and sleeve in the box, so the price you see is the price you pay.

The 13.3-inch OLED screen is bright, sharp and very colour-accurate, with a Delta-E of 0.3 in our testing. Battery life is excellent too, lasting over 20 hours in our video streaming test. “It’s unique and ideal for creatives,” says our reviewer.

It’s not built for processing power, though. Its Snapdragon chip is better suited to drawing and photo editing than 3D, and some Windows software, including InDesign, isn’t fully compatible with Snapdragon chips. So check your favourite apps run well on it before you buy. The glossy screen can also be reflective.

The best laptop for students

For most students, and certainly for creative ones, the MacBook Air is the laptop to get. It’s thin, light and silent, the battery easily lasts all day, and it has enough power for design, photo editing and light video work. “A thin and light laptop that performs as well as this will always be attractive to a creative audience,” says our reviewer Ian Evenden.

That power is the reason to choose it over the cheaper MacBook Neo. In our testing, the Air M5 was much closer to the MacBook Pro than the Neo: it scored 17,091 for multi-core performance in Geekbench 6, against 17,897 for the M5 MacBook Pro. In Photoshop, it more than doubled the Neo’s scores.

It’s not so cheap any more, though. Apple raised the price by $200 / £200 in June, although students can get quite a lot of money off through Apple’s education store. If you want to save cash and your course doesn’t involve creative software, the MacBook Neo at $699 / £699 is a great-value alternative, as long as you can live with 8GB of memory.

Read more: MacBook Air M5 review

FAQs

In fact, there's a competition dedicated to the discovery of optical illusions, and it's recently revealed this year's winner. The Best Illusion of the Year Contest has bamboozled us before, and this year's choice is another mind bender, as you'll see in the video below.

Think the gear on the right is moving faster than the one on the left? Think again.

The winner of the Best Illusion of the Year Contest was submitted by Jacky Z. J. Yueh and Joan Danielle K. Ongchoco from the Perception and Cognition Lab at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Their video above shows two gears that are rotating at the same speed. But if you focus on the white dot on the left gear, you'll probably think that the other gear (the one on the right) is moving faster.

If you focus in the centre of the screen between the two gears, however, the effect disappears. You realise that they're moving at the same speed.

The explanation is that our peripheral vision is more sensitive to motion. This is due to specialised cellular structures and faster neural pathways in the retina and brain. This had a potential evolutionary advantage in that it helps us detect movement in the corner of our eye, which could alert us to a potential threat.

But the winning experiment goes on to show that it's possible to confuse our minds even more. When the position of one gear is adjusted slightly to make it look like it is causally connected to the left one, and we again focus on the white dot, it now looks like the gear on the right is rotating even faster than before.

The conclusion is that perceived causal mechanics, even if they're not real, can altar our perception of dynamic properties, such as speed.

The Best Illusion of the Year Contest is a celebration of illusions and perception run by the Neural Correlate Society. It sees the study of illusions as critical to how we understand sensory perception, and many ophthalmic and neurological diseases too.

Previous winners of the contest have included a stunning Harry Potter Platform 9 3/4 optical illusion.

Quixel features thousands of production-ready items, including 3D models, tileable physically based rendering (PBR) surfaces, vegetation, decals, and custom materials, created by scanning real-world objects, environments. That makes it a massive resource for game developers, 3D artists, VFX artists and those working in architectural visualisation (also see our guides to the best laptops for CAD and the best laptops for 3D modelling).

Megascans currently contains around 23,000 3D scanned assets. Quixel says listings on the Fab marketplace will be updated up until November 12 to make items free. It's also updated the terms for Quixel assets to allow Megascans and Megaplants assets to be used to train AI models.

"Your AI models can now learn from real-world scans to help you generate varied, photorealistic environments for your projects," it says.

Anyone who bought a Megascans or a Quixel Bundle on or after January 1, 2025 should receive a refund to their Epic Account Balance by the end of the year while keeping their licence and getting the new AI rights. The balance can be used across Epic's products, not just on Fab.

Epic has worked to make the new Fab marketplace as easy to use as possible; Channels can be used to discover compatible game engines while a mix of licences ensure you can find the right asset to meet your needs. Fab offers a Creative Commons licence and the Personal or Professional tier of a Standard License. Epic Games press release clarifies: "The Fab Standard License enables you to use the assets, including Megascans, in any game engine or tool you want."

Check out the Megascans library on Faby to see the variety of assets available, from furniture, and architecture to creature, vehicles and materials.

It shouldn't come as a surprise given the rising popularity of wired headphones. While it's only been a decade, we've come full circle, and now they're officially cool again. Sony's MDR-3R USB-C Wired Headphones are going for a tasty £49, but sadly they're currently sold out. But thankfully, if you're on the hunt for something similar, there are several popular dupes.

Not found what you're looking for? Check out the best wired headphone deals based on your region.

Wacom is selling the MovinkPad 11 with a case for £402.70 with the code CASE20 at checkout. That’s down from £469.96, a saving of £67.26 (around 14%). The tablet alone is listed at a discounted £429.98, so you’re paying less for the tablet and case together than for the tablet by itself. It’s a handy extra, too, on a tablet that’s made to be tossed in a bag and used anywhere.

A drawing tablet first, an Android tablet second

The MovinkPad 11 is built around the Pro Pen 3, not a generic Android slate with stylus support bolted on. The 11.45-inch display has a 2200 x 1440 resolution and a 90Hz refresh rate, and the screen is etched glass. If you’ve ever drawn on the slick glass of a regular tablet, you’ll know it can feel like sketching on a bathroom mirror. The textured surface adds a little grip and feels much closer to paper.

The Pro Pen 3 offers 8,192 levels of pressure sensitivity and 60-degree tilt recognition, and it needs no battery or charging. Those numbers look good on a spec sheet, but what I notice more is how naturally it responds to light pressure and follows your strokes.

It runs Android 14 with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage, so you don’t need a computer. You can download drawing apps such as Clip Studio Paint, and Wacom includes a two-year Clip Studio Paint DEBUT licence.

It isn’t the most powerful Android tablet around, and the screen suits sketching and illustration better than big professional workflows, but for that exact art need, it's a better choice than an iPad Air. It’s a portable digital sketchbook, and at £402.70 with the case, it’s easy to recommend.

Alternatively, get the more powerful Wacom MovinkPad Pro 14 deal:

And after a few days with the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, I'm happy to report that this is very much a device—perhaps even the ultimate device—for creatives. But rather than the ability to touch the screen, it's all about the quality of that 'PROLED' display itself. Turns out there's a reason Apple decided to lead with that, and not touch, in the name of the device.

• Get the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display for $2899 at Amazon

Simply put, it's the best laptop screen I've ever seen. With up to 2000 nits of peak brightness, 10,000,000:1 contrast, and P3 + Adobe RGB colour, this is a best-in-class display that puts every other OLED laptop screen I've used to shame. It gives creatives a portable reference-quality display, which means it recreates video, colour and contrast as faithfully as possible. Once you've used the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, everything else looks washed-out in comparison, and for that reason alone it's impossible not to recommend for creatives – so long as the small matter of the $2,899 starting price isn't a barrier.

When it comes to touch, as I've written before, in my testing I've found it to be a nice-to-have rather than a need-to-have. Now that we're all touchscreen natives (which wasn't so much the case when Jobs made those comments in 2010), certain navigational actions just feel right, even on a laptop. Scrolling through windows, pinching to zoom in on a photo or map, scrubbing through the timeline in Final Cut Pro; there are plenty of times when touching the screen feels more intuitive than reaching for the trackpad. And Apple's subtle UI tweaks, such as having navigational icons expand when touched, make the whole thing feel more natural.

But equally, there were plenty of times when I preferred to use the trackpad – particularly when a certain level of accuracy was required. And despite Apple claiming to have produced a newly designed hinge with greater stability, it still wobbles. There's just no getting around the fact that a touchscreen on a vertical display is less ergonomic than it is on a flat one.

From a design perspective, the new MacBook Pro isn't a game-changer – unless you really missed the illuminating Apple logo (another noughties mainstay). There are improvements here and there; the Dynamic Island takes up less space than the notch, and slightly smaller bezels result in slightly larger viewing areas. But perhaps the most meaningful design change is the reduction in weight. That OLED panel has allowed for a 14% weight loss – making the 14-inch model, somewhat ironically, lighter than the 15-inch M5 MacBook Air.

But everything pales next to the screen. The PROLED XDR looks incredible. If you're looking for the most impressive visual fidelity available on a laptop, here it is. You can touch it if you like.

The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display is released tomorrow, with preorders available now. Prices start at $2899 for the 14-inch model, and $3399 for the 16-inch model.

It also has to make its point quickly and efficiently, because ordinary (non-designer) people are barely going to give it a second glance. So it usually pays to make the central visual idea blindingly obvious.

With this in mind, when I first saw the logo for the 2027 FIVB Men’s Volleyball World Cup, my reaction was: "Er… what that's supposed to be exactly?

The meaning behind the design

Representing the tournament taking place in Poland next September, the logo emblem is a tall white shape with spikes at the top, a cluster of small squares in the middle and wavy stripes flaring out towards the base.

Perhaps I'm missing something, not being a volleyball fan myself. But to my eyes, it didn't look like... anything.

According to the press release, the inspiration was the World Cup trophy, whose “industrial form” has been distilled into a minimalist mark. And sure enough, when you look at the very distinctive trophy, it does look a lot like it. But it's not a pure representation, and that's deliberate.

Instead, four ideas are said to come together in the logo: the silhouette of the trophy, a circle representing the Earth, a sweeping curve representing the net, and reaching hands and a rising ball for the players. In the press release Maciej Bogusz, marketing director for the local organising committee, also added a fifth: the fans, represented by a wave rippling through the base.

Once you stare at the logo for a bit and pick out all these elements, yep, they're all present and correct. But that's kind of the problem: you have to stare to pick them out. All these concepts don't just magically mesh into one simple design; indeed, there are so many, that feels like it'd be close to impossible.

At the same time, it annoys the heck out of me when people judge a logo on first sight, because that's not how a logo should be judged. A logo is not primarily designed to be liked on first sight, it's designed to work over time.

The history of design is littered with logos that attracted a wave of negativity on first release, yet ended up being loved over time. And I don't want to make the same mistake here.

So here's something positive I can say: this doesn’t look like any other sports logo I can think of. There’s no generic shield, no generic ball with a swoosh, no cliches of any kind really.

Remember the London 2012 logo? It was widely ridiculed at first, but by the time the Olympic Games started, it had become a welcome part of the furniture.

This design now has plenty of time to do the same. Its first big outing is on 3 December, when the draw will take place 125m underground in the Wieliczka Salt Mine (because why not, eh?). And when the games start in Kraków, seven months later, the shape that looks so wrong to me may look, well, entirely right.

Honestly, I’m not convinced yet. But ask me again in September. My answer may be very different.

Title cards aren't just for aesthetics; they offer a narrative anchor, a beat to collect yourself before the action begins. But of course, it's. not empty imagery. The best movie title cards can be a storytelling device in themselves, and this year we've seen some stunning examples.

01. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

In contrast to the film's bold poster typography featuring sturdy sans serifs and clean composition, The Bone Temple's title card feels surprisingly organic. Created in a natural, hand-drawn scrawl, the imperfection of the lettering gives it an almost juvenile feel.

Appearing just after a particularly violent opening, the silent serenity of the title card scene regrounds the audience, offering a moment of respite from the chaos. But set against the temple of bones, there remains an eeriness to the blood-red hue of the title card typography,

02. Wuthering Heights

Championing hand-crafted design, Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights took a delightfully strange approach to title card creation. Made using hair (including some of the lead actors' real locks!), the stop-motion title card is equal parts whimsical and slightly disturbing, setting the tone for the madness that ensues.

"We wanted it to feel completely human", Fennell explains in a behind-the-scenes sneak peek. "It's really thrilling to show the hands that make something," she adds. Wonderfully tactile and hauntingly beautiful, the title card demonstrates how thoughtful design can effortlessly set the tone of a film.

03. The Drama

A prime example of how simple title cards can create a sense of tension, The Drama's erratic opening plants a seed of anxiety amid the intimacy of the dance scene. Using a jumbled mix of script fonts, stately serifs and bold sans serifs, the chaotic nature of the title card signals a sense of chaos amid the calm.

Appearing only fleetingly, almost as if the screen is glitching, the random fonts create a sense of visual disharmony as they flash across the scene. Appearing in a conventional white colour scheme, the juxtaposition of order and disarray builds a perfect layer of discomfort.

04. Obsession

Obsession demonstrates one of my favourite movie tropes – the integrated title card. After a particularly harrowing scene, protagonist Bear is seen weeping on his bed as a tense score begins to creep in. The camera pans down to reveal the Obsession title card woven into the duvet.

The simple visual effortlessly creates an eerie effect, as the viewer is thrown into the film's suffocatingly bleak universe. Purposefully domestic in nature, the tactile title card hints that the horror is not abstract or far away, but lingering under our noses.

05. Wildwood

Wildwood's beautiful title card was created by hand, using tactile design to breathe life into each letter form. With diverse natural wood textures, crawling ivy and powered pigment details, each human-made design has its own story woven between the branches.

With animation studio Laika heavily promoting its human-made artistry, it's no surprise this dedicated craft extends to its stunning title card. Demonstrating the beauty that comes from intricate, time-intensive work, Wildwood's title card shines as a rejection of the increasing quantity of AI slop taking over cinema.

06. Resident Evil

The Resident Evil title card is perhaps one of the most controversial on the list for an unexpected reason. With the franchise's origins stemming from the gaming world, many die-hard fans were anticipating the game's iconic title voice narration, something that director Zach Cregger opted against.

The tense, thumping score, paired with the rapid warping of the bold title card, creates an eerie effect that stands strong on its own (basically, doing away with the campiness of the game narrator was a good move). Grungy and terrifying, the title card perfectly encapsulates the film's decay into raw, unrelenting horror.

From Buenos Aires to Vienna, GTA VI ads have been appearing on the sides of buildings, at bus stops and in stadiums. At least one's already come in for a spot of artistic intervention after someone took advantage of game's visibility to make their own brand a household name, and it's sparked quite a debate.

Sign painters Nick Birnie and Ian Potter spent over a week hand painting a huge GTA VI mural for Rockstar in Brooklyn, New York City. The artwork became an attraction, drawing fans who travelled to capture work in progress on the piece.

Within a month, the artwork had been tagged by a graffiti artist going by the name of Jelous, and the intervention has sparked quite a debate.

Many people have expressed outrage at the desecration of the colossal tribute to Jason and Lucia from the upcoming game, with some saying the piece has been "ruined" by the graffiti artist.

"Hopefully they come and remove this crappy graffiti and fix the mural…. Also look on security cameras to find out where this guy lives and arrest him," one person writes on Instagram.

“As an Italian graffiti artist myself, I honestly think this is pretty disrespectful, even by graffiti standards,” someone writes over on Reddit.

But some think fans are being overly precious about what is, after all, a huge advert installed by a subsidiary of a $39.06 billion corporation that's using public space to push an $80-$100 game, even if the artwork was hand painted.

Others point out that crime is a central feature of the GTA franchise. Players can commit everything from minor traffic offences to first degree murder. Some think that makes the tag a fitting response.

"There's nothing more GTA than tagging a giant GTA mural," one person reckons. Some even suggest that Rockstar should add it to the game.

GTA 6 will be released on 19 November.

Maxon sees a world of potential, announcing that Cinema 4D and ZBrush, long-time features in our guides to best 3D modelling software and the best animation software, will get touch support for the new MacBook in late November. And that's not all. Cinema 4D is also getting a new capability that allows artists to preview 3D creations with Apple Vision Pro.

• Get the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display for $2,899 at Amazon

Maxon believes the new MacBook Pro will introduce an "entirely new dimension to professional creative workflows" with its tandem OLED display, intuitive touch capabilities, and powerful M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. The touch display means artists will have new ways to explore interact directly with their 3D creations.

Whether building and animating complex 3D worlds in Cinema 4D or developing intricate digital sculptures in ZBrush, touch support is intended to bring the responsiveness of hands-on interaction to professional desktop workflows, complementing traditional mouse, keyboard, and trackpad workflows.

Maxon already has ZBrush for iPad, which made digital sculpting in the app more mobile and allowed artists to shape and refine their work with their fingers or Apple Pencil. Touch support on MacBook Pro extends that to the more familiar desktop experience.

While touchscreen displays on Windows laptops have been around for many years, Apple's PROLED XDR Display also delivers exceptional brightness, contrast, and color accuracy.

Meanwhile, upcoming Apple Vision Pro support for Cinema 4D will extend the creative process opening up collaborative, real-time three dimensional workflows. Through the new Spatial Preview API, artists using Mac Virtual Display on Apple Vision Pro will be able to explore, preview, and interact with Cinema 4D designs in immersive life-size detail, making it easier to evaluate proportions and composition before moving forward with production.

Rather than judging work based on a 2D image, artists and designers will be able to move through an interior, evaluate a proposed installation, or explore the layout of a space at real-world scale before anything is physically built. This could be particularly valuable for architectural visualisation, retail environments, exhibition spaces and experiential design.

The integration also aims to enable more seamless communication with clients and collaborators, allowing them to inhabit the same space at the same time, immersed in the scene or from a bird’s-eye view using Apple Vision Pro. For reviewers who may not be familiar with navigating 3D software, this could allow them to better understand the space, identify potential changes, and provide more informed feedback earlier in the creative process.

Cinema 4D and ZBrush will be immediately available on Apple's new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, which begins shipping 6 November, 2026. Touch support for Cinema 4D and ZBrush along with Open in Spatial Preview for Apple Vision Pro running visionOS 27 and Mac running macOS 27 will be available in late November.

A new Cinema 4D iPad app is also slated for release before the end of the year. You can learn more on the Maxon website.

Okay, ‘ends’ might be jumping the gun a little. Elon Musk hasn’t said outright that the Cybertruck is being discontinued, and it’s not clear whether production could move elsewhere. But as posted on X, Texas is the only known facility equipped to build its rather specialised parts, so the writing is pretty clearly on the wall.

Cybertruck is winding down

It was always going to be a tough sell. When Musk unveiled the Cybertruck in 2019, he promised a revolution in pickup design. What we got looked like it had rolled straight out of a dystopian sci-fi movie: angular stainless steel, sharp edges and a comically oversized windscreen with one comically oversized, slow wiper. Different? Absolutely. I’ll give it that.

The reaction was instant, with designers and the internet having a field day. We covered the fallout in our 2019 look at the designers taking aim at Tesla’s Cybertruck, and the argument over whether it’s genius or a low-poly disaster has never really gone away.

The launch event set the tone for everything that followed. Tesla’s chief designer, Franz von Holzhausen, took a metal ball to the supposedly unbreakable windows, and they promptly shattered. Not exactly the show of strength Tesla was after, and a pretty cringe bit of live theatre for a truck sold on its toughness.

Then came the production delays, shifting specs, and a price that jumped from the original promises. Musk once talked about selling 250,000 Cybertrucks a year. According to Kelley Blue Book figures reported by Reuters, Tesla sold just 20,237 in the US during 2025, down 48% from the year before. Yikes.

Cybertruck design fails

We’ve been tracking the Cybertruck’s design misadventures since that first reveal, and it constantly surprised us for all the wrong reasons. We looked at early Cybertruck sketches that show how different the finished design could have been, and even imagined what happens when other carmakers go angular in our look at what every car would look like as a Cybertruck. The Mini Cooper, the first car I ever owned, in particular, wasn’t the looker it used to be.

But the issues ran deeper than looks. In June 2023, we reported on leaked design and engineering flaws that made the Cybertruck sound even more terrifying, including problems with braking, handling, noise and water leaks. Then there’s the branding. In April 2024, we rounded up the six worst Cybertruck design fails, from that questionable logo to the accelerator pedal recall.

Then came the reports of bits falling off and the off-road truck getting stuck in mud – are you getting the picture? In March 2025, another Cybertruck design disaster emerged involving exterior panels coming loose. It’s quite something when a truck styled like an armoured tank can’t keep its own bodywork on.

To be fair, the Cybertruck was never meant to be universally loved, and ambition may have overtaken the practicalities of mass production. Musk wanted a vehicle that looked like nothing else on the road, and he got it. But good product design has to do more than turn heads. It has to work, make sense for the people buying it, and survive the rather less glamorous reality of everyday use, whether it's offroading or just driving to the shops without a bumper falling off. The Cybertruck struggled on all three counts.

That heavy, angular build also proved a barrier in Europe, where it failed to meet pedestrian-safety requirements. And the stainless-steel exterior may look suitably apocalyptic, but it brought its own manufacturing and finishing headaches.

Then there’s the branding. That huge angular silhouette was already shouting loud enough, and the aggressive typography and Cybertruck identity just pushed the whole thing further into concept-car territory. I love seeing designers take a big swing at something genuinely unusual. But there’s bold, and then there’s a design that seems to have skipped the bit where someone asks, ‘Is this actually a good idea?’

Is Cybercab really the future?

For contrast, check out some of the best car logos on the road today. Ferrari, Porsche and Mercedes have built enduring identities for a reason: they tell you something about the product and its heritage without yelling at you.

Tesla is now turning its attention to the Cybercab, its two-seat autonomous taxi, with the Texas factory being repurposed to ramp up production. The company is also pushing harder into AI and robotics, so the Cybertruck’s exit is part of a much bigger change of direction.

We’ve already had a glimpse of what that next chapter might look like, and Tesla’s Cybercab has its own rather silly design fail. Maybe the Cybertruck’s lessons haven’t quite sunk in yet.

So here’s to the end of the Cybertruck era, one that made us smile more than it had drivers, and to whatever the Cybercab era has in store.

The good news is, for browsing, streaming, gaming and a bit of sketching, the classic 11-inch iPad (2025) does everything you probably need. If you have specific tasks beyond that, it might be worth shelling out for a more expensive iPad Air, iPad Pro and iPad mini. But for most people (including me) this is the best iPad to get.

Below, I’ve compared the latest versions of all four models – because they are the best versions of all the families – drawing on both my own experience and reviews by the Creative Bloq team, which has been using iPads since Gen 1 in 2010.

Let's get into it...

The best iPad for most people

Our top pick for most people is what people often call the basic iPad. But don't let that put you off, because "basic" is purely a relative term here. So yes, this is the cheapest iPad Apple sells, but it’s still a lovely tablet to use every day. Web browsing, streaming, video calls, note-taking and email are all fast and easy, and the bright, colourful screen is big enough to be comfortable without weighing you down.

It’s a decent gaming tablet too, as long as you're not set on playing AAA titles at the highest frame rates. Call of Duty Mobile runs okay, for instance, until you go up to 120fps mode, while Infinity Nikki might need dropping to medium. The lack of an M-series chip also locks you out of some games entirely.

For drawing, though, it does the job nicely. Add an Apple Pencil and you can sketch happily in Procreate, although the first-generation Pencil is the one to get, as the cheaper USB-C model doesn’t have pressure sensitivity. As our reviewer Ian Evenden says: “You don’t get desktop-level processing power, but you do get one of the friendliest, most useful tablets around, especially if you combine it with a Pencil for sketching.”

A couple more things to point out: there’s no Apple Intelligence, the USB-C port is slow and the screen has an air gap beneath the glass, so it feels a little less refined under a stylus. In short, the compromises are there... but they won't be deal-breakers for most people. Finally, bear in mind that reports suggest a replacement could arrive in early 2027 – although Apple hasn’t confirmed anything so that's currently just speculation.

Read more: Apple iPad 2025 (A16) review

The best step-up iPad

The Air costs $300 / £320 more than the basic iPad. In return you get a much faster chip, twice the memory, Apple Intelligence, Apple Pencil Pro support and the option of a 13-inch screen.

That extra power is overkill if all you want to do on your iPad is check emails and watch Netflix. But if you want to run demanding creative software or games, then it may be worth it. In our Geekbench 6 tests, the M4 Air’s multi-core score of 13,168 was more than double the 6,338 we got from the basic iPad. Its graphics score of 53,071 also matched the 53,252 of the previous M4 iPad Pro.

That will really make a difference, for example, if you want to run 3D software. Our reviever, Glen Southern, who has used iPad Pros for professional work since they launched, found that he could sculpt models of up to 16 million polygons in Nomad Sculpt. But he cautions that for some, all that power will be overkill. “For a lot of creative users, 12GB of memory and an M4 chip may be more iPad than they’ll ever actually need,” he says.

On the other side of the equation, the Air isn't quite as capable as the Pro. For instance, it has an LCD screen rather than OLED, and a 60Hz refresh rate rather than 120Hz. For many people, though, that line won’t be worth paying to cross.

The best iPad for creative pros

The Pro is the absolute best tablet Apple makes, and so if price is no object then please, knock yourself out. It is very expensive, though, and for most people, it’ll be total overkill. However, if you have a specific work need for a Pro such as 3D modelling or video editing, then it may be worth the investment. And it truly is a lovely thing to have and use.

The tandem OLED screen is the best on any iPad, with deep blacks, high contrast and a 120Hz refresh rate. And it’s the most powerful iPad by a distance, scoring 16,443 for multi-core and 74,046 for graphics in our Geekbench 6 tests. “Whether it’s for building up a lot of layers in Procreate or Illustrator, video editing in Final Cut Pro or Davinci Resolve or crazy stuff in Zbrush or Nomad Sculpt, the M5 iPad Pro barely breaks a sweat,” says our reviewer Ian Evenden.

That price, though, is not to be sneezed at. And the cost climbs quickly once you add a Magic Keyboard, Apple Pencil Pro and extra storage. So unless you're certain exactly what the Pro would do for you, we'd say: get the Air.

The best small iPad

The iPad mini is, just as the name suggests, small and light. That makes it a great choice if you want something you can carry easily in a small bag. It's also useful for using in tight spaces, like a crowded railway carriage.

If you’re a fan of small, and you want the best, the 2026 version is the one to choose. It's the first mini with an OLED screen, the first with IP67 water and dust resistance, and at 255g, it’s noticeably lighter than its predecessor.

We haven’t tested it ourselves yet, but our sister site TechRadar praised both its screen and fast performance. So if you want an iPad for reading, travel, note-taking and sketching on the go, it's a great choice; especially if you opt for the paper-like nano-texture screen, which costs an extra $100 / £100 on the 256GB and 512GB models.

The catch? It's a whopping $250 / £270 more than the basic iPad and only $50 / £50 less than the 11-inch Air, so you really are paying a premium for the smallness. The 8.5-inch screen is also stuck at 60Hz. However, if you want to save some cash and the upgrades aren't important to you, retailers still have the previous A17 Pro model, which has dropped to a record low.

FAQs

But annually increasing capabilities, and largely a price freeze, has meant that it's no longer my idea of the best iPad around anymore. That title now goes to the (not really that) humble iPad. The A16, 2025 version, to be precise.

Right now, you can buy the 11-inch, A16-chipped iPad for $399 over at Amazon, in what is the earliest Black Friday iPad deal that I've seen. I've got both this model and the most recent Air, and though I still enjoy the Air more, for the money, the entry-level iPad is the only one I would buy today.

The best early Black Friday iPad deals

• Browse iPad deals at Amazon

Not in the UK? Check out iPad deals in your region below.

As the brand's first-ever holiday campaign, the beautiful stop-motion animation is a sparkling debut that captures the joy of the festive season. A masterful display of tactile craftsmanship, the 'e.l.f. Made to Stand Out' campaign carries many of the traits of the best Christmas adverts, proving that analogue storytelling is the perfect tool for sparking festive joy.

Narrated by iconic actor Alan Cumming, the campaign follows friends Kit, Echo and Cleo as they reunite in their hometown for a holiday get-together. What could be an uncomfortable hangout turns into a celebration of the qualities that make them extraordinary, spreading festive cheer.

“For a campaign about the power of standing out, the medium needed to stand out too, and stop motion felt like such a natural fit for this story," explains Oshiya Savur, chief marketing officer at e.l.f. Beauty. "We're seeing a real appetite for nostalgia and a return to simpler times, with 72% of Americans saying nostalgic memories inspire them when life feels complicated.

There's something about stop motion that takes you right back to the holiday specials you grew up watching, but we saw an opportunity to give that familiar art form a uniquely e.l.f. twist. There's an incredible level of craftsmanship and character that comes from building an entire world by hand, and when you combine that with our signature wit and wink, you create something that feels both familiar and completely unexpected.”

Created by Apartment D Films, each element of the ad reads as a love letter to analogue craft, from individually moulded characters to intricately constructed miniature sets. "We used a wide variety of different materials! It's truly a mixed media project," Cami Kwan, Creative Director of Apartment D, tells Creative Bloq. "The puppets have aluminium and steel wire armatures inside, which makes them posable. Their hands and heads are made of printed resin, which we then painted and finished with actual e.l.f. products! The cheeks and mouths of the puppets are colored using a combination of e.l.f. Powder Blush Palette, e.l.f Perfect 10 Eyeshadow Palette, and e.l.f. Halo Glow Silky Powder Highlighter.

All the characters' hair is made with different weights and textures of yarn, to call back to super nostalgic toys, but with a modern sensibility. The eyebrows and eyelids of the characters are made of a mix of wax and clay, so they're super mouldable to get big expressions in the performance, and also so you can literally see the animators' fingerprints on the characters as they emote.

A lot of the world around the character is made of wood, but with hand-painted textures so the wood grain is more painterly and stylized. The mini products and bottles the characters use are all hand-sculpted out of clay, and then finished with a variety of nail art techniques, like cured acrylic, gels, and powder shimmers! The mini bottles are really so, so small; none of them is more than 1 inch tall."

It wasn't a project without some difficulties, as Cami explains. "One of our challenges was integrating real beauty products intended to live on human skin with stop-motion puppets. Unlike real humans, our puppets don't have pores and don't have a body temperature, both of which e.l.f. beauty products are chemically formulated to interact with.

On top of that, stop motion puppets are designed to be handled and touched constantly during the animation process, so the treatments and colors on them need to be incredibly resilient to constant wear and tear. We spent a good deal of time on the material testing of the e.l.f. beauty products to see which ones would integrate best with our fabrication techniques.

It was actually really interesting to let our puppet team dip into their extensive knowledge of material science! We've found that generally anything based in a powder pigment merged really well with our typical techniques, and those combinations were really successful in getting puppets with a lot of character and a lot of dynamic color and shimmer on screen!"

Honouring such a tactile animation style is a time intensive practice, but are audiences hungry for analogue creativity? “Absolutely," says Oshiya. "The more purely AI-generated content we see, the greater the opposite and equal reaction from people craving something real: human connection and creativity they can actually feel.

We're seeing a renewed appreciation for the analogue, and I think that's a natural response to an increasingly digital world. At e.l.f., we're human first, human last. AI can be an incredible tool, but taste, discernment and original ideas come from human ingenuity. At the end of the day, we want to make people feel something, and that human element is what makes it possible.”

"The thing I'm most proud of is how kind and collaborative our crew on this project was. It's not something you can point to on screen, but it's something you can feel in how much care was taken with every frame, and how lively the animation is. There was so much joy in the creation and filming of this project, and I do think you can feel that in how kinetic and inventive everything is. It's a little zany, a little imperfect, and really so captivating when all seen together!" says Cami.

"For a more specific on-screen detail, though, I love the smear frames we used when Echo is zooming between the tables and getting everyone amped up! Smear frames are an animation technique that's most typical in 2D animation – they're moments when, for just a few frames, you distort the character and literally smear them to give a sense of speed, mimicking the way something moving too fast on a live-action camera will appear blurry.

You hardly ever see smear frames in stop motion, but one of the things that we really focus on at Apartment D is pushing the stylistic boundaries of stop motion and finding ways to bring 2D animation techniques into our three-dimensional medium. So, in that Echo zooming scene, we actually used pieces of cut paper to create practical, dimensional smear frames! Jen Prokopowicz, the animator of that shot, curved the paper smears to get an extra sense of dimension, and created smears of different sizes to get a sense of speeding up and slowing down. It's just so cool, and something that generally only real animation nerds will notice," Kami adds.

“At e.l.f., we've never been interested in being part of a sea of sameness. We're a brand that celebrates the unexpected, embraces individuality and believes that what makes us different is what makes us extraordinary. That's what I love about stop motion. Every quirk and detail adds personality to the story, and there's no expectation of perfection. Just as no two handcrafted creations are exactly alike, no two people are either. It's a playful way to bring our belief in celebrating every eye, lip and face to life, and a reminder that your difference is low-key your gift,” says Oshiya.

For more creative inspiration check out Prada's Disney inspired Christmas campaign or take a look at Dior's festive ad that ruffled some feathers.

But whether you’re working monochromatically to draft an illustration or using it for a finished piece, a black and white approach is full of benefits. It can even make you stand out in an art world that's saturated with vibrant talent (if you need the tools for your own art, see our guides to the best drawing tablets and the best pens for artists).

Foregoing colour can be an intentional creative choice rather than the result of a limitation, but for illustrator Sarah Koudelka-Mason it was born out of convenience. “After trying out all sorts of tools, I found pencils to be the simplest, least fussy medium,” she says. “All you need is a pencil and paper, which you can bring anywhere. Perhaps because pencils were also my first and most consistent tool in my art journey, I feel the most comfortable with them.”

For character artist and illustrator Joe Vriens, a black and white approach was the result of a fear of colour theory mixed with a dash of impatience.

“I’d always get excited to see the bare line work of a comic, too; it seemed much more achievable,” he reveals. “I could grab a pen and paper and make a comic without expensive markers, paints or digital tools.

“I’m also old enough to remember King Kong in black and white. I made my parents rent that thing probably once a month. In retrospect, maybe King Kong informed my approach all along?”

Illustrator Isabella Mazzanti points out that working in black and white plays into a long tradition of art styles, including her own influences which range from Gustave Doré’s engravings to contemporary manga.

“They seemed accessible and reproducible to me,” she says. “These early experiences were fundamental, because they shaped my aesthetic sensibility and my approach to drawing.”

Seeing as working in black in white is a deliberate approach, it also depends on specific considerations.

“You have to make sure the shading values are balanced well,” Sarah advises. “It’s easy for your shading to look flat or ’muddy’ if your tones are too similar, so you really have to figure out your darks, mediums and lights, and then tie them together with the between shading. I personally like to work lighter and work my way to the crisp dark lines at the end. So satisfying.”

“Line weight and shape design are also key,” says concept artist Alexander Joseba, who has worked for Epic Games, HBO, Ubisoft and more. “A strong silhouette can communicate a character or object very quickly, and different line weights can help separate forms and create depth. Since you cannot use colour to separate materials or planes, you need to do it through values, textures, edges and rhythm.”

“For me, black and white forces you to be more disciplined, although I also like to play with a more wild and instinctive approach. If the image works in black and white, it usually means that the composition, lighting and structure are solid.”

Alexander grew up looking at the work of great artists such as John Buscema, Mike Mignola, Alberto Breccia and many others.

“I was fascinated by the way they were able to communicate so much with ink: how they separated planes, created depth, controlled light and shadow, and made the whole image work so clearly, each one with their own very distinct style,” he explains

Some extra considerations are required when working in black and white, however. Alexander believes the most important consideration is readability.

“Without colour, you have to rely much more on values, contrast, shapes, silhouettes and composition to guide the viewer’s eye. Everything needs to be clear from the beginning: what the focal point is, what belongs to the foreground, middle ground and background, and where the main light is coming from.

“Working in black and white forces you to focus on the foundation of the image. You need to solve composition, lighting, values, silhouette, volume and overall readability properly. I think any artist who works well in black and white will also improve their colour work, because they understand values, light and structure better. Colour does not replace that foundation; it complements it.”

Isabella also warns against assuming that working in black and white is a simpler approach.

“A solid grasp of the visual language is essential in order to use it effectively,” she argues. “Black and white is not simply the absence of colour; when working with chiaroscuro, one chooses to tell a story based on duality, contrast and the exaggeration of ambiguity. I believe it is vitally important for an artist to understand this element, which has the power to intensify the viewer’s emotional engagement.”

When it comes to making black and white art work professionally, Isabella stresses that economic forces may be influencing publishers just as much as aesthetic considerations. “It lends images a classic, refined and timeless quality,” she says.

“Even when telling a certain type of story – for example, Gothic literature – black and white seems to be the most natural choice. It can be a risky choice, because one is foregoing the emotional appeal of colour, but when used in the right way and in the right context, it’s a winning decision.”

Sarah claims that black and white art is underrated, and that it’s not the usual approach commissioners are looking for. “But at the same time, if there are clients specifically looking for works of that nature and you’ve established yourself in that niche, you will find them. This applies to any unique niche of art, and I personally enjoy the challenge of going against the grain!”

For Alexander, black and white artwork is useful for both commercial production pipelines and for final illustration styles. “It depends on the project: sometimes it is a practical development tool, and sometimes it becomes the final artistic language,” he says.

Even if artists don’t gear their black and white artwork towards clients, focusing on it can still improve their overall craft. “Balancing tones in a final image is super-important, so if you can master greys then moving on to colour will feel easier,” says Joe.

“You can guide the viewer’s eye with tones alone, so it can help your compositions greatly. Focusing on greys or even black and white can take a lot of the pressure off as well, which allows you to really dig into lighting and form.”

Meanwhile Sarah is a firm believer that practising black and white art is one of the best ways to strengthen your understanding of the fundamentals.

“Without the distraction or support of vibrant colours, you are encouraged to look at your work in a simpler and more intentional way,” she says. “You start to see shape language, values, lighting, contrast, composition and depth a lot clearer.

Isabella agrees: “The absence of colour changes the way an image is perceived,” she says. “Rather than depriving the image of something, a black and white approach reveals its essential and most intimate nature; it speaks to the viewer in a more universal, almost archetypal language.”

This article originally appeared in ImagineFX. Subscribe to ImagineFX to never miss an issue. Print and digital subscriptions are available.

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