Hey everyone, it's time for another update. I'm closing out November with three posts under my belt, super happy about that! Anyway, time for what you (hopefully) came her for. This post is about yet another school project, the design item du jour was an infographic. It seemed pretty simple at first, find a topic, arrange some statistics, illustrate. I can assure you it was not that easy.

My first struggle was picking a topic, I wanted to start with something fun like "Death through the Ages," but that didn't pan out due to a lack of information that I could source (and also because I didn't feel like looking through that much data). I then tried to look up something I thought would be easy to find, which nations around the globe consume the majority of certain fruits. Again I hit a wall. This time it was in the form of me only being able to find records of imports and exports from particular countries but no data on what they actually were consuming. After staring at the Google search bar for what seemed like an eternity I typed in "sugar content in fruits." Bingo! I finally found something I could work with. A handy little drop-down menu popped up with all of the info I needed.

Since my idea was relatively simple I decided to go with a minimalist approach to the design. I was working with this kind of manila envelope color in my last project (though I didn't end up using it at the time) and decided it would be perfect for what I wanted to do. I did a few sketches at work and got all the details ironed out, here's what they look like.

This was my first sketch, it's how I figured out the layout of the image. There's a little note scrawled at the top that reads "need 1 more fruit." At the time I had only listed eleven fruits in my design but in order for that arrangement to work I needed twelve. That'd make three on the top, four in the middle, and five on the bottom. I wanted to mimic the food pyramid a bit with the shape, so that's why I went with a stepped pyramid design.

This drawing shows what the key or legend was going to look like and also has a thumbnail of the finalized design in the top left.

 This one shows the title of the infographic at the top along with some text that would be displayed under that. I also drew the fruits in a little more detail, the black silhouette is the shape of the fruit and the white unfilled space represents the percent of sugar in the fruit.

I started my image by making a background in the manila color I selected, then created a two inch white border around each side. I got all of the bits and pieces arranged where I wanted them, then it was just a matter of creating the fruit shapes and listing all of the information I gathered. The description of the process was greatly simplified as I really don't feel like going through the horror of that again. For some reason filling in the shapes I created with that little touch of white at the bottom was exceedingly difficult, I'll be asking my professor if there was another way I could have gone about it. In the end I came up with something I was pretty happy with. The design's pleasant, well balanced, and the color pallet is simple and doesn't distract from the information being conveyed. Here's the final product so you can see for yourself.

That's all for this post! I've got one more project I need to finish so look forward to seeing that one sometime in early December. Hopefully I've got some time for some personal stuff on winter break, I'll make sure to update as frequently as I possibly can. Thanks for stopping by!

Hey everyone! It's time for another update, and you guessed it, this one's for another school project. For this assignment my professor tasked us with creating a heads up display in either Illustrator or Photoshop. It had to be sized according to a 16:9 aspect ratio and displayed over a photo to simulate a first person perspective. I decided to have some fun with this one so I used a picture of one of my cats.

This is Pinky, as you can probably tell she's serving a bit of attitude in this picture. Perfect for what I wanted to do. My idea was to take this sassy cat picture and turn it into a Terminator 2 homage. Seeing how the Terminator viewed things in the movies was something that stayed with me from my childhood, so thought it'd put my own spin on it for this assignment.

First I needed to change up the image a bit and make it look more digitized. After adding one orange and one blue radial gradient to a layer I switched the blending mode to hard mix and came up with this.

Looks pretty cool but I've got a long way to go. After duplicating the original image then combining a copy of the gradients I created I sandwiched those layers together. I then changed the blending mode to exclusion and this is what I got.

I'm really liking it now, it sorta has a 3D look so I decided to really push that concept later. I added another copy of the original image in hard mix mode to give it a bit more depth. After that I put another copy on top in luminosity mode, this brought back a little more detail that was previously missing. Here's what that looked like.

It's getting there, now it was time to add in some noise. I also added a blue green gradient to the top and bottom to balance out the intense red of my cat in the image. This is what I ended up with afterwords.

Almost done! At this point it just needed a little extra tweaking. I added a bit of green in the background to further contrast the red tint on my cat. I then added a color dodge layer to make her look a little less dark. That left me with this.

Now it was time for some text. The HUD in Terminator 2 didn't really look as complex as what we might be used to today, but I liked that retro look so I tried to stay true to it. After a little creative writing I came up with this.

I liked the way this looked, but I felt like it was missing something. That's when I remembered I wanted to incorporate something else to push the 3D feeling I got when I first started editing the image. I selected every bit of text I typed, then added an outer glow blending option, then separated the blending options from each set of layers. This was done in red, green, and blue to create a stereoscopic 3D effect. Once that was done I added a bit of letterboxing and then my image was complete. Here's the final result!

There you have it, the finished product. See if you can spot the not so hidden Terminator reference. I hope you enjoyed reading through this as much as I enjoyed making it. It was a lot of fun.

I just wanted to make a quick announcement at the end of this post. I wanted to say a big thank you to everyone that has been stopping by and viewing my blog. It was important that I post something today because after checking my account I noticed I surpassed one thousand views! That's super incredible to me and it's extremely gratifying to see. Thanks again!

Expect another post later this month. The semester's winding down so I've still got a few projects left to complete. Till next time!

Hey everyone, time for an update! I haven't been able to do much personal work lately because school projects have been keeping me quite busy, so this update will be about another task for my design class I recently completed. This was another project completed in Adobe Illustrator. It's still something that's not completely familiar to me so I had to jump through quite a few hoops to finish my design. It was tough, but I'm really happy with the end result.

The criteria for this project was pretty simple; illustrate a quote from a well-known literary or historical figure. The final image needed to be poster size (27"x40") so we had a lot of room to work with. After browsing the internet for a while and looking through quotes from people like Maya Angelou, John F. Kennedy, and few others, I happened upon a quote I liked. This one was from Aristotle; "whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god." I thought there was a lot there to work with to create an interesting image so I started sketching out my idea right away.

I knew I wanted to break up the image into three distinct sections, then tie them together through the use of alternating font sizes. A colored gradient underneath would help the transition from one image to the next. Since Aristotle was Greek I decided to give the image a mythical punch by using Zeus as a supernatural force throughout. After doing a little research I found that Zeus was known to take the form of a bull, this worked perfectly with the quote and my idea so I felt like I was on the right track. After a couple of minutes scribbling on a scrap of paper I came up with this.

It was perfect (or so I thought)! The idea was approved by my instructor and then I got to work executing it. After a bit of googling for some images that I could use to layout the design I plopped them into Illustrator to see how it was going to look. Upon seeing everything together I realized I made a grave mistake. Take a look.

Way too much going on, no way possible to arrange the elements in the image to make them look connected, no font and gradient could save this. Bad design, bad. After staring at my computer screen in defeat for a few moments I knew I simply had to start over.

I reviewed my original quotes a couple of times, and not being too enthused with anything I was seeing I looked for some new ones. Finally I happened upon something promising by Ralph Waldo Emerson; "A man is related to all nature." It was simple, had a wonderful message, and got me thinking. This was the quote I would use.

I did a tiny sketch of what I wanted the final image to look like, then started figuring out how I wanted to arrange all of the elements within the composition. We had learned about Fibonacci in our discussion about proportion and creating harmony in an image, so I thought it might be neat to use his number sequence in my design. These are a few thumbnail sketches I did showing some representations of concentric circles and the various designs I wanted to include in them.

I decided I wanted to create and arrange symbols that would represent the natural world, mountains, trees, flowers, and animals, radially within each circle. I would then place a man at the center of the image and the quoted text at the bottom. I was going for a bit of a retro look since I felt the quote could easily be applied to the 60's, so I looked up some old posters for reference then started plugging away.

I tried everything I could think of to make the design work, but for whatever reason I couldn't quite get the shapes to repeat within the circles in the way I wanted. Again I had hit a wall. I tried looking through tutorials online, tried typing in what I was attempting to do into Google, hoping it would magically produce an answer but to no avail. I knew my concept wasn't bad but I just couldn't execute it within Illustrator due to a lack of knowledge.

Since I couldn't produce the elaborate thing I envisioned I thought the next best thing to do was to distill my concept to its essence. After all, a poster should be something you see that you don't have to pour over and analyze. I know I don't see many of them every day but if I do they're there to quickly convey a message. I realized my problem this time around was the same one I had before. I was just making things too complicated. The core of the quote is man's relationship to nature, that part of this sentence is almost the whole quote! There was no need to design something so ornate, it's a simple idea with impact. With my "Ah-ha!" moment came the final push for me to finish the piece, this is what I came up with.

I wanted people to see how closely connected we are to the natural world around us which is why the circles represent an eye. Within the "pupil" is man, and the color of the "pupil" is a loamy brown to symbolize the earth. The man stands on the earth because we walk on the ground, but also because when we die our bodies return to the ground, this is why he can also be viewed as laying down. The "iris" is filled with flowers and greenery to represent nature, and the blue symbolizes the water and sky. Finally the quote at the bottom is placed in such a way to emphasize the meat of the quote which is "man to nature," that's why that text along with the man are shown in white. I really wanted to drive that association home. I feel like this design is extremely successful at communicating what I wanted it to and I'm incredibly happy that this process (which was at times rather frustrating) ended up being such a great learning experience.

If you guys got through all of that I salute you! I'm pretty sure this was my longest post ever (had to make up for the fact that I missed that last update in October). Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it. I've got one other project almost done, and another one I'm about to start. There will be much more to come this month so check back later!

Hey everyone, time for a new post! I've got another school project to share with you all this time around. This one was pretty neat because it was my first time using Adobe Illustrator to create a finished design. I've always worked in Photoshop since it's what I know and am comfortable with, but it was nice to learn some new things in a different program. I think I'll be using Illustrator a lot more after this!

For this project we were tasked with creating a pattern demonstrating the Bezold effect. This describes an optical illusion that occurs when a color appears different depending on it's relation to adjacent colors. First we had to create a pattern in Illustrator, duplicate that pattern, then change one color in the duplicated pattern to demonstrate the Bezold effect. The two patterns are then displayed on an image together to highlight the difference that change made. We're being graded on our use of color, weight, balance, and how we showcase positive and negative space in the image.

So now, onto the designs! This is the pattern I came up with.

I was inspired by African textiles and bead work, The patterns in those designs are very interesting, and their use of color really highlights that. The colors that I started with were fairly neutral, dark taupe, taupe, white, and black. I used the two shades of taupe in the alternating triangles atop the black and white columns to help showcase the contrast between black and white. I felt like it was a little more visually interesting than just using grey. Finally I added a pop of color to the bottom of the design with some analogous colors, red, orange, and a golden yellow. They really pop out against the darker background which was exactly what I wanted to see.

After getting the first pattern together it was time to alter one color to show how that would change the design. I decided since the colors I used in the original pattern were all warm analogous colors that it would be great to throw in a complimentary color to really set the pattern off. Here's what I came up with after the change.

You can really see how much a simple color swap affected the look of this pattern, the aqua leaps out against the dark taupe and the orange and really demonstrates the Bezold effect quite nicely. The first pattern, although intricate, seems a bit muted compared to the second with it's aqua and orange fighting for dominance. I'm really happy with the way this one turned out. Hopefully my professor is as well.

Working on projects like this has really helped me to think about my process in designing art, I feel like it's really helping me grow.

Well, that's all for this post. I'm gonna see if I can squeeze in one more update before the end of this month so keep on the look-out for more art! Thanks for stopping by!

Hey everyone, time for another post! Recently I was assigned a project for one of my classes to create a chimera, of sorts, out of three different animals. We were tasked with stitching it together in Photoshop to produce the finished product. Unfortunately for me the animals that I chose, crab, cuttlefish, and octopus, are apparently really difficult to find high resolution photos of. Which meant I had to get a little creative to execute my concept. It was super fun to work on, so I'm gonna dedicate this post to showing you how I did it.

I needed a background that would showcase the creatures habitat as this was one of the criteria for completing the assignment, so I picked a photo I took of a local beach.

Next I pulled up a couple references I found online and put them into my Photoshop document. I chose a cooked crab claw for a little humor.

After that it was time to draw the outline of my creature, since I wasn't able to find any images that would have been big enough for me to manipulate in Photoshop I had to create this guy from scratch.

My next step was to paint in a little grey inside the silhouette I created, this is what's going to help the texture that I'll be overlaying next to show up. I was careful to try and match the direction of the light in the image when painting in the grey, that way it makes the image more believable. Well, as believable as a giant hybrid monster sitting on a beach can be anyway.

Since I now had the base for my texture ready, it was time to apply that texture. I found a photo of octopus skin that looked pretty decent, cut it up and blended it all together, and that left me with something I could overlay. All of that gave me this...

Looking pretty good here. Now the next important part was adding in the crab claws. I just duplicated a couple of them after removing the white background they were on, changed their sizes just a little bit so that they'd each look appropriately closer or farther away from the viewer, then put them where they needed to be. I also painted a bit of the color on each claw down on the tentacles so that it blended a bit better.

At this point I've almost got a complete creature, however something's not quite right. It's just kinda floating there in space, it needs a shadow to ground it in the image. I also wanted to add the marks it would have made getting from the ocean to the beach, so it was time to paint those in.

Now that the shadow underneath the creature has been taken care of, it's time to make sure that all of the parts of the creature that should be in shadow reflect that fact. Again looking at the light that's in the photo I took, which is slightly behind the subject I'm painting, I added some dark blue to color in the shadowed areas.

We're in the homestretch at this point, now it's time for just a few finishing touches. So this guy might look menacing right now, but he can't quite look at anything since he doesn't actually have eyes. I simply took the eye of a cuttlefish photo I found online, cut it out, painted a shadow underneath, and pasted it in place. I had to manipulate the one on the other side with the liquefy tool to give it it's rounded appearance.

With that done it was time to add the signature frill of the cuttlefish along the head of my creature. This was accomplished by making a quick selection with the marquee tool on the front of the head and behind the head to outline the frill area. Next the frill was filled in with a creamy yellow color I sampled from the crab claws and then made slightly transparent using the layer opacity slider. Once that was done I took some dark blue found in the buildings in the background and painted in some color on top. After all of that I ended up with this.

So that's it! There you go! One Giant Octocuddlecrab on a beach. Since you made it this far through the process your reward is the finished version that I added a description to, and turned in for a grade. I hope you all enjoyed reading about what it took to make this creature. 'Till next post, later!

Hey there everyone, just wanted to share the what I've been up to the past week. In my last post I uploaded some quick sketches I did while I was at work and let you know I planned on finishing them in Photoshop. While only one of them has been started (and is definitely not finished at this point) I figured I might as well post it just to show you all how it's coming along.

Just for a refresher, here's the sketch I've been working from.

This is the version I'm currently working on in Photoshop.

I think it's looking pretty good. There's gonna be a whole lot more detail in the finished piece but I think this should give an alright idea of what the final product is going to look like. If I actually render as much in there as I'd like I'll make sure to post some close-ups of the really detailed bits so you can see them well.

That's about all for this post. I don't think I'm gonna be able to finish all three of the sketches in Photoshop this month but I'll do my best to finish this one at least. I should post another update in about a week so make sure to check back later.

Hey there everybody! So this will make my third update in August! I did it! Three posts in one month! That's pretty exciting, right? I'm sure it'd be more exciting if I actually showed you what I was working on, so let's get to that then. Here are some sketches I did at work the other day.

These were inspired by some music I was listening to, I plan on on painting each one digitally - I'm gonna try to do one-ish a week next month and post them up when they're done! That's all for this month! Stay tuned for more updates!

Hey everyone! It's time for another blog post. I've decided recently to go back to school and get a degree that encompasses a lot of my interests (digital photography, drawing, painting, web design, programming), and I'm super excited about it. I start school in about a week and I can't wait! While I was looking through one of my books on design for one of the classes I'm about to take I stumbled upon this picture.

(The above image was saved from wikipedia, I do not claim ownership of this image. It was posted as a reference.)

I had just recently made a custom brush set in Photoshop that looked similar to the strokes Monet used for the image so I thought it would be pretty fun to try my hand at painting my own version.

I started off with a super big canvas, didn't sketch or plot anything out, just painted. It was a really fun exercise. It's easy to get caught up in producing "Art." Something that has to look a certain way, or appeal to a person, or be something worthy of selling, but this was something I wanted to do to remind myself that the first reason why I do this sort of thing is because I enjoy it. So after about an hour this is what I came up with!

It's narrower, everything isn't quite aligned right, but it was a blast to do. The thing that really sticks with me anytime I do a study of a master work like this is how much color is used. There are so many different hues, tints, and values in this and the original painting it's crazy! It was really fun to create.

That's all for this update! I still want to do at least one more this month so look out for that one. Till next time!

Hey there, it's time for another blog update!

There was a sudden rainstorm that rolled over my house so I thought it might be fun to take some pictures. My objective was to try and catch the rain in motion. I wasn't entirely successful but it still lead to me getting some really cool photos (with a little creative editing)! Without further ado, here they are!

This was a small branch that broke off a nearby bush, the little white dots you see sparkling against the black background (which is the grass) are raindrops. It kinda looks to me like a constellation you might see in the night sky.

This photo was actually the reason the other shots look the way that they do. Because it was rather dark out and I was shooting at a very fast shutter speed to capture falling rain I had to photograph this image at a very high ISO. This can make a picture really grainy and lose detail, which is exactly what happened here. So while it wasn't really much to look at in it's unedited state, I thought there still might be some hope yet for me to showcase what I was originally trying to capture - the falling rain. By darkening the image, converting it to black and white, then inverting it, and adjusting the color balance channel by channel, I came up with this. If you look closely you can see little black flecks peppered throughout the image, that's the rain frozen in motion. I also really liked the way the edges of the leaves popped out against the sky (which is black in the photo).

This final shot was framed to capture water flowing out of the drain connected to the gutters on the roof. You can see the water up in the right hand corner of the image. The bonus for shooting stuff when it's wet is that you get a neat reflection of the water sitting on any surface. It made what's normally a boring grey sidewalk a little more interesting.

Well, that's all for this week! Doing something different was pretty fun. I'm also really glad I didn't get electrocuted, that would have been kind of a bummer.

I'm gonna try to do at least a few more posts this month, my goal is three, so look forward to some more new stuff soon. See you next post!

Hey there everyone! I've got some new stuff to share with you so let's get right to it! Here are a couple of sketches I did on my iPad this week.

These came about while I was sitting in a waiting room when I noticed an older gentleman in front of me. I started looking at the creases on his face and the texture of his skin and thought it'd be neat to do a portrait of a man around his age. With a great reference to work from (discretely) I went for it.

The whole process was really fun. I started painting in the shadows first, the dark hollows of the eye sockets, the contours of the cheeks, the shadow under the neck. Then came a whole bunch of layers of lighter grey to give the face depth, finally the face was topped off with some highlights and this is what the (mostly) finished product came to look like.

I'm pretty happy with the way it came out. All of the wrinkles and spots on the skin look really lifelike, I also like the way his expression turned out.

The task of painting the second portrait, which is of a young woman, was a whole lot more and yet a little more complicated. Because the texture of her skin was to be smooth and blemish-free there was a whole lot of blending to do. I didn't have to worry about that too much with the male portrait as the quick transition from light to dark and patchy to even skin helped to show his age. This would not have worked for a young lady though so everything had to be smoothed thoroughly from one shade to the next. After all of that was done this was what I ended up with.

I think she turned out rather pretty, her nose and lips were the most difficult parts to get right, but I'm really happy with the finished result. She's a little less realistic than the gentleman above, but I wasn't really shooting for any particularly photo-realistic look. I was just trying to push myself out of my comfort zone and do something I never do which is draw the human face. It's kind of an important skill for an artist, so I figured practicing might be a good idea.

Thanks a lot for reading! I hope you guys enjoyed this post. I've got a whole bunch of quick sketches I want to upload soon, and a friend suggested I post some of my older art from a few years back, so I might be doing that too. See you next update!

Hey all! I know it has been quite sometime since I've updated so I thought it was time to share a couple sketches!

They're a bit surreal which is always a fun style to work in, you can pretty much do anything you like (and it's kinda more fun for that reason). I'm thinking of turning the first sketch into a finished piece of digital art and making it available for sale on my store.

I've got a huge project in the works right now that I've partnered with a friend to complete. Once there's a bit more to show we'll most likely be launching a separate blog for it so stay tuned! Thanks for stopping by!

Hey everyone! Long time no blog! I mentioned before that I was plugging away at a big project recently and that's why it has been so long since I've updated. That project is over and submitted so I wanted to take some time to tell you guys about it.

There's an online art school called CGMA I've been thinking of taking some courses at for a while now and I noticed they had partnered with Syn Studio to sponsor an art contest. The criteria for the submission was as follows:

"This epic competition challenges you to conceive of or update a classic tale, design believable and convincing sci-fi technology, and illustrate a key moment in the narrative. You can also depict characters, creatures, worlds, and civilizations at any point in time and anywhere in space. Your goal is to create a unique sci-fi illustration which showcases your design and rendering skills while conveying a rich underlying narrative that has universal appeal. Your final image will be evaluated on it's originality, design and rendering."

Sounds pretty cool, right? Naturally this got my imagination running wild, it was pretty difficult to just settle on one idea and work on it. My gut told me to go with something immediately readable, Alice & Wonderland, but my head had other plans. After spending most of my time working on a project I didn't really end up liking I trashed everything at the last second and started from scratch. I had one day to complete what it took me a couple of weeks of work to get halfway done.

The first thing I did was to make a couple of thumbnail sketches to layout the scene. Here's a sampling below.

The last sketch seemed to speak to me the most so that was the one I chose to develop further. After looking at it for a little while I came up with a story, this actually be came the description of the piece I used for my contest submission. Here's what I wrote up.

Her ship, The Hare, had certainly lead her astray this time. With her navigation systems damaged she had no choice but to make an emergency landing on this previously undiscovered world, and from her first impression it appeared to be anything but wonderful. She found a disused observation tower and climbed atop to get her bearings. Suddenly the clouds in the sky parted, revealing some kind of massive structure, it glowed brightly against the dark night sky. Struts ran up from the base to the top and spilled over haphazardly. This mega city sat there before her, appearing almost to welcome her with a grin. She gazed into the distance, uneasy, it would be a while before her ship's automatic repair functions got it back in working order. She hoped that she hadn't been noticed, every second she lingered she was more overcome by dread. She thought to herself, "This is the last place you want to be, Alice."

There it was, I now knew what I needed to do, it was just a matter of pushing myself to get it done. All of the work began in grey-scale, no color was used at first so that I could make sure the contrast and value of the image was just right. That process took about 8 hours. It was grueling but I had to get it done. After all that work this is what I came up with.

At this point it was about 10:30 pm and I had been working all day, I was absolutely exhausted, but I couldn't give up because I was in the home stretch. Just one thing left to do, color. This would have been easy enough, had I ever completed a digital painting in this manner before, that was unfortunately not the case.

After two more hours of tweaking everything to be just right, I came up with the final image.

It had to be slightly cropped to meet the size criteria, but overall I'm extremely happy with what I was able to produce. I couldn't have done it without my biggest fan and cheerleader, Lee, so I'm extremely grateful that he was there to help me finish this piece. My entry can be found on CGMA's website here. Wish me luck guys, the judging's tomorrow!

So that's what has been going on lately, I've been doing a lot more photography which I should be getting around to posting up on my Flickr page soon. Thanks for reading!