Hey everyone, here's today's post!

I think this one was a lot more successful than the last two, I mentioned yesterday that I was going to try something different and I think it worked pretty well.

With my prior two pieces I just kinda roughed all the mass in really quickly and then tried to flesh out the details. I didn't take the time to look over everything and make sure it was all in the right place. This time around I took a moment to sketch out where everything should be, then laid in all the color, I think it really helped! You can be the judge though, here's how it turned out.

And here's the original for comparison.

I claim no ownership of this image, it was used as a reference for the study above.

I'm really happy with the way it turned out, obviously it's not a perfect (there are some color issues and the bottom portion around the base of the rock isn't completely painted), but I feel like this was a step in the right direction. This piece was completed in about 35 minutes (I wanted to be done in 33:03 but the rock was too unfinished for me to be happy with stopping).

Can't wait to do another one of these tomorrow, see you then!

Hey there everyone! I think this month I'm gonna stick to doing landscapes. Maybe I'll switch it up next month and do figure drawings or something anyway, here's my painting for today!

And here's the source image for comparison.

I claim no ownership of this image, it was used as a reference for the study above.

I think it turned out okay, there's a lot more contrast in the original photo than in my work, and I couldn't get the colors quite right (I'm picking the colors by eye, not from the image itself) so that's something I'll have to work on. I think I'm gonna try a different technique for laying out the image tomorrow and see if that helps. I hope you enjoyed this post! Expect another tomorrow!

Happy New Year! It's official, I've been at this for a year. That's pretty exciting, right? I missed the update I wanted to do yesterday due to it being New Year's Eve, but I just wanted to post something really quick to mark this milestone.

I've decided that from this point forward I'm doing one digital painting a day, it doesn't matter what it is, it's gonna be one each day from here on out.

Here's a landscape I completed in 30 minutes 56 seconds!

This is the image I was working from.

I claim no ownership of this image, it was used as a reference for the study above.

You'll be seeing a lot more work from me this year, check back each day for new content. I'll still be posting updates related to my personal and school work as well, so look forward to that too! Enjoy 2015! Thanks for visiting!

-Francesco

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!