It’s time to have some fun for the holidays. One of my clients asked for a reflection composite (very trendy!) of apples for his upcoming self promo piece. The concept is “Stand Out’ using apples. I grabbed the individual apples from IStock, put them together, did some shadow painting, re-lit them, then created the background gradation and reflection. I then had this idea that it would be cool to take a bite out of the red apple. So back into istock to find a bite picture, then back into PhotoShop to composite the bite and recast the reflection. That also turned out pretty cool. I was thinking maybe a front and back cover of the brochure in question.

The client emails me back and loves the apple composite so much, that he wants me to add a santa hat to the set so he can use them for this year’s Christmas Cards. So back into istock, I grab a santa hat, isolate the hat and then place it on the apple. The trouble is that the hat is shot under very different lights so, I jump into the layers and duplicate the hat, set it to multiply and tweak the color a bit. This makes the hat’s density curve pop a bit, but it still isn’t right. So I go back to the tablet and do some more shadow painting, I add a small drop shadow to the hat and put a small cast reflection to the apple closest to the hat.

It’s not perfect, but it is fun. I am always amazed at what photoshop can do.

The Zen Fellowship of Dayton. It is a gather place (not sure if worship is the right word?) for Buddhists in Dayton Ohio. The client said it was perfect, while at the same time commenting on the ‘leftist’ look the logo has. He said it has a flavor of Russian propaganda art!  “… The hyper-perfect grain, backed by the sun burst!  Enlightenment for the workers!  A bold new tomorrow!”

Who knew that I would eventually have a voice in the uprising of the spiritual proletariat?

I am illustrating a children’s book, one of my favorite things things to do. It is a very simple story about a boy who likes to play in the mud. The story is written in Spanish which of course I can’t read, but a translation was provided. I gotta say that drawing all that dripping slurpee mud brings out the boy in me. I wonder what the Spanish word for ewwwww is?

I am also currently working on a website e-commerce site and a set of corporate presentation kits for Intermax, and a POP display for the local library, a logo for a Zen Buddhist fellowship, and of course I have grading falling out my ears that needs to be finished.

My MMORPG has taken a back seat to my real life. I hate when that happens!

A new project commissioned by Stuart Advertising in Spokane, Washington features a pharmacist with a pill bottle in one hand and a gas-pump handle in the other. This was a fun gig (started Monday, finished Wednesday.) It was fun, first, because I was allowed to do the illustration and layout — which is always cool — but also because they sent me the ad copy and said “do whatever, be creative!”

So with an emphasis on simplicity, and directness I came up with the female pharmacist pump-jockey. You really can’t see it here but the background pattern is a series of pill bottles. Used on a variety of display cards and sizes From 11 x 17 to 4.5 x 7 and a 2″ x 6″ banner. Gotta love vector versatility!

Because we wanted to skew this cartoon more towards real than towards wacky, I used a piece of scrap from istockphoto. I made her younger and changed her hair. Of course there is not a lot of pictures of pharmacists with gas pump handles in their hand, so I scrubbed for a piece of scrap for that as well. I then reversed it (and altered the sketch for a left hand grip). Filled in the blanks, mapped the logo onto the bottle and name tag using Illustrator’s envelope tool and voila; Pharmacy gas gal.

I’ve been working on this for the last few weeks and I just came from the meeting where I presented my ideas. They loved the logo and the site I put together for them. It is always good to walk out of a meeting with positive feedback. Normally I charge $2,000 for a logo, logotype, ID kit. For web pages, depending on the type of site I normally get between $2,500 and $3,000. This was a special situation so I deferred my normal fees (I did not bother to tell them how much I charge.) and sunk myself into the joy of the work. This probably sounds a bit silly, but there is a lot to be said for doing the “work” out of a sense of fun and love and feeling empowered by the ability to call your own shots because of it. I certainly would have made as many changes and alterations as might have been necessary, but they loved what I came up with, no changes, and this by itself is very satisfying.

Here is the link to the site : Bitterroot Mountain, LLC.

Students sometimes fret over the complexity of PhotoShop and how overwhelming the breadth and depth of the program can be. Certainly it is the “Queen Mary” of applications. But the power of the program does not overshadow how useful it can be for very small, in-and-out jobs. In this sense, The Queen Mary becomes a sporty little power boat. For example, I have a client for whom I am building a corporate blog. I use WordPress for blogs 99% of the time because of the widget, plugin, and theme support from a very active open source community. This means I can block out a site quickly using a theme and then leverage PhotoShop and CSSedit to change graphics and styles to match whatever look and feel I am going for.

This particular header piece uses pictures from iStockphoto and combines them into a composite with very little done to them other than some simple masking, and basic changes in layer properties. In and out in 30 minutes, and that includes the time spent looking for photos. I love this program!

Work, work, work. I am currently working on:

• A wholesale/retail website for Cock-a-doodle kids. (finishing up some product shots and data entry. I hope to have both ends “live” by next week. I am using Zen cart for the retail side.
• Final grading for NIC Spring semester. (Finals on Thursday.)
• Customized Forum (vbulletin) Look and feel changes for Center for Excellence
• Changes to the Northwest Territorial Mint medallion sculpt for the Federal Reserve.
• Braided Accents catalog changes.

I am currenty having some fun with:

• Setting up a new sketchbook blog (Gullible’s travels) as a focused outlet for various pictures and writings. I am using a self-hosted WordPress blog this time around. (.org not .com). I am almost done tweaking the CSS for the template and setting up the general look and feel.
• Building in Second Life (although the lag has been sooo bad there lately that it isn’t much fun.
• Research (pointless web surfing)

This is going to sound silly, but it wouldn’t be the first time. I needed to create a digital mosaic from a piece of Illustrator art. Not one of those high tech picture mosaic, where a person’s portrait is rendered with a thousand little pictures. I am talking about the old school little chips of tile, cut and clipped and assembled piece by piece to create an image or design. Of course I have neither the time nor inclination to do one by hand and the nature of the job I am working dictated a digital solution.

PhotoShop has a mosaic filter which is more of a name than a tool. It will apply a mosaic-like texture over a photograph and I am sure (like most of the filters) it is a great place to start to develop random fields of texture from which to build or apply masks. But as a stand alone solution it sucks. Not very mosaic like. Alien Skin Software makes a plug-in for PhotoShop that has a mosaic effect, but it falls short as well. While definitely more mosaic like, it nver the less looks “canned” and delivers a buggy, gap filled, inconsistent mosaic patten.

AutoFX also has a plug-in and a stand alone product which really doesn’t do much more than PhotoShop’s basic mosaic filter (plus or minus a few bells and whistles.)

After studying a few mosaics I stumbled across a solution that is perfect. I am not sure why I didn’t go here before but I never really thought of it. It is a tool I use a lot — but over the course of years have never uncovered this gem hidden in a menu that I obviously glaze over in search of other things.

Corel Painter has a Mosaic tool, that is not strictly a filter but uses your pen to fill in or “paint” tiles. This can be done freehand, (like the real deal only faster and digital), or you can use a cloned color source and paint over top. What really makes this outstanding is the natural way you control the pattern of tiles. Because it works like a pen, you can control the direction, the overlap, the natural gapping, the color, everything! You can override a portion or a single tile. You control the grout color and width and it works as fast as you can draw a line.

After drawing my test mosaic, I dumpped it into photshop, attached a layer effect to give the tiles some dimention, and exported it out to my program 3D texture program. Very cool.

My client does some video production for SUNY schools in New York. He uses a web app from time time to time to create DVD case sleeves and disc art. (The application is actually a service offered by the company that “prints” the low run disc duplication and packaging products.) The web app is mostly a hobbled together, upload picture, stick it “here” and type over the top using our built-in web based text editor. While the system works, it is short on creativity and heavy on jumping through hoops.

He asked me to create something special for his lasted production and I dumped this together in Photoshop. The background is a combination of stock vector art that I modified a little in Illustrator and moved it over to PS for final text and image layout.

I am working on a web site for a client who also needs a logo. The logo was not part of the original bid, but rather than build a site around a brand that sucks eggs I took it upon myself (read FREE) to put together a simple branding solution. Since it was a freebie I did something that I don’t normally do, that is start with some clip art. As an illustrator I find it very difficult to use somebody else’s work as a solution to my own. Even if this means saving money. But this time around I did not have the time so I jumped to istockphoto and found a piece of illustrator art that I could use as a jumping off point and then fill in the blanks. Over all it worked great. The client loves it, and now I am free to move into the work I am actually being paid to do.