This is an assignment overview for my digital Illustration class. We emphasize the use of multiple applications as tools to achieve singular results. This assignment is a lead-in for our next assignment; creating
gaming textures!

Somebody asked (emailed) me what do I do to keep myself in business? In this market, it is is tough. You are linked with your pool of clients and their failures are you failures to a certain degree. When a client goes under I feel it. I am a small shop, I can’t not feel it. However, there are five things that I try and keep consistent that I believe contribute to the over all health of my business. (This applies to my illustration as well as advertising clients.)

Be service oriented: Treat yourself like a plumber with a pen. People come to you to get a service performed; to fix their visual communication pipes. They come to you because you are the expert. If they could have done the job themselves, they would have. Treat your clients with respect, listen to their ideas, and foster an attitude of service. It will win the client’s loyalty and keeps them coming back.

Be approachable: An air of superior aloofness may foster an image of artistic aptitude, but being a friendly, approachable, down to earth person of character is something that you can take to the bank. Unfortunately, art programs often don’t teach this positive skill set. A lot of artistic types are loners, and not apt at being overly sociable. This may cause an outward appearance of aloofness, when you are in reality standing behind a protective wall. As much as I sympathize with this, it is bad business. Do your best to be open and approachable. Your clients will find it refreshing and frankly it is a lot more fun to be around.

Be deadline focused: An acceptable job done “on time” is worth more than a stellar job handed in late. This is a carry-over from my work in publishing and illustration but it applies to advertising too. More often than not you are not the only person in a workflow. Copywriters, editors, printers, designers, illustrators, photographers, publishers, distributors, are all in the boat with you. A small delay on your part can equal thousands of dollars in overruns for your client and cause problems for the others who are depending on you to do your part professionally. This is no excuse to do mediocre work. Do the absolute best you possibly can, within the established deadline.

Be flexible: Stuff changes. Clients ideas evolve. Better ideas sometime take a while to incubate. For whatever reason, the work that you do and the reputation that you secure will hinge greatly on your ability to adapt to what the client wants today not what the brief outlined two weeks ago.

Be grateful: I worked for a number of years as an in-house artist and art director. I also worked day-labor for a few years before that. Sitting on my backside while I attempt creative greatness is the best job ever. Doing it for myself, on my own time on under my one direction and schedule is about as good as it gets. I have know some great art directors and creative directors at some high powered agencies and companies. Without fail, all of them have said that despite the downsides of begin self employed (there a a few) nothing beats owning a small to mid-sized shop under your control picking and choosing the work you want to do.

So … My Mondays and Wednesdays are nutty crazy as this last emergency fill-in sub situation for North Idaho College has a stranglehold on my life. You wouldn’t think it would be so hard, But 2.5 hours teaching in the morning (7:30 – 10:00) then coming home for studio work, then teaching again in the afternoon (3:00–4:50) then coming home to wrap up studio work and set up the next days work is killing me. The loss of creative momentum is staggering and to be honest the politics of academia would make disgruntled postel workers shudder in fear. If it weren’t for the students, and what they give back in energy and shear joy for the work It would not be worth it al all. (It’s certainly not the money … I mean … really? This is what professional teachers get paid?) If I have not said it before … I am grateful for my studio work.

Speaking of which, I have been very busy working on a host of divergent projects including an ecom website for one of my regular clients, a large 6′ x 4′ standee (Standing advertising display), a logo and brochure, a couple of newspaper ads and some misc promotional items for a local broadband internet company.

All of this put together means I am a very busy man. Not as busy as I would like, and not productive busy, (I spend a lot of time comuting from my home studio to campus and back again, and grading, and reviewing lesson plans, and trying to get into a creative groove and then leave and then getting back into it again.

This means that my webcomic is falling behind, and my game play is down considerably, and of course updating this site has taken a back seat to real life and trying ot get a grip on the whole, only 24 hours in a day thing. Fortunately we are past midterms and I have high hopes of organizing all of this into a profitable and well managed machine … uhm … real soon.

Circumstances aligned themselves and I was asked this past Friday to cover a section of computer graphics, teaching an introduction to Photoshop and InDesign. (Classes started Monday) Although I have used Photoshop for 20 years this is VERY challenging for me. It is one thing to stumble around the program in my own expertly acceptable but inept way and quite another to pass this off as a preferred method of emulation. So, I am cramming, training myself to do things the Zen-like Adobe way.

After three days of this, my wife has given me this advice: Relax.

Of course, she is right. It not like I don’t already know this stuff. Teaching lessons from the heart is always better than teaching numbers from a book. RELAX DUDE!

Whew …

OH! Some Photoshop Shortcuts:

photoshop_cs3_shortcuts

And a fun link: Photoshop ad busting

It’s time to catch up with some old posts. We start with a class project run amok. One of my Students (Meagan!) took my challenge to heart and turned her high contrast portrait assignment into a pumkin carving. I always try to point out real world applications for all of my assignments. The real world application for high contrast art is almost endless. I use it all the time in logo creation as well as masks in Photoshop. However, farther down on the list is pumkin carving. Most great pumkin designs start as a high contrast conversion from a picture that is a lot more complex. Being able to look at this picture, decide what to drop, what to simplify and what to keep while still maintianing a recognizable image is quite the trick. Putting it onto a pumkin is even trickeir! Thanks Meagan for a job well done!

I know it seems like I have dropped of the end of the earth, but the reality is I am completely overwhelmed with  work. It is times like these that make me want to hire more people, but I know that in two months things will be back to normal. So I plow ahead. My to-do list is 28 entries long and extends into September.

I have a sculpt due tomorrow morning, and a web redesign, and of course School starts Monday! I have a logo project that is waiting in the wings, they are getting impatient and two illustration projects that will not die.

My webcomic “Artiste Gullible” is sorely neglected and I feel bad about that worst of all.

ARGH!!!!!! I can do this , I can do this, I can do this …

Getting back to work now.

As soon as it slipped from my teeth, it got busy again. One of the things (OK, the FUN one) that I have been working on is a new project in for a client who wants a new fresh direction for a direct marketing campaign. The concept I am pitching is “YES YOU CAN.” It is a benefit driven message that moves the existing message from “Here’s what we offer you.” (Which may or may not mean anything to the customer) to “Here’s what you can do!”

The client is a broadband service provider that uses microwave relays instead of cable/DSL/satellite connections. In rural areas, or city areas on the back side of a DSL trunk, or with areas with a ton of shared connections over the cable, broadband speed is a real issue. Most of these people feel there is no options and suffer with dial-up or very slow satellite connections.

The illustrative element switches out to reflect the multiple popular uses of the internet. There will be six to eight of these. Some of these will be used singularly on postcards and some will be grouped together on mini-posters all with the tag line “Yes You Can.”

I sketched them in Sketchbook pro, and inked and colored them in Illustrator using a pressure sensitive brush.

I pitched it last night. we will see where it goes.

Today was the last day of class, and like most of my “last days” it was a deadline day. The students hand in their work (or use the last class time to finish up and mat projects) and then go home. Not much for me to do but oversee the class, review sketchbooks, and draw in my own sketchbook a bit. The picture here is the result of my doodles. Oddly enough, the reference shot is a picture from my “Owned” file. This girl has an unusual beauty that inspired me to jump off the deep end and do some steampunk daydreaming. Like most of my jump off points it is not meant to be a portrait, but still … something about her smirky smile that just wants to be empowered as a take-care-of-business heroine.

A note to self: Because I sort of just jumped in without thinking about it, I drew this as a low res file. By the time I realized what I was doing, I was too far in. so this is a web only shot sorry to say. I need to pay more attention to file sizes in my digital drawings.

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.

Yeah! First day of class. Our first assignment is an exploration of Storyboards and visualizing in 3D. Most of this semester is an exercise in breaking the visual plane and turning ourselves from passive viewers in front of a flat glass box into creative professionals who can insert and rotate themselves in imaginary worlds to find the “best” shot. This applies to art directing a product photo shoot, to conceptualizing a magazine layout, to producing a commercial or conceptualizing a film.

A couple of templates we will be using in class:

tv-strybrd2.pdf
tv-strybrd-6x.pdf

The joke sheet:  jokes.doc

and a weblink for discussion purposes:

Josh Sheppard