Logo for My Mom's Art

So my mom does a lot of crafts and hand-jam type of art.  She's the one that inspired me to start with art when I was a kid, so I thought I'd give a logo for her a shot.  She wanted it to incorporate the things she does, which are photography and sewing (In fact she just taught me to use a sewing machine!  I don't have to break my fingers hand sewing anymore!).  I had to do all the elements separately, which was a bit of a pain.  The G flows into the thread of the spool that goes through the needle that sits in front of the D.  The Made with Love patch is like a tag I saw at JoAnn Fabrics that goes into clothes that are hand made.  My mom, also, is a phenomenal photographer.  She's better than a lot of the wedding photographers I've seen at weddings :)  Anyway, I thought for a starting point, these turned out fantastic!  Enjoy.

Needle and Thread

The logo for my mom's artwork had to reflect her art, which is mostly crafts, so the most important element had to be a needle and thread.  The spool of thread was the most difficult part, by far!  Anyway, it's purely from Illustrator.  The presentation of the frame and gradient were done in Photoshop, though.  I was VERY happy with how this one turned out.  In the logo, however, the thread looks like it's going through the actual needle. 

Made with Love Tag

This was a test of whether I could do pulled material on Photoshop using just paintbrush, smudge, burn, and dodge.  I think it came out alright, but not completely sure.  It's something I'm new to, but it's a good attempt!  I'll have to keep trying.  The tag itself was made in Illustrator, another element I used in the logo.  It is meant to look like a tag you sew into hand made clothes.  The canvas look was done in Photoshop. The rest of the logo was done in Illustrator.

Vector Camera

I had to make many elements for a logo I was planning, and they took so much time to figure out in themselves that they ended up being designs in themselves.  This is the camera, as you can see.  It's made in Illustrator, using shapes, mostly, and pathfinder.  The only time I used the pen tool was to make the uneven black on the main part of the camera.  It was finished with a couple faint gradients, then took it to Photoshop to make a shadow and light from the top left just to present it.  In the logo, it won't have the shadow or lighting.

Broken Down Butterfly Chair: Time to Remodel

It's not enough for me to just have a ratty old chair.  No, I have to do something with it.  Whenever something is plain, even if I love it at first, I'll eventually do something to revive it.  I've had this chair for YEARS!  I believe it was a birthday or Christmas gift at one time, but over the years the black canvas type fabric has dulled, and eventually ripped on one of the sides.  Something I learned from my mom is when something like a chair looks broken or ready to throw away, it just means the fun starts.  Time to remodel it.  This fabric was left over from the two bolts I bought to make curtains to hide my storage room.  I have this crazy fascination with pink camouflage.  Not to mention, I love fluffy malibu style feathers!  Ten years ago, if you told me I'd be making a bright pink chair and loving it, I'd have thought you were nuts, but anyway, I loved this snuggle flannel (yes that's really what it's called) fabric, so soft, but not too fluffy that it doesn't breathe like the anti-pill fleece, for example.  I started with only the intention of covering it with the fabric, but as I started pinning the fabric in the odd, curved seat hanging on the metal frame, I realized something was missing.  When I went to JoAnn's after class to perhaps try and figure out what was missing, I'd practically given up, but when I went to check the areas with the boas and feathers, as I always do (as if I don't have enough feathers for my crafting) I found this pink malibu type boa.  What's more, it was buy one get one half off!  Lucky days :)  So I was in luck.  They had four left.  Since I had no idea how it was going to work yet, I grabbed all four and went home, starting to pin it on, completely having to re-pin the edges of the material, though, and cut them to be more appealing.  It was all coming together.  Perhaps super-girlie, but hey, not like that is a first with me!  This project was probably the most painful of the week.  As I hand sew everything, in the two days it took to finish this (when I start, it's hard to stop!) I must have cut my hands on every push pin in the thing!  Finally, after it was done and my clothes were covered in pink strands of fluffy feathers from sewing them together, I had a brand new chair! Not only did it revive it, but I was able to fix the torn side that made it impossible to sit in!  This was, honestly, extremely fun.  I consider all the knicks on my hands signs of hard work and totally worth it. 
The compilation was created in Adobe Photoshop, by the way.  The photos taken with the black material background were cropped, sized, and placed into a new document where the pink boarder was created by using a canvas size for the larger pink, a 20 pixel black boarder around the outside, and two smaller frames cut from a rectangle carefully.  The text was created in two layers on a pink rectangle.  The top layer of text is black with a speckled brush set to a low opacity and strategically set to erase much of the text, leaving only a speckled, faded, faint layer of the words.  Below it is a layer that was not edited much, other than a faint gaussian blur to make the edges less harsh.  All in all, I think the project as a whole was successful (Even if Princess wouldn't get out of the chair for half the photos!  I guess she approves of it, too!).  The most difficult part, though, was admittedly the corners.  They were tricky, especially with two lines of the trim, but as the picture shows, I think they worked out well.

A Safer Collar: Paracord

I started making survival bracelets shortly after getting out of the Army, where they're extremely popular.  The idea behind survival bracelets is that they are made from 550 cord, commonly known as paracord.  The Army calls it 550 cord because it can hold up to 550 lbs, which gives you a fair idea of how versatile and valuable this simple cord is!  Survival bracelets are a way to wear this necessary resource in a small, easy to contain, easy to reach manner.  If you're in danger or an emergency, you unknot the cord, which is surprisingly easy.  The knot is a fairly simple knot, and perfect for someone as OCD as I am.  This fascination began when I looked on a popular survival bracelet site, where a lot of my platoon sergeants had ordered theirs.  They guarantee that if you ever use it, you can send in your story and they'll either reweave it, or replace it!  They had ones with dog tags on it, which I thought would be great since I can't seem to part with my dog tags for very long yet, but they wanted so much!  What's more, I was looking at ones they'd made into collars, and the price was twice, maybe three times as much as the bracelets!  Well I thought that was just ridiculous, and I sure wasn't paying tons of money for a collar someone else made when I was good at figuring things out for myself.  I'm stubborn that way.  So I went on youtube, the holy grail for all those that like to self-teach, and found out that the knot is called a cobra knot, or cobra stitch as I sometimes incorrectly call it.  That's fantastic! I was ready to go, but the guy in the video wasn't done.  What could the other half of the video be, exactly?  It was something called a KING cobra knot, which was basically going over it again with the knot a second time.  I thought to myself, well that looks even better!  So I took one of the cheaply made copies I'd bought at a store called Five Below, that had fallen apart in probably about a week, and took it all the way apart.  Wow, easier than I thought.  I then started practicing.  In the meantime, I went onto ebay (of course) after exhausting my search for PINK paracord at every place I could think of, including the ANG base, and coming up with only black, grey, and brown.  Ebay, however, was a gold mine.  Cheap prices and more colors than I could choose from.  When they came in, I made probably three bracelets before my fingers were sore and starting to make blisters, so I'd obviously found something I liked.  As I looked at them, though, then to my dog's old, worn, but still cute collar, I could feel the lightbulb pop on in my head.  Click.  Why would I pay all that money, when I could make my own?  Wasn't that the question that started me searching in the first place?  So, with the hot pink I'd bought tons of, I made my first collar, but firstly, the single knot wasn't big enough, to me, so I tried the King Cobra knot.  Well, there were several things wrong with the first collar I made, though most weren't noticeable except to me.  There was too small of a clasp on it, that didn't stay together if she were to yank on the leash.  Granted, it's good that it can release if she tugs hard on it, in case she's in danger or stuck, but not so good if it comes apart with a little soft tug!  Second, I did each layer of knots separate.  The ends have to be burned, so that means there were four pieces of the 550 cord, which is a complete waste!  There were a few other minor, OCD things that I wanted to correct, but the two previously mentioned were definitely the main problems.  So, I wanted to remake it.  I made it out of one solid set of cords, two colors burned at the ends and stuck together, and then fixed the minor problem of a crooked D ring (which by the way is the hardest part about making the collar, getting the D ring into the knotted weave), finally adding a nice latch instead of the cheap one made for the single knot bracelets.  I'm much happier with this one, and plan on doing a larger one for the other dog (which is what the white cord has been started for pictured in the center).  I've received several compliments already on it, especially now that it doesn't have a bad latch!  Princess decided she wanted to model it instead of just laying it on the black background.  The idea of making a collar out of this is for two reasons.  One, it just looks great, and is fun to make, but secondly, Princess goes hiking with me, so if I'm in danger or in an emergency situation, her collar can act as a backup for any paracord I may have, or possibly had forgotten at home.  It ensures I'll always have that lifeline (literally) there for whatever happens.  These are fantastic for the outdoors, active type of dogs, and they're unique!

Druid Staff: Fixing Mother Nature's Blunder Part TWO

Since Mother Nature couldn't stop at ruining my boots of my costume, the staff took a beating as well.  Everything on the staff, which I have actually been working on here and there over the last TEN years (taking it apart, remaking it, etc), had to be redone.  The bags were additions I added for this, and the tail is the first I'd purchased two years ago when I went with my mom on a visit during a holiday while I was in the Army.  The bags are hand sewn (which as I've already said, isn't possible for me without covering my hands in little cuts from push pins!) and made of natural rabbit pelts, using the uneven edges to make a wild, primitive look.  The one thing that's not primitive on them? The intense magnets I used to keep them closed.  They are laced with a thick leather cord and tightly attached to the mid section of the staff itself.  From there, the feathers (more to be added later, actually) are added, and finally enough slack is kept in the cord to be able to slip the tail's leather ring through and snap it on.  About one foot below the bags is a ring of either bear fur (I forget) I had left in the scraps (I still have a LOT, actually).  Finally, a tuft from a raccoon tail is added in a bare spot around the mid section between the tail and one of the two bags by sewing through the pelt section and tying it onto the cord itself.  There is a lot more I want to add to the staff, but this is a start.  The bags are fun to make, and rabbit pelts are very easy to sew through, though sometimes too easy, causing them to rip if you're not careful!  Maybe later, after a lot of other things are completed, I'll have a chance to really get into adding all the crazy stuff I want to to the staff.  I have tons of feathers and a couple bear claws my uncle gave me that I'd like to add to it as well, so, as it will always be, it's a work in progress.  Something like this ends up evolving as I change.  Installment two in the Mother Nature Remake!

Druid Boots: Fixing Mother Nature's Blunder

My druid costume has taken a lot of work, burns, cuts, and blisters to make, but during the renaissance festival last fall, my boots I'd made took a good beating.  They were full of mud and pieces had torn off because of that.  This week, being a more hands-on art week, I decided to fix them.  These were originally a pair of leather hand made sandals, but my dear dog got ahold of them and had her way one day when she was upset with me.  Great!  So there was nothing for me to wear on my feet other than a pair of running shoes.  That wasn't going to work, obviously, so I took the scraps I had from when I made the cloak, and pieced together this.  I made the skeleton of it out of a leather-esque material and leather scraps.  The pieces were then both stitched as well as hot glued (gives it a bit more of a secure fit), but even all that wasn't a match for Mother Nature.  So I had to pull the pieces off and match scraps to the boot.  There are three straps that go around and then the shoe part, all lacing up with a leather cord.  I added a charm on the bottom that is a sort of shield with chains hanging, giving it a more tribal appearance.  In the winter, there are black warm socks that go under the boots, hidden for the most part except at the toes, as there are openings there.  The idea was inspired, actually, by muck-lucks you see on the Inuit in like Canada and Alaska.  Their art was pretty plentiful in Vancouver, BC.  I think the mix of colors in this version is very effective.  I have another pair of boots I want to attempt something like this with, but thicker and more winter-friendly!  Anyway, the furs are fox, beaver, bear, rabbit, and skunk, recycled from scraps that would otherwise be thrown away. Just the first of many remake projects this week. Busy, busy!  (...And I have the cuts on my hands to prove it!  It looks like a feral cat got ahold of me!)

Eye of the Beholder

I'm actually completely unsure what spawned me to make this, but I guess I wondered if I could make an eyeball from scratch.  It's not in 3DS Max, only Photoshop and Illustrator.  I used blending modes to help mix the layers, filters to create the sphere look of the knife in the eye, smudging to make the burst in the iris, a low opacity paintbrush to do the veins, and finally the most difficult part was the lighting glare that mimics the clear part overlaying the eyeball  (not the two white dots but the sheen from the left).  The knife has blood on it, which are actually from a paintbrush, and a spherize filter to make it bubble like it's on a curve reflection.  Anyway, this is my first attempt at an eye, but I think it was fairly successful.

Cousin's Logo Part 2

I was working on my cousin's logo, and I started thinking of more ideas!  I took the butterfly and duplicated/rotated it.  I took the two capital letters and faded them in the back after layering them in illustrator.  The name was realigned to fit better, as well.  I like the look of a square as opposed to the rectangle.  It seems clean and brighter than the other one.

Cousin's Logo Part 1

My cousin is a brilliant artist (it runs in the blood, you know?), and between crafts and photography, she has a lot going for her (Not to mention those three adorable kids!), but she has no logo!  Though I can't seem to find the paper with her company names, I started playing around anyway.  I started with this with the letter K.  I took it in Blackadder and, since I didn't like how messy it looked but really liked the curled ends and top, used the pen tool to outline it and make it more crisp.  I used the handles to clean it up more, and finally repeated it with the L.  I then took four of the K's and created the butterfly background.  I took the pieces and pasted them in Photoshop to do the colors.  There are actually two layers to the letters, making it blend with the butterfly, though subtly.  Finally, there's a gradient with color on the butterfly.

Eagle Logo (Plus a bit of Color)

So I was playing on Illustrator (What's new?) and came up with this.  It was originally just black and white, but the eye seemed so ...lacking.  So I took it from Illustrator's Pen tool to Photoshop and the brilliance of color.  Through paintbrush, smudge, and layer blending, the eye color came through.  I thought about doing the rest of it, but sometimes simple is better.  All the attempts seemed insufficient.  All in all, I think it gives it dimension with the color.