Neko - An Experiment

I tend to rely on the pen tool a lot for my graphics, because I'm comfortable with it and tend to excel with it.  With that in mind, I once had an instructor at VFS that made her characters (which were actually very cute and ...kinda awesome!) by using only shapes and pathfinder in Illustrator.  With that in mind, I thought I'd give it a shot!  I'm not sure what it is, but it was made, VERY carefully, using only shapes and pathfinder, and a sketch I had as a guide.  The hardest parts were the whiskers and ears, though, because of all the dips and curves.  So, for the most part, Mission Accomplished.  Next step is to try making one with a faint gradient for depth.  We'll see.

Snowflakes

I do love making snowflakes.  I remember cutting them out when I was a kid, but never quite getting them to look nice (usually I ended up cutting the side that held it together! Ooops), so maybe this is my revenge for all the misshapen paper snowflakes of my childhood!  Seriously, though, I wanted to show how taking the Illustrator creation of the snowflake and applying it in Photoshop could create a snow storm, so to speak.  You take one, resize and move it repeatedly until you fill the screen.  You can then take those, merge them, and rotate/resize those as well.  You take the other layers of snowflakes, however, and lower the opacity so it gives it depth, also erasing any overlapping ones that look wrong.  Finally, you take the layers, merge them into a flat layer, and duplicate it.  Take the bottom one of the two and apply a motion blur and play with the settings until you get your desired appearance.  Don't forget to change the degrees!  Anyway, I liked how it came out and thought I'd make it into a board where you can see the individual snowflake and how it can be made into a snow fall.  Mind you, the outlines come of before you make the snow.

Demon Wolf

This isn't terribly unusual for me.  I will sit idly and just play with Illustrator like a drawing pad.  This is just made using the pen tool.  There was no guide like a sketch or photo or anything to influence it, just my weird imagination at work.  Purely Illustrator's pen tool with a gradient background.

Winter

A friend of mine likes trees and winter, and I was just playing around recently trying to make trees with Illustrator (which, for me, is harder than I thought it would be!).  My biggest obstacle was that I always wanted to make them so symmetrical, or the branches didn't have enough twigs sprouting from it.  Finally, though, I made one that I liked, referencing a dead tree, though only slightly, since it now looks nothing like the photo I was looking at, simply because trying to make all the small little offshoots starts to make it look even more fake!  Less is more sometimes.  I had thought of making a cemetery scene, all spooky, but with the snow fall, I decided to make it winter (especially since that's what she was talking about in the first place!).  Besides, I love making snowflakes!  So I did the outlines in Illustrator, as well as the snowflakes and moon, and the coloring on the vertical rectangle and tree were put in using Photoshop (since I didn't originally connect the lines, making it appear more like I had inked it with a paintbrush).  A note, as well, on the lines, is that I love using India ink and those Japanese paintbrushes.  I originally played around with them in my first year of college, where I outlined these sort of abstract collages, and the neat part is it depends on how you hold the brush to determine the thickness of the lines.  I thought thick lines on the tree made it look painted, with that same method.  Anyway, it's sort of a bookmark.  I think it was successful, personally.

Toyota Concept Car

Toyota had a great concept car that could be camouflaged.  No kidding.  On the side, there was artwork animating across it.  The applications for this for personalization for owners and advertising for companies is limitless!

The composition is made using a photograph I took at the auto show, and outlining it in Illustrator due to the more accurate pen tool.  After I outline the parts I want to copy, I take the outline to the photograph in Photoshop and copy/paste that section of the photo, getting rid of all the excess.  The edges are blurred slightly in order to blend it to a black background, and the Toyota symbol is applied instead of words.  Simplicity.  The aurora in the background is done using strategically placed colors caught from the tiny logo on the car and the lights, then a motion blur applied at a lower strength.  Finally, a gradient mask is applied to it to blend it into the picture.

Falcon Motorsports = Amazing

Falcon Motorsports had one entry for the Auto Show, and that's really all they needed, because this one was absolutely impressive.  With a price tag of $125k, it was worth the fifteen pictures I sat there and took to get some nice, useable pictures.

The composition is made using a photograph I took at the auto show, though one of many, and outlining it in Illustrator due to the more accurate pen tool.  After I outline the parts I want to copy, I take the outline to the photograph in Photoshop and copy/paste that section of the photo, getting rid of all the excess.  The colored background was made with crosshatched lines blended with colors in several layers using blending modes.  The text was made in Photoshop, a blended tri-color gradient over it, and a copy of the text was applied behind it with a strong motion blur in order to create the movement on each letter.  The windshield has reflections of light as well as the reflections of the background's colors using many layers of blending modes and masks.

Lexus Concept Car

The Lexus area at the Auto Show had a great couple of cars showing off this year.  One was the LF-LC Hybrid.  It's a concept car that is made from a single block instead of being pieced together.  Strange right?

Anyway, this was made using two different pictures I took. The composition is made by outlining them in Illustrator due to the more accurate pen tool.  After I outline the parts I want to copy, I take the outline to the photographs in Photoshop and copy/paste that sections of the photo, getting rid of all the excess.  After that, a mask is applied to each layer and blending is accomplished using this noninvasive method, ensuring if a mistake is made it can be undone.  From there, the text is made in Photoshop and a gradient is applied.  The colors for the text are selected using the eyedropper tool and picking them from the car itself.

What Does The Future Hold?

At the 2012 Detroit Auto Show, the auto companies bring out some pretty crazy concepts.  The EN-V is a people-mover like the Segway, but in a shell and room enough for two people.  Add a couple rockets, and it would look like something from The Jetsons!

The composition is made using a photograph I took at the auto show, and outlining it in Illustrator due to the more accurate pen tool.  After I outline the parts I want to copy, I take the outline to the photograph in Photoshop and copy/paste that section of the photo, getting rid of all the excess.  The colors in the text, done in Photoshop, were picked out of the EN-V by the eyedropper to make it accurate.  The reflection in the windshield is burned to darken it, as well as desaturated to get rid of pesky red reflections that were on it.  The figures in the reflection were carefully smudged to be unrecognizable.  It seems really weird, but kind of neat!

Decorative Cross

This is something that started, as an idea, back when my mother was trying to put a poem on a picture she'd found in memory of my grandmother that recently passed.  It had this terribly pixelated cross on it, but it was in pink.  My grandmother's favorite color was pink.  As such, I decided to take my little decorative lines I like to do and make a cross out of it, perhaps in her memory, in my own way.  I started, of course, in Illustrator with many, many lines and many, many duplicate rotation actions.  All in all, I think it turned out well.  After that, I took it to Photoshop, where I made two layers of the cross, the center lightly taken out of one, and the other far more taken out (using masks).  This gave me a great way to make the center seem more bright than it did before.  With a light fading mask on the center of the top cross, the bottom one, when made bright pink in Hue/Saturation, seems to be on the verge of bursting with light in the center and toning down into the darker pink/purplish colors.

Tribal Horse

I wasn't quite sure what to call this, but I was originally making a horse logo, and decided to play a bit with it.  I manually gave it a shadow that was long, sort of like those movies where the tall, menacing shadow gets smaller as the cute, innocent creature gets closer.  Anyway, it started in Illustrator and was taken to Photoshop to do the gradient and shadow.  I like the simplicity of pictures like this, but it's definitely not something I can often do successfully.  There's a first time for everything!  Practice makes perfect, though.

Das Boot!

Modelling has never been my strong suit, as I have self-taught Photoshop and Illustrator for 13 years, give or take, so being that 3D Modelling is new to me, generally speaking, I wanted to explore it.  Here's what I came up with.  I modeled it in 3DS Max, of course, and took it to Photoshop.  The designs are done in Illustrator.  I added in the loops on the side as though the wearer would put leather straps through them to attach the plate to the boot itself.  Later, I may add to this one.

An Experiment with Photo Editing

I love photography, as is probably obvious from my blog, but I always see these photos from professional studios that turn out so well, while my photos always end up looking a bit off, despite the good camera.  So, I decided to take a picture of me and my very red eye prone dog and see how much I could fix it.  I was very happy with how it turned out, actually!  By taking it to Photoshop and playing with levels (which I rarely use, to be honest!), blur, and a variety of other tools to create this appearance.  All in all, I think it looks a hundred times better!

What is the World Made of?

So I saw something flash on someone's computer while they were surfing the web, and there was something completely different, but for some reason, I thought it looked like a sphere with a wedge out of it.  It started from there.  It was done completely in Photoshop, which is unusual for me, but I originally drew it as a sphere with a wedge out of it and a darker orange from the orange sphere in the center.  From there, a suggestion was made about what if it was a world, so I did...and it looked like the Earth was a Cantaloupe.  The core, though, looked more...Avacado.  It only made sense to change the color.  From that, I created these:

Cowboy Snowman

I was so upset with the lack of snow this season that when a small amount of snow fell, I jumped on it to make a snowman...all of 6" high.  So proud of what I'd accomplished...being that it took all the snow on the patio to achieve it, I raided the art supplies and made a scene out of my snowman.  With a lack of tiny top hats, I had to settle for a cowboy hat instead.  I found other things for a scene and some pieces of fence.  Put them all together, lay down on a freezing cold ground, and add a Canon Rebel XTi, and you have a falsely tall snowman!  It's all about perspective.  Color touch up is in Photoshop, as is the framing and text.

Symmetry

This is a moment of boredom in Illustrator that turned out well!  It's a lot of duplication and symmetry.  It's completely done in Illustrator with the pen tool and on an older version, the swatches.  There's also a little subtle shadow, too.

Cute Phoenix

No, it's not a Pokemon.  I was just playing in Illustrator, drawing with the pen tool.  I then took it into Photoshop and colored it.  It's a simple creature, most like a Phoenix.  I may play more with it later, but for now, it's just a cute little doodle.

Sparks

When my friend said he was going to cut a car's spring (Or is it a shock? I don't know, I'm not a car person) I just had to be there to see it, camera in hand.  When the sparks started to fly, literally, I was thrilled.  It turned out so well.  The art of it was all practical.  Framing is done without cropping, completely original, and the focus was manual in order to focus on the sparks and blur out the closer objects. 

Thunderbirds

The Thunderbirds are like the Blue Angels for the Air Force (Blue Angels being Navy).  When they were flying, I had to take pictures, and I did take plenty, but this one in particular was framed so well, I didn't have to do much on Photoshop after I got home, other than a bit of saturation work.  The symmetry of their aerial movements are so perfect for photography, it is easy to see why so many people love to go watch them show off their skills.

Pearl Harbor

At an airshow, they reenacted the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  I loved the photos I took so much, I took them into Photoshop to age them a bit.  I loved the color of the lower plane, though, so much that I faded it instead of desaturating it to create a neat appearance to the photo overall.  The technique is simple, but creates a look that makes it look like a photograph taken decades ago.