Intention

In this post, I decided to go with the intention to kill as my theme.
I started off thinking of a way to give it a cool angle. So I decided on making it so the camera is on the main characters legs. I started off with just the outline.

After I made the outline, I started colouring the character, and added some shadows to it.

After the shadow, I added a background to the canvas with a gradient to it. I choose purple because it will complement and give red colour some pop. 

I also added bevel and emboss effect to the character. Instead of having the default black and white, I changed the colour to yellow and orange and changed the mode.

This itself gave a nice effect to the character. After that I created a bad guy in a silhouette form.

And finally, I added a ground for them to stand on so that they are not hovering in mid air.

There you have it, Intention. So here it is the final piece.

INTENTION

Capable

Illustration by René Gruau
In this illustration René Gruau shows a fashion side of illustration but this image gives me an idea of what I can do.
This image reminded me of the good and evil side of humans. In my illustration, I want to portray an emotion. I started off with a gradient canvas on photoshop and just started drawing with the tabloid. 

After drawing the image, I started adding shadows to the girl.After adding shadows, I finished it off by adding some cool text.

I think that this image shows good composition and has a sense of balance to it. The image is not ment to have a lot of colours to emphasize the evilness with colours red and black. This image uses a good use of third rule keeping the focus on the first half of the image. Then with the help of using lines in between image, the eye follows down the page, where it meets the caption of the image.

Fluid

Illustrated by CG Evers

This image has a very good illustration of fluids, which is why I chose this image. CG Evers work posted on Leifs blog have some sorts of water form incorporated in his images. The illustration of water is done in detail which inspires me to create something realistic.

For this tutorial I have gone ahead and take an image of a glass with water in a studio and with the help of photoshop, made a path tool around the glass to have a cut out.
To help with my final design, I got help from this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UioEstpPy0Q 
It uses 3d tool so make sure you have a fast running computer.
Using similar techniques, I created water effect on top of the text "water."
And this is the result.

Suspense

This week i have decided to go with the artist Ric Grasso

Tutorial: for cs4- cs5 extended or higher

with the background layer go to 3d menu and go to new shape from layer and to go sphere.

It will give you a nice round ball.

 in the 3d layer double click the background layer to build elements to it.

create new blank layer.

Press d for black and white

fill the colour to 50% grey. (Shift + Del)

filter -> Render -> fibers

variations - 16

strength - 12

Go to filter again go to distort and choose polar coordinates.

choose rectangular to polar and press ok.

Select marque opt. +  Shift from the centre of to the edge of the circle. and press command j to bring it to its own layer

and lock the transparency by clicking on the first button next to lock in layers panel.

go to filter -> blur and -> radial blur. zoom it at 30%

go to gradient, radial gradient to be specific to a black to transparency and change the mode to opacity.

start by getting some gradient from the middle so it looks like an iris of the eye. Click it couple of times so you have a good amount.

click the layer and convert it to smart object. and scale it down by clicking shift + option.

Next bring in some colour by clicking on layer style and click inner glow and change it to linear burn mode with a black colour.

click on colour overlay and choose the colour of your choice and change the mode to soft light. click ok and SAVE the changes.

you can close it down.

you will see that the eye is not fitting properly, the easy way to fix that is to double click the background and transform it so its squished from sides. 

Adjust the eye according to your preferences chosen.

you can rotate the eye around by clicking the 3d rotate tool.

go to 3d window and click 3d.

click on the materials section 3rd one one from the top.

click on the icon next to it and choose new texture. set it to the dimensions from original file.

you can see the light added in.

choose the gloss at 75% and shine at around 60%.

Emotional Labour!

Today I am going to share with you some of my passion, people who I look up to and things that inspire me when I don't feel like being creative. As you know I am a Graphic Designer and a photographer. I create commercial and editorial content through composition and innovation. 

I started learning photoshop by myself and after my high school ended. And as a visual learner I wanted to see people create art work on photoshop. I wanted to learn what tools they used so I can relate to the artwork. Through countless hours on my computer searching for people who created this type of content, I found some amazing artists I can look up to. I will share with you my top 2 artists on this post.

Corey Barker

Corey is a Photoshop Guru. He creates stuff on the side for people inspiring to become good at photoshop. He posts his video tutorials on http://planetphotoshop.com/ and the work he produces is just simply astounding. His tutorials are very simple elements put together. If you are new to graphic designing, follow his tutorials and I promise you, you will learn so many things he has to teach you. 

Deekay (Dongwook Kwon)

As I started to improve, I wanted to challenge myself and set out again to look for artists who were amazing at this and I stumbled upon Deekay, a korean guy from New york. His artwork is something I hope to achieve some day. You can find his work on http://www.deekayart.com/, He doesn't do tutorials but makes speed painting that is worth dreaming for. This is one of his artwork he recently created of Jeremy lin from scratch on photoshop. You can watch is speed painting on http://youtu.be/BHJ0RlRsofw 

These people are on my top two list of thousands of people. What they have started and what I hadn't realized at the time was that they were doing emotional labour. According to me emotional labour is creating content that other people can relate to and feel something through the art, even if it is difficult for you to create. By starting this blog and posting my art, I am one step closer to the artists I look up to. 

As a result, I started making things that other people don't feel like making. Couple days ago, a friend asked me to create a poster for him about Cricket. 

The only information that was given to me was:

Cricket

History: 

The game of cricket has a known history spanning from the 16th century to the present day, with international matches played since 1844, although the official history of international Test cricket began in 1877.

The first ever international cricket game was between the USA and Canada in 1844. The match was played at the grounds of the St George's Cricket Club in New York

Previous winner has been India 2011, Australia winning the last 3 world cups in a row 1999, 2003 and 2007

Sport

There are 3 different formats in Cricket, Test Match, 50 overs and the more exciting version is the 20/20. A Test Match will take a maximum of 5 days and both teams’ bats twice. A 50 over game take roughly 7 hour, and the shortest version take about 4 hours to finish. 

Equipment

Cricket has a lot of Equipment, a proper cricket bat and ball. Batting pads, Batting Gloves, A Hamlet, thigh pad, these equipment’s are only used by the Batsmen, the back catcher AKA wicket keeper wears Wicket keeping Gloves, Wicket Keeping Pads.

Field

A cricket ground is somewhere from 90 meters to 75 meter from the middle of the ground where the cricket pitch is, 75 meters being the shortest. In Cricket, batsmen are allowed to hit the ball anywhere along the field 360 degrees.

Team

A cricket teams consists of 11 players, there are all present on the field at the same time when they are playing defence AKA fielding. A squad can have up to 15 to 18 players.

At first I thought I will give it a background and one or two images but soon realized its not a going to be a poster. The content is not about creating a poster but about teaching how the game works, its an infograph I needed to create. So I googled some of the infographics and got inspired by it and made this. My friends college loved it soo much that they not only wanted to publish it but also wanted to take me to an international trip on a paid expense and take photos for them.
Infograph is about distributing information and transforming it into a visual for other process the information. 

Hope you create your own content and share 

International Women's Day Poster

Hey Guys, so here it is the final International Women's Day Poster that I have been working on for weeks now.

500px.com

Gabriele Tenhagen-Schmitz 
http://500px.com/schiwa-rose
Dragonfly:  http://goo.gl/mag/780nS

Chris Miles 
http://500px.com/ChrisMiles
Pointing this way : http://goo.gl/mag/xEbu7

International women's day poster behind the scenes

Hi. Here is a short behind the scene video ( http://vimeo.com/36806771 ) . What we are doing is after we have painted,  we are taking a digital image and will be posting it up in a link. There will also be a gallery of Art in the square at mohawk college some time soon.
The painting belongs to my classmate,Jessica b. You can follow her at jessbdesignsthings.blogspot.com/

14 Week Challange - Twirl

Hi folks, this week we will be working on twirl. So to start off, as always, I started with inspiaration and looked for artists that inspired me. Upon reference, I stumbled upon Will Davies a struggling artist who grew up in 30's and admired the romantic art in the American Magazine. Click here to look for more info on Will Davies.

As a Photographer and a Graphic Designer, I instantly connected with his work because of the emotion portrayed in his work. When he painted people, as a viewer I could feel the emotion between the people. When I try to display my art or photo, I try to look for some emotion within the photographed people.

The Image that catches my attention is the wrap around artwork that he did for Harlequin Magazine. The reason why I chose this as my twirl inspiration was because of Wills love for romance art shows on the painting. In the painting he has nice and bright vibrant complementary colours. The way she is sitting is she is twirled on him, a very realistic style of painting technique. 

So after picking the image, I decided to research and found that leif peng has already described the step by step demonstration work posted on here.

The way Will works is not by thumbnailing right away but thinking of what elements he wants in his head clearly then he puts it on a piece of paper the way he wants it. And once he is done sketching roughly he shows it for proofing. He then starts with the next part of the project by photographing the people in it. In the image above he put his kids on the table with a friends wife as mother and act out a little role. I believe that by photographing the people in, it is easier to show the actual size and proportion of people and the exact emotion that they would feel at the exact moment.

Ive chosen the same path that Will has used. For his thumbnails he used pastels not markers, but since I dont own pastels I will be using charcoal to sketch in thumbnails. 

Once I completed my thumbnail, I went to my next step which is photograph it. I asked my two friends who are now married, to be my models. There is a place nearby in town that has a nice background to it. My thumbnail was drawn because I had already thought of which place would be good to shoot at. Fortunately for me I caught one of the good day to shoot.



So after I got the image I was looking for, I jumped on photoshop and started with editing the photo and adjust the colour. So after I started with drawing in simple outlines and went on from there. Pictures speak larger than words so i'll let the pictures do the talking.

and to add finishing touches to it, i added a forest backdrop to it.

 Time to add some text to it and finish it up. This becomes a 2 page spread of a Womens Magazine.

Till next time Cheers!!

Laptop Skin

So couple weeks ago, I started working on my laptop skin and wanted to make it unique and something cool. So I was looking at some of the laptop skin for macbook pro and they had some cool ideas incorporated with the apple glow at the back of the laptop. I wanted to do the same, so I started with the heroes that haven't been done as a skin and I decided on Green Lantern. At first I wanted to make it so that the ring is inside the hand and its glowing because of the apple but then I realized it will not work out so I had to come up with another idea. My next idea was to simply use green lantern and since he uses his ring to create imaginary objects i will make it so he is imagining the apple logo which looks like this :

I added he green lantern text and put it at an angle so that it works with the proportions and made green lightning come out of the text to give it a cool look to it. At first I wanted to make it all color but then realized that I have a macbook pro hard shell cover which is black in colour. I could've made it colourful but it wouldn't have been as affective as the green glow outlines. The pink outline is just the cut out area of where the apple logo is going to be with the trim marks.

If you want to know the details of how I made the green glow and other things comment me below and I will make another post. Till then Chao!!

Free Wedding photography workshop online!!

Hey guys, I don't know about you but I am a photography frenzy. And I love to learn new techniques and details of what is it that other photographers look for when taking photos. I searched Internet for any information on photography and stumbled upon creativelive.

This is an excellent website out there for any photography tips and techniques. What Creative live does is they bring in well known photographers and other artists who have been successful in the industry and perform a live session. Meanwhile the members of creative live (member of 8 people, and tons of volunteers) come together and make this happen.

Creative live prepares their stuff in advance, they start with finding 5-6 viewers to have a free in class studio time for the whole 3 day seminar. When the preparation is done, they put it online for free so that people like you and I, who are truly interested in getting information can watch it. Thats not all they take their recording and sell it for a variable price from $99 + so that even if you are super busy, you can buy it for a reasonable price.

And from a person who has watched their videos, I say this is the smartest investment you will ever do. The amount of information produced in this is just mind-blowing. I might even go as far as to say this is better than taking co-op in school. Some might even argue this point. What they've done that makes it so special is that they have couple people sitting on the computer asking your questions relevant and related to what you might have asked if you were really there.

Tomorrow on 27th Jan 2012, Creative live will go live from 9:00am to 4:00 pm pst for the next three days they have invited Zach and Jody Gray, professional wedding photographers. They will be in a real wedding scenario and will go through of how to take images and what little things you can do to improve your own skills.

To watch it live go to http://www.creativelive.com/live
See you there!!

IWD - Week 2 - Update

Today I continued working on Mother Teresa. I created a sketch of how i want things to look with the full text and also experimented with color schemes. But as of right now, I dont know which direction I should be going towards. If you have any suggestions feel free to comment.
Started sketch on 18 x 24 approx.

Color comps:

Feel free to comment on what I should've changed..
Arios amigo!!

14 Week Challange - Week 2 "Prepare"

Good Morning everyone. Today we will be working with the word prepare as given by Illustrationfriday. To start off I started researching for the word prepare, and found out some ideas of where I can go with this. Because I have chosen photography as my main element to display my art in, I have to choose carefully of what i should photograph. As mentioned in my previous blog, I will be looking at Leif Peng's Artists collection and look for inspiration.

 Inspiaration

From the different artists, I chose Richard Gates as my inspiration. In his artwork, he showed an apple which is very stationary with a bunch of apples in the background and people harvesting the apples. He tried to display texture on the apple and cut out the apple from the frame. For the colours he used complementary colours to make the apples pop. 

Thumbnails

For my thumbnails, I tried to incorporate fruits that are being cut and prepared to be served. But during my thumbnail process, I had an issue with the subject. Looking at an apple is very boring to look at, therefore I had to create something that wil catch the viewers attention but didn't know what that was yet.

Shoot

Knowing that just apples was very boring to look at, I decided to just shoot the apple and thats when i got inspired. I thought back to when I would see those ads about pizza's and saw the nicely cut vegetables falling down. I wanted to create something along those lines. But the issue was that if I were to take an image and make the fruit fall down, it will turn out blurry and plus it will not stay in the form that i want it fall down in. So I had to make something to hold the fruits in its original position. 

The fruits i was using was an apple and a banana, half cut and falling down. I used toothpicks for apple to make it hold it in place. At that point, I knew I had to shoot at a low angle so that i can see the distance between the ground and the apple. And for the banana, I had to use a long stick and stick it from the middle through the cuts and into the remaining of the banana.

Here are the images I produced:

For educational purposes, I will go through my process of photoshoping the image. 

So the first step was to bring it in photoshop. I didn't had to use any color correction techniques because I had already set my white balance to the correct temperature when I was taking the shot. 

So I started by using clone stamp tool and and the spot healing brush tool to take any pieces of toothpick out of the image.

 

 Before cloning it out

After cloning it out

 Then I used the hue and saturation filter to take out the yellowness of the apple because it had been out for so long and the 1000 watts hot lights made the rotting process faster. Go to the hue and saturation, into the yellow filter and turn down the saturation.

After edit of yellow hue, it already started looking really nice. 

I used the vibrance filter to bring out the colors in the image. It was ok to bring out the vibrance a whole bunch because there were a lot of dark colors surrounding the apple. 

After I used duplicate merged the layer so all the effects on the image are transfered to a new layer merged with the image(Mac: cmd+opt+shift+e)(PC: control+alt+shift+e). Then I used the HighPass filter at 1.6 pixels just so that we can bring back the tiny details.Dont worry if the screen goes into a weird gray scale color because we will be turning the channel into an overlay

 

Here is the screen shot of all my layers.  

So here it is, the final two images:

These images can be used for Commercial ads with just a little bit of text added to them.

Thanks for joining me, see you next time!