Hello fellow bloggers. With only three weeks left until graduation projects are coming to completion and I just wanted to share with you some of what has been keeping me up at night.

These are the final pages for my 2012 Creative Photoshop Collection booklet. The first page of the booklet is a technique I learned from www.psd.tutsplus.com. This tutorial is about adding flames to an athlete while in motion. The tutorial used a snowboarder.

What I really liked about this was the background. Yes the flames are cool but I have brushes in photoshop that do the same thing. I wanted the capture the gritty feeling of this image. I've had a stock image in my library of a male hip-hop dancer in this interesting jumping position for sometime now and felt he would work great with this technique.

As you can see I made the image a bit more gritty by applying some more texture to the back ground. I did add some flames but only very minor as compared to the tutorial. To finish off this technique I used the flare tool to add a power point to his hand giving the image a bit of an aggressive feel. Next we will look at the second page of the booklet .

For this page I got back to my comic book roots and attempted a technique with a Sin City kinda feel to it. I found this technique at anothera.net. The nice thing about this tutorial is that they provided a video.

Although I used my own images, I didn't really deviate from this tutorial. This style has a very specific feel to it and I wanted to not lose it.

The rain proved to be a bit of a challenge and I still feel it might be a bit overpowering but it was a good time working on it.

Here is where I made some changes to the content in my book. Originally my third page was going to be a displacement technique that I applied to a beautiful latin model. The technique worked fine.

But this image just didn't have the same feel that the rest of the book was developing. I wanted to keep going with a more abstract/gritty feel. So, I got looking around and I found this decomposed – abstract technique on psdbox.com.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find a suitable male model to replace this guy (if any ladies out there know where to get good quality images of CLOTHED male models please send me a link) so I ended up using the same model and altered the technique. I decided to do some abstract pieces to tie everything into the abstract typography piece I did for the cover, which I have shared in a previous post. There really is not a set formula for a technique like this you kinda just throw stuff down and get what you get.

As you can see I got a lot more aggressive with things. I also added a texture to the background to help tie this page into the next piece as they are the center splash of the book.

Which brings us to the next page.This page features a stylish lighting effect that I found on abduzeedo.com.

Once again it was the bright abstract feel that attracted me to this technique. I used a different model and added some extra elements but pretty much followed this tutorial to it's design.

As you can see the background texture is the same for this page as well as the last and I hope they marry up nicely together in the book. With only a couple of pages left I wanted to show a couple of refined techniques and the next one I learned in class here at Mohawk College. It's a multi-coloured box design that has a slightly abstract element to it.

When I applied this technique I used an image that had a more vibrant feel to it. and once I was finished the technique I added a brighter background to help the image fit into the booklet for the fifth page.

I like the look of this technique on a model with clean lines but if you want to see this technique done with some more attitude you have to check out Jefferson Ceballos rendering of this technique. (He hasn't posted it yet but has assured me it will be up soon.)

For the final page I got completely away from the abstract theme I had going but I absolutely love the look of this technique. I came across this next technique at photoshopstar.com, and being a penciler at heart I had to give it a go. There really wasn't much to this technique (surprisingly) and it has a nice elegant feel.

So there you have a full preview of my 2012 Creative Photoshop Collection book, hope you like it and I can't wait to see it printed.

Cheers

Emotional Labour

"Emotional Labour," as defined by Seth Godin in a podcast by Spark 97, is to do the difficult work that others are not willing to do. That the act of connecting with another human being and making a change even when it is not easy to facilitate at the time...

Seth Godin is talking about the individual who is willing to take the initiative, give his/her ideas away for free so that he/she can get their ideas out there. This is because if your ideas are not out there then no one knows about them and they are worthless. Seth also talks about attention being the most precious thing that anyone should strive for, because having someone pay attention to you is the only way to get your ideas out there.

Not many people can explain or say this better than Seth Godin, and I'm not trying to either. I'm just hoping that by sharing with you the what, who's, and how's of my experiences I will be able to inspire some of you to put your ideas out there and get the attention you deserve.

Emotional labour for me is not just about getting my work or ideas noticed, but helping my children express and achieve their ideas. Weather it's in karate, gymnastics or trying to organize a club (Aavery has had a drawing club in previous years, this year it's basketball). I take great pride putting in the "Emotional Labour," to help them see their ideas come to fruition.

An example of someone giving something away for free that I have come across is a website devoted to providing royalty/licence free vector images is Vector Junky. On their website you can find just about anything you can think of, and other than having to wait 60 sec's in between downloads they don't ask for much. Yes there are ads on the site and they have a second section of graphics that are from Shutterstock (which is a pay site), you don't have to look at these.




A website I like to look in on that I feel is truly an Emotional Labour for those who run it is a memorial site for Micheal Turner. Micheal Turner was a comic book artist who got his start drawing backgrounds. That's it, just the backgrounds weather a city scape, land scape, or the inside of a secret hideout that's what he did. Eventually he gained recognition and went on to draw characters such as Supergirl, Batman, Superman,



Then he moved on to work on Witchblade and Tombraider.



After achieving some good success with these characters he went on to develop his own character Aspen for his own title Fathom.



This led him to launching his own company Aspen Comics. The guys at Aspen Comics carry on and it was here that I found the next person I would like to introduce you to, Marcus To.



Marcus, is good at doing Emotional Labour as well, by sharing sneak peaks of his current or upcoming work. I love checking his twitter feed to see what he is working on.
https://twitter.com/#!/marcusto

There you have it, I hope that by me sharing these websites and artists I have been able to change your mind about weather or not to put yourself out there for everyone to see. I made the leap, here, and I hope that you well enjoy looking through my blogs as much as I am having bring them to you.

Creative Photoshop Book pages

So most of my time has been spent preparing the cover and some pages for my Creative Photoshop book. For my cover I went with a typographic abstract image. I learned this technique from www.digitalartsonline.co.uk.




As I complete the various pages I will be posting them, so far I have two pages done. These will be pages 7 and 8 in my book. Page 7 is a technique learned while attending Mohawk College's graphic design program.




Page 8 is a displacement technique I found online at www.computerarts.co.uk.




Well, that's what I have so far and I will endeavor to bring you more creative photoshop techniques as I learn, practice and complete them.

Catching up

Good day all. I've been playing catchup lately and I just wanted to share with you some of the illustrations and other projects that have been occupying my time. Or what time I've been able to squeeze from the gymnastic/karate schedule.

I'm going to start with an illustration I had in the back of my head for our first Illustration Friday word "grounded." Having children and the constant influence of cartoons, books and toys. Any parent out there knows what I'm talking about. Back to the illustration, grounded can mean many things but two that stuck out to me was a plane being grounded (not aloud to take off) and a child being grounded for misbehaving. So I thought it would make for a humorous scene if Darth Vader was grounding Luke Skywalker from flying his X-wing.

For this illustration I decided I wanted to finish with ink so I started my basic shapes with a non-photo blue pencil.




From here I continued in the non-photo pencil to fill in my rough lines.




Once I had my rough lines in started to fill in with black ink. Once the black ink was complete I felt the illustration needed something to make it pop so I added some red ink to the X-wing in the background. I also put Leah in the illustration to hint that it was she who got Luke in trouble.

IWD Poster Update

As time draws to a close and IWD (International Women's Day) fast approaches I wanted to take this time to share the progress of my poster thus far.

Firstly, here is a look at the paint stage with larger areas of colour filled in with not much detail to it yet.



I am planning on staying with a very graphical, solid blocks of colour style, while trying to capture a sports poster feel to it. To accomplish this you can see I have used a white boarder or frame area on the bottom and right side. You can also see that I have my subject breaking through that boarder to help empathise her movement and create a little visual tension.

As I have progressed I have added minor details and some type elements.



As I continued to paint I have gone back and forth with just how much detail to put into her facial features and after many, many long hours of debate (not so easy with only one debater), I have decided to not add detail to her. Adding to much detail to just this one part of the painting I feel will take away from my over all look I am trying to reach.

For the type elements I know I had the option to leave these areas blank and add them in digitally during post production but this is what I always do. So, I decided to paint them in. More to challenge myself to step out of my digital comfort zone than for any other reasons. All in all, I like what I have done and I'm glad I did take the digital easy way.

All that is left is to finish it off with.... well that's for another post. I can't give everything away.
Cheers.

Good day, I have been working on an Illustration Friday piece for the word "forward." For this piece I decided to take a more graphic approach. All most all of the elements are comprised of basic shapes with the exception of the clock face.
When I started the first thing that came to me was time, time is always moving forward. So my first element was the clock face. I didn't was just a digital or watch style face so I looked to clock towers to use in my illustration. With the clock face figured out I wanted to explore other every day symbols we see that tell us to move forward. The yellow arrows painted on the roads  was my next element followed by the fast forward button arrows. Which brings us to the first step of the design, rough line work.



As the clock face was the first thing to come to me I wanted it to be the stand out element. To accomplish this I made it my darkest element and used 6B graphite to colour it in.



At this point I realized that I didn't want the clock face to be covering all of the other elements in the design so I took a needable eraser and pulled off a layer of the graphite where the fast forward arrows intersected with the clock. Then I started to add some colour to my shapes.



For my colour scheme I decided to use the yellow for the road arrow and a blue for the fast forward arrows so that I could combine the two to use green for my back ground element.



For my back ground element I wanted to use a repeating green arrow because direction signs all over the world use the green arrow to tell which way we should proceed forward. The fun part of this is that by measuring out the arrows so that they are uniform in both size and spacing once the final rendering is complete we will be able to see a contrast to the theme of the design which is "forward," as the negative space in the background design will form into a repeating arrow the same size and spacing as the green arrows that is moving in the opposite direction. Which I feel compliments the over all design of the finished piece for "forward."

Awesome wake boarding in Alaska

Good evening all. An interest of my is traveling and I am stoked about an up coming trip to Alaska. Yes, that's right number two on my all time places to visit (the first is the Arctic). As I have been doing some research on where to go and what to see I've stumbled across this video of Andy Hurdman wake boarding in Alaska by Team Hydrus & Up Down Procutions. It's a short video so I hope you take the time to watch it. It's pretty awesome.


Alaska Wakeboarding Teaser from Catchin' Air Tv Show from UpDown Productions on Vimeo.