Metalclay

This one was for my illustrator class.

Assignment: Design a superhero by first sketching it out then scanning and vectorizing it.

I did do the sketches on paper first, about a dozen of them! To brainstorm some ideas. First I knew I wanted someone who was semi-realistic, mostly because I was itching to do some plane work with the face via vectors.

As for the hero, I wanted a rather unconventional one, no super strength or uber running, something a bit different. After finishing a powerpoint for art history on Aboriginal art, I had the lingering effects of these rustic people.

After kicking around some ideas and recalling Deidara from Naruto and the clay dude (think his name was the blob) who would transform into various weapons in Clayfighter and some influences from Persian and Egyptian art I settled on this dude, tentative name: Metalclay (ha).



Did I mention I got a nice wacom tablet about three weeks ago? Haven't gotten around to using it because of projects that have been bogging me down, but now I had a sort of obligation to use it. Totally want to experiment more with it. The pressure control and quick buttons are complete nirvana.

Name: Metalclay
Power: Convert clay to explosive metallic weapons

Close up on the face

Generic Castle Environment

Metalclay on Balcony

Only things of note really here as far as technicalities go, is that I built and layered each part of Metalclay so that he may be animated later on Flash. So, heh, there are literally a hundred layers from just limb parts to shadow layers.

I was going to go all out with the shadowing but it is time I moved on. The actual piece I turned in was:


I really wanted to see though what happened if I took out the outlines and did a more realistic cell shaded Charles Schwab (Commercial) - Rotoscope (Scanner Darkly) - Zelda (Wind Waker) - type thing.

As for the enviro, heh. I didn't even know we had to turn it in as part of the prorject, so I quickly made one in like 10 minutes in class and turned it in. I then went back and tweaked it some.

That's all folks. Next projects are going to be duds like the ones before (merchandising, product design and the ilk, bleh).

Time! spread and cover.

Probably not one of my favorite projects in photoshop so far, but does help me appreciate how these mags are made. Usually, these are done in Indesign, no?

Project: Design a Cover and and spread for on a social issue. 166 lpi, you choose magazine and thus specifications.



I chose to cover marijuana, ganja, cannabis, weed, grass, whatever it is they call it in your neck of the woods. Summary of artist statement included notes from Citibank's recent $306 billion bail out and the benefits that could come from legalizing marijuana and making as mainstream as tobacco which is arguably worse than marijuana.

On to the technicalities! Experimented with masking from vector to clipping. Did adjustment layers on the borders and box, most notably the cigar butts. Embossed the box a bit since the original was too light. Messed with the transformation tools to get the perspective right on the marijuana logo on the box.

The actual layout of Time was probably the funnest thing. A bit mundane but it was interesting to measure out the magazine and see how the specs are distance to be halves of themselves, I'm pretty damn sure they use some derivative of a golden ration, cause the measured specs aren't too random.

Logo was downloaded from brandsoftheworld. Had to mess with it since the one uploaded was funky.

Type and style was inspired by some Time magazines I had laying around. The alternate stories at the top were grabbed from recent digg articles I found rather interesting. Favorite one was Calvin and Hobbes.


After finishing the Title page, my eyes were blazing and I had to brush up on some other projects I had due, so yeah this part isn't that great.

Layout, again, inspired by Time magazines I had. The pictures of the Marijuana in the back look very unprofessional and plain gaudy, but, it was 4am and I was running out of ideas, so I just got a marijuana brush and scattered it all over the place. Found a picture relevant to marijuana and pasted it.

The picture itself was bad, should have been something more relevant to the economy and I probably could have orchestrated those leaves so they strategically covered white spots and not the lettering. Overall, horrible, but the magazine title cover took a lot out of me.

Technicalities not much on the spread. Did a clipping on the title, made vector lines for the borders, applied a clipping for the leaves themselves and did vector for the hand towards the bottom via paths.

As for the original site where the writing was lifted:

http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/legalize-it-2

That's it!

Matt and Shiny

Write Out Loud Cafe gallery went great, cool local lounge bands played and we got a few spoken word poetry in the mix. Didn't stick around too long, just drank a bottle of water, chilled and left (it was like 12am, hot in Miami!). Here are the three I Matted some more to give it a more comic book feel:







I'm also messing around with this oil:


haven't had time to work on it, but I try to whenever I can. Again, this is oil, and I'm working this off a mirror. Doesn't really look like me, but I'll just have to fix that, or just get frustrated and just render it as is.

I just finished watching a tutorial by Shawn Barber; awesome stuff. Very inspirational and informative, so much that I placed and order for some turpenoid, liquin, galkyd, and meglip (yay financial aid). Never used any of them except for maybe turpenoid, but I use the turpentine my dad uses when he paints houses (have to dilute with water o.0).

For anyone interested, I started off with a pencil sketch on the back, and loosely went over my background. I thought the background was rather boring, so I fleshed out some images in my turpentine haze. The approach to this was to go back to a painting I did back in junior year where my thought was: pretend it's stone. But I gave it a twist and pretended I was working with clay.

Something I've noticed, working with clay, even if just playing around, really does help in creating links in your brain to memorize what you've drawn before with what you're sculpting, so when you go to paint, especially with oil, it's as if you're sculpting but with paint. My teacher back in highschool used to call it: working in planes

Once you've got the planes down it's just a matter of blending, if you're ever worked with clay or maya (or at least have seen videos of people using maya), think polygons vs. nurbs or when you go ahead and add some water to the clay to make it smooth.

Next up: Photoshop work and Illustrator, yes.

Latin Jazz

Design a poster/flyer for a concert; letter size.



Few things about this:

The saxophone is THE hardest instrument I have ever outlined, and I've outlined my fair share (ok, only a few like...13).

Let's start with the concept, since that's what it's all about eh? At first I didn't know where I wanted to go with this, I was thinking of maybe illustrating one of those old school jazz players in a silhouette with the whole old school get up and the hat, think New Orleans.

I came up with a few concepts, but...after a while (after some comments from my teacher) I asked, what separates my concept from others? So to give it a spin than, I started thinking of maybe doing Bossa Nova, Fusion, something different. I settled with Latin Jazz.

In the end, it didn't come out quite as I had envisioned, came rather cold and not "Latino" at all, but time was up so, that up there is the final product.

As for the technique, I was messing around with gradients and transparencies that we had just learned. was going to find a way to incorporate it into this final render, but didn't have time to, and my layers were a mess so I couldn't find too many things, I didn't know what was linked to what, some masks flipped out on me, and until I find a way to patch shapes and mesh them together (couldn't find it in pathfinder), floating shapes in the abyss would have to do.

I also experimented with the wrap tools (can you tell?) and smooth tools to get the clean cuts instead of messing to much with the pen tool. Some parts may not look to crisp since that's where the floating shapes were placed to cover those binding "tentacles" and overlapping effects.

Logos were taken from brandsoftheworld. Except for the Miami Dade County one, that one wasn't up there except for a very cheap knock off of called "Wade County"...get it? as in Dwayne Wade form the Miami Heat, eh? eh? no? alright. The shape wasn't even right, at least if it was right I could put in the letters, bah.

Not very satisfied with this piece, at all, but I'm learning. Next project should be fun: Create a superhero! extra credit if you animate yourself!

Prof told us to outline everything from fingers to teeth and eyelids if we were thinking of importing this into flash, which I might (even though I'm not a big fan of flash animations since they ALWAYS look so cheap). I included some rejected rendered concepts.

Book Fair

So, there's this thing Miami Dade College hosts every year, the Miami Book Fair. Never been to it before, and since it takes place on campus and I had about four hours until class started, I decided to look around.

This year they had a Comic Galaxy section, where they invited a bunch of graphic novel publishers from Tokyo Pop to Darkhorse, it was pretty sweet. The best part had to be Udon front and center.

Not a huge Street Fighter fan like some people I know (insane), but I played it on the SNES, and played the SFII: Turbo with some friends some time ago, (got owned). But I couldn't pass up on having a sketch from an Udon crewmember.

He drew these with copics, three different shades of gray, and black. took him like 5 minutes, 10 max. I asked for Blanka, always loved that crazy orange hair. He started out with the nose, moved to the bridge and outlined the eyes, shadowed the hair, and went down to the hand, crept it up until he had the arm formed and finished off the hair, then drew some bits of the body, added some shadows, and ened with the energy waves around.

An interesting note, I did ask him how he got into the industry, how he started, etc. He said, he was always drawing and he would post up his drawings online and when Comic Con came, he went over to Capcom I believe it was (not sure if it was Udon, and he got transferred over) he showed his work, and got hired.

Told me he did attend art school for sometime, but dropped out because he really wasn't learning anything he couldn't manage on his own. Even though it's comics and not animation, I'm sure the same would be true.

Anyway, I also got myself a copy of Watchmen and Harry Potter 7, since I never got around to buying it when it was released (even though I used to religiously wait in front of my local drugstore to get a copy, since they had loads, and no one ever went to a drugstore to get their fix of hp).

Oh, and according to my art history teacher, the works I submitted are on the Write Out Loud Cafe in the book fair. Gonna go check it tomorrow, pretty sweet though, never had my work up anywhere o.o

Update pop strip

Needs more pop my teacher says.



Moar pop? hmmm.

Anyway, got more stuff on the way, aaaaand a REVOLTING DEVELOPMENT! I'm not just ready though, knowing how things have gone for me: things don't go well!

But think it was Winston Churchill who said: "Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."

We'll see. More on the way definitely an update on these three since it needs more...pop (wish it were cowbell, I know how to give it that o.0)

Maruchan Ramen, mmm.

Yeah, I know, but let's just get to the technicalities:

Make a magazine ad for a product. The product is to be brought in to class, taken a picture of and edited (highlights, tones, balance, noise, etc). Visual hierarchy: model, product, advertising line, and body copy.


Took the DNG of the product into photoshop, edited split tones for orange highlights and blue shadows. Messed with the tone curves for some weaker highlights, greater lighting, and brought out the shadows more. Healed and stamped out some of the disgusting highlights shining off the plastic ramen package.

As for the model, the picture was taken with a craptastic canon digicam. The noise was disgusting and the auto for the ISO is horrible. Was going to set it on manual but time was of the essence (even though I ended up taking about 100 pictures, literally, maybe 150). Anyway, this was the best I could get from shooting indoors and no proper lighting (I'm soooo making a light diffuser box after this, omg).

Anyway, since I was basically overcasted by this rather odd tungsten lighting, I had to split tones on this one as well, but even more with the orange and blue. I would like to thank adobe right now for allowing .jpgs to be edited like camera raw files. Anyway, I cleaned up some of the blemishes on my face, and even liquefied it, too much I think (yeah, way too much). I tried to get rid of the noise as best as I could. I filled light on it with some orange, upped the temperature on me (to give myself the orange color cast, you know...radiosity =D).

That's about all I did to the model picture. After fixing it all up, I extracted myself from the original picture (or actually, I think I extracted myself first). I then googled: "Japanese Restaurant" and got the background you see with the rice-paper or w/e they're making it out of now.

Well, actually, I did that first, and edited myself accordingly o.0 Point is, after I edited myself, I plopped myself into the picture and set myself to look as if I was eating there, yay.

As for the Logo, the top one, I got from brandsoftheworld:

http://www.brandsoftheworld.com/search/69985864/59065.html

imported the EPS into illustrator and fixed some things that looked bad. Now, whoever does these logos...they suck. They do. I mean, they probably just extracted it from a jpeg and auto created the outlines in illustrator, so...can't blame them, but the way the things were layered made me want to tear my hair out.

Anyway, I plopped the logo on the top to make it look from well...Maruchan. I then created the logo on the bottom left myself, really simple and fun (I personally think the logo is genius). Anyway, I got some curly type to resemble the noodles (speaking of I forgot to say I had to color burn the ramen noodles in the picture because when you cook maruchan ramen for an extended period of time, it tends to get...gushy? gooey? dunno, but it clumps together like nasty slimy mash). After that, I got Maruchan's tag line, put it next to the logo, and wrote some filler text since I could not get a body copy from Maruchan's website (localization fail on Maruchan's part).

That's it!

Logo design, yes.

Fabricate three company names and make a logo, logo + graphic, business card, envelope, and letter head:











Just a bit of info here:

Tim's Toolbox is an obvious take on Home Improvement's Tim Taylor (awesome show and person...from what I've seen). The store is supposed to be a type of mom and pop but with a more corporate feel hence the plain type and very rigid logo design.

Fruit Frenzy is supposed to be like a type of lounge bar that sells drinks and stuff of the ilk. Supposed to be a rather laid back but...serious environment. Deco Type I though conveyed that as well as the stylized pineapple out line, yes that's a pineapple.

Xilt Pens is a take from many sources. First being the old saying: "The pen is mightier than the sword". The actual store sells pens of various types mainly focusing on the art aspect with calligraphy which is why there's heavy emphasis on the clean wavy look of things. Going back to the name, the actual "xilt" comes from a combination of "hilt" from a sword and "xiphoid" from a sword shaped metal, so together, Xilt.

That's about is for this project. On a related note, I'm still not fond of graphic design. It's not too bad though, but ehck, I want to bring something to life! move!

More updates on the way...maybe.