Winter Geese

First photo-shoot with my very own Canon T3i. Braved the cold to shoot something and I came back with this one photo that I really like. Quality over quantity my friends.

How It’s Made: Christmas Card

Over the holiday season I had some fun creating a few Christmas designs that focused on vector illustrations, typography and colour. I posted a Christmas card earlier and now I figured I’d show the process and various stages that design went through.

Where did the initial inspiration come from? Wrapping paper.

I wanted to give myself a bit of a illustration challenge so I didn’t scan it and do a straight trace, I recreated the reindeer by eyeing it out.

Then I wanted to have a design that focused on repetition, just like the wrapping paper. So I got my feet wet with a simple composition.

A little plain, let’s see how it looks with colour.

Slightly more lively, but still nothing special. Plus, in hindsight those colours are kinda gross. But we were getting closer to the type of design I had imagined. Seeing it in front of me, I could deduce how it’d look better with two wider rows that left space for copy above. Back to Illustrator to put my plan into action.

Now we’re getting it. Time to pick some nice colours and make any final tweaks.

The finished product:

Merry Christmas!

I may have missed midnight by a hair or two, but here’s a little Christmas card I whipped up for any of you legends viewing my blog. Typography, cool colours, and some basic vector illustrations – what more could you ask for?

And what the hey, have my first draft/composition.

I wasn’t happy with it at the time but on second glance maybe it has some merit? Feel free to leave a comment as to which you prefer. Happy Holidays!

Christmas Card

What a Single Colour Can Inspire

Since I worked on my Breaking Bad skateboard design, the default colour selected whenever I opened up Illustrator or Photoshop was the greenish-blue I used for the font. Even if I was working on another project, that particular colour always caught my eye and the other day I decided I had to play around with it. Soon I created colour palettes and designs all starting from that one colour. It was just a bit of fun but a few cool designs came out of it.

 

 

Bot-Guy in Beautiful Films – Photoshop Evolution

Awesome blogs like Beautiful Stills from Beautiful Films and Stills from Beautiful Films inspired this fun little photoshop exercise I played with when I had some free time.

One of the first things I created in Adobe Illustrator was a little vector character I deemed Bot Guy. Afterwards, I figured why not whip out Photoshop and place the little guy into a still of a cool film. But the array of amazing images these blogs had to offer turned it into something more. I had to see Bot-Guy in all of my favourite films. And after one or two photoshop-ed stills, I wanted to one-up myself every time, always combining or adding something new.

So enjoy the cinematic beauty, and check out the main Photoshop features used in each still.

The Godfather:

Drop shadow.

The Master:

Transform>Perspective

2001: A Space Odyssey:

Lasso Tool to select the area of the still that I needed in front of Bot Guy, copied selection onto new layer, layered Bot Guy behind.

Taxi Driver:

Selection and Layering technique, Perspective Transform, Gaussian Blur.

Moonrise Kingdom:

Check out Bot-Guy’s feet, he’s standing in water after all.
Layer Mask to hide most of the feet on the original Bot-Guy layer, on a different layer a copied image of the feet but with a decreased opacity placed on top.

There Will Be Blood:

I was reluctant to mess with Bot Guy’s colour but eventually I crossed that threshold.
Selection and Layering Technique, Perspective Transform, Gradient Overlay.

Breaking Bad Skateboard Design

I gave y’all a teaser awhile ago, and behold, the design is done!

Now Let’s Break It Down.

Inspiration:

The client had quite a lot of requirements for our skate deck design. The first being, it had to focus on a modern TV show, film, or video game. The second being you then had to apply an 1950-1960’s feel to it.  A big source of my inspiration were the old school Volkswagen advertisements.

 

I kept imaging Walter White’s classic Pontiac Aztec against a similarly coloured plain background. That was a strong image in my head, I just had to expand off it to make it into an actual design. Eventually after racking my brain and doodling in my notebook, I came up with the idea to use the Pontiac Aztec to depict the journey Breaking Bad’s main character Walter White takes from family-man school-teacher to meth-dealing kingpin. When the show started he drove the Aztec but later in the series it gets banged up and Walter decides to replace it when a black muscle car.

So on the left side of the board we early season Walter White with his faded-creamy-green coloured car and background, but towards the right side of the board everything turns black as the front of the car is engulfed in flames and having completed his journey to break bad (get it?) we see his alter-ego Heisenberg sporting the infamous black hat and glasses.

Design Elements: 

The design of the board was required to have several different elements incorporated into it. Majority of the design, with all of the illustrations, are vector elements so that I had covered. I ended up knocking out the raster, photography, texture, and even typography elements in pretty much one go.

First things first, I brought some blue rock candy, broke it up and then busted out the camera.

I was able to get some high-resolution shots of textures resembling Breaking Bad’s notorious blue meth.

Stay tuned for a later post where I’ll upload a whole gallery of these shots. Free-to-use images for anyone in need of some high-res blue meth photographs.  

So afterwards I took these photographs and created a text mask to give texture to the words “WHO KNOCKS.” And that’s how I blended four design elements into one aspect of the board.

But in keeping with the 1960’s feel I went on a downloading fonts binge as I hunted for cool retro script fonts. In the end of I settled on the sweet font Pacifico to use for the Breaking Bad title, as well as the Citizen Woodward branding (also a required element).

What was once digital…is now physical. 

Once all the final late-night tweaking was done to the design it was off to the printers. This is what came back.

And then it was time to mount it onto the skate deck.

Overall I’m really happy with the design. There were times when I questioned it, and even now I may look at it and think there’s a lot I could have done with it. But it’s all a learning experience and it was a fun journey to go from picturing the Pontiac Aztec in my head to holding a skateboard in my hands that has a whole design built around it.

Turning a Character Sketch into a Vector Illustration

The final assignment for one of my classes was to take a rough but detailed sketch and turn it into clean vector art using Adobe Illustrator. I ended up using an awesome sketch of John Marston drawn by lycanthropeful. Big thanks to her for letting me use the image!

Here’s how it turned out. (Click here to see it in all of it’s vector glory.)

And here’s the original sketch.

Set Up:

Before jumping right into this endeavour, I made sure I set up everything to make for a good workflow.  I brought the sketch into Photoshop to scale it up even though it was already at 300 dpi. I boosted it to 600 dpi just for good measure and to ensure the lines would appear slightly blurred opposed to that cursed pixelation. Then I placed the sketch into Illustrator on a 8.5 x 11″ document. However it’s default size when placed was quite small and I soon found myself working almost entirely zoomed in at 6400% which of course is no good. Given the image’s resolution and the fact I was planning to vectorize it, there should have no hesitation for me to scale it up. As soon as I did the process was much easier.

Getting Started:

A drawing of this size with this much detail – it’s daunting stuff! So to help me get my feet wet and once again familiar myself with the nuances of the pen tool and its mysterious bezier curves, I decided I’d start simple. So the first sections I traced were the cowboy hat and the revolver, isolated objects to get me started.

Definitely not my best tracing work, but it helped with working my way into the more detailed parts of the sketch, the face and the chest.

In the Midst Of It All:

The juices were flowing and while there may have been some music or a podcast playing in the background, I had entered full-on trace mode. I kept working on the shirt’s detail, and before I knew it I’d nearly completed the drawing of his legs and the horse’s body.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————

Helpful Tools for Tracing:

While the pen tool is be-all and end-all, a few other tools came in handy.

Brushes: Go look at the horse’s mane and tail, plus John Marston’s hair and beard, there’s no way I’m killing myself manually tracing every thin strand of hair. So I used this tutorial to create my own really thin custom brushes. I created two, of different thickness, and they got me through every section with hair.

Outline Stroke: Praise the vector lords for this one! An amazing option that saves time and keeps some consistency with your lines. Draw a path and estimate the size of the stroke needed, create outline, and boom, you have a shape you can alter. Then use the direct selection tool (plus the Add and Create anchor tools)  to adjust various parts of the line where the thickness changes.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————

Time to Colour:  

I approached this with some hesitation. Unlike the line art, where you know exactly what to do and exactly where to go, colouring requires some decision making. So I went with the obvious stuff first.

The shirt, the vest, the brown straps, and 99% of the horse.

I’d eventually make my way to the smaller stuff and would figure out which strap belonged where, which same colours needed to match up, and lastly, how I was going to colour in the hair.

With John Marston’s hair, I was able to position the strands of hair so they created a black border, underneath which I drew the brown fill.

I applied this same principle to the horse’s body. The mane and tail left parts of the body open so it was difficult at first to figure out how I would be able to draw a fill that covered the entire horse. It wasn’t so bad with the mane, a few strategically   added brush strokes and I had a black border running among the bottom of the mane. The tail however gave me pause.

The original sketch had it open like this.

And in the end I had to close it up like this.

Don’t Forget About Shade:

If I thought colouring required some decision-making, I was going to be even more nervous about placing the first piece of shade on this picture. However after giving it some thought, I decided on the direction of my source of light.

I still feel the white highlight at the front of the horse looks kinda awkward but with the light coming from that direction I was able to create some cool shadows at the back of the horse.

 

But those came after a great deal of trial and error, not just with where I should place them, but with what shapes shadows and highlights should take. But once I figured out I could use the shadows to add curvature to the horse’s body if felt like everything was coming together.

Parting Advice:

If any fellow aspiring designers are reading this and you’re still on the fence about how you organize your layers just heed my advice right now and…lock your layers!

In a previous post I discuss how lovely grouping your layers in Photoshop is. Well now I’m saying it makes your life so much easier when you lock every single layer besides the one you’re working on. My process on the first night I was working on this project was considerably hindered by the fact I constantly had to check to I was on the right layer, and to move around paths drawn on wrong layers. Once I wised up I noticed a big increase in my productivity. Think of it like hotkeys, it may seem like a small time-saver, but it adds up.

Overall, this project was super fun and it inspired the confidence in me that I can create high-detail illustrations as long as I put the time in.

So make sure you check out lycanthropeful. And here, why not look at that vector goodness one more time.

Welcome to the Paper Zoo

This was an assignment I had to do for my sketching class. While I’m not the biggest fan of painting, I must admit I love taking handcrafted elements like drawings and paintings, then scanning and bringing them into the digital realm where I’m free to play with them in all of my beloved editing software programs.

In terms of my paintings, I’m fully aware of my limitations when it comes to water colour painting, so when I was creating my background environments I decided to make it an exercise in colours instead of painting accuracy.

Christmas in Toronto’s Distillery District

I had to head to the Distillery District for an assignment. Not my best work, but here’s my favourite photo from the shoot.