Saturday, May 30, 2015

WIP - Traditional piece...

     So... very often when I enter a gallery or looking through an art book I find myself thinking, "Well, I can do that."  This is from one of those occasions.  I had never used oil crayons before and I ran across a semi-local artist who used them for nature illustrations.  I was inspired and thought I would give it a go.  There have always been a large number of deer around my family's home in Oregon and I had a good amount of reference, so I found an image I liked and used it to create this piece.  What I really wanted to focus on with this was trying to push a depth of field in a traditional piece, so I went really loose in the background and have incorporated different levels of snowflake to really push a 3 dimensional feel to the piece.

     I would say it is about 70-80% done here as there is a lot of snow left to draw/paint, I need to push the shadows on the ground and I want to go back over the deer once more for just a bit more detail attention.  Sorry for the camera phone quality and yellowing.  When I finish I will break out my real camera, take some archival images and post a final piece both here and on my site.


The Last Apple of the Season
Oil crayon and acrylic on paper, 22x30

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Some graphic design work...

I was going through some graphic design freelance work files to update my site and thought I would post some here.

A few months back I did some work for a web design company looking to hire a few web programmers.  It is a pretty cool small business with a superhero / comic theme.  I enjoyed brainstorming with them as their theme allowed for a number of fun ideas.


This is a printed flyer looking for new employees.  I have removed the text, website and address of the company.
Front: We had a pretty specific idea for what would work.  A cape and cowl patiently waiting on a hook for the new team member.  Because finding an image to exactly match the concept would have been neigh impossible, and photomerging stock images together would have produced less than ideal results while taking the same amount of time, I was given the go-ahead to model/render everything in Maya.
Back:  I created the characters in illustrator, then brought them into PS and went from there.  I like how it turned out.

For good measure I threw in a free square blurb image in case they also wanted to 
post the available jobs on their facebook page.

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While I was living in north Hollywood, I helped out an e-cigarette startup with logo, oil bottle stickers and an example menu to try to raise the professional feel of their company.  The text in the menu was filler I made up and not formatted for final print.




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I also did a bit of freelance for an architecture firm in Oregon helping with some retouching to raise the presentation level of their proposals.  I have added some before and after images to show what I was able to achieve with a bit of Photoshop manipulation.  I enjoyed being able to do some retouch manipulation again.

This image was for one of the project lead's personal portfolio.  (billed separately to him)
Color correction, removed person, added lights and glow, added signage, populated with people, plants, office supplies.

Most of the images I worked on were like this.  Small changes to darken distracting areas, add texture
and add people and plants for scale and to make the room feel more alive.

Slight color correction, background added, floor texture & carpet fix, cleaned ugliness in stair walls,
populated with plants, dishwasher, added company logo as a sign.