New Beginnings?

Today I decided to revisit my blog, which I clearly have not touched in close to a year. I have to say that I regret leaving it to stagnate...I actually have some interesting pieces of work here, and I feel like I should continue adding to it so that I can see my progress over time. So, in the spirit of new beginnings, I'm going to pick up where I left off. Hopefully some good stuff will come up.

Skate deck

I may have spent way too long on this, but I'm happy with how it turned out. Part of the time factor is due to my having worked on areas that will not actually show anyway...I know that sounds like an incredibly stupid thing to do, but let me explain. I could easily have gotten away with cutting out the fret board, since it will be covered by the board's trucks anyway; however, it just seemed like a cop-out to me to do so. Also, I figured that if I wanted to display the design, it would look silly without that area. So I added a fair bit of work time by incorporating that area into the finished piece, but it looks good now and I can use it for other purposes without having to go back in and make too many adjustments to it.

BUT--there are a few things I wish I could improve about the finished, printed piece: 1) I don't think it's weatherproof--although it was printed on vinyl, it is not laminated and is therefore susceptible to the elements.

2) for the same reason (i.e. lack of lamination), the colours are not as vivid as in my test print--apparently the material soaks up some of the pigment, but laminating a piece would bring the levels back up again (so my printer told me).

3) I didn't do as good a job of sticking it to my deck as I would have liked...it took me ages to get it done, and it still wasn't quite right. After Joe told me how he usually goes about doing this, I almost kicked myself because it would have made the task so much simpler for me. No sense in complaining about things that can't be changed, though, right?

Inked

Here are a few photos of tattoo art--on myself, my sister and Kim.

Of the designs (shown below), I like the sword best (I call it Excalibur). I'm not sure how realistic the bird looks as a tattoo; I wanted to have more of it showing, but scaling the vector art down made it difficult to see any of the detail, so the result was a compromise. The design I mapped onto myself is the simplest of my three designs and looks surprisingly believable.

*Some of the jpegs for the actual design line-art are acting up, so I will add those later...

A Blast from the (near) Past

So, here's a small picture of the logo trace I did for our first assignment in DMA101 (I don't really have any explanation for why the colours are so far off here...some sort of internal error to do with Blogger I suppose). Looking back, it's interesting to see how much we've learned in Illustrator over the past few months. I didn't at the time believe myself capable of doing that assignment, but I think we have all made some great progress with that program--and I've come to see that you can do some really amazing things with it.

This is the third of my 3D scenes, also done in Illustrator. I never quite got around to posting it...or rather, I didn't post it because I thought that most people would not see the humour I had intended in it. I guess that's essentially some form of self-censorship, which I tend to do often; in my sketchbook I erase my drawings when I am unhappy with their progress, when maybe I just need to start a new page.

The last three items are examples of word art created in Photoshop. I don't think I got them quite right, but it was still a good exercise to practice using filters and layer effects.

Tattoos

These are some of my designs in preparation for getting 'inked.' I'm going with the sword in the drawing on the left, but I'm hoping to also try doing the stylized bird. I'm going with a really clean, sharp line technique that will make the designs stand out best.

Skate Decks - Initial Draft

Here are two of my better designs for the skate deck assignment. My idea for the first was actually to have a character playing the guitar, but I ended up sketching an electric guitar on pretty much the full board instead (I used my brother's instrument as a reference).

The second one evolved on a whim, and I think it has some visual interest to it...having the entire image repeated on the smaller deck within the drawing was a fun idea courtesy of Craig, and results in a deck-within-a-deck sort of situation (ad infinitum).

Random drawing

I finished this sketch a few days back; I'm not sure why I made it look Grecian/ancient Roman, and I don't have any sort of story behind it, but it looks kind of interesting (I think).

I've also done more work on my tattoo designs, toy box concept art, and skate deck designs [which I will post as soon as it's all scanned in]. I'm not sure if anyone else is having the same problem, but I'm worried that my tattoo designs are a)not complex enough and b)that they lack originality. I do like one of them, which is of a sword--I revisited one of the very first designs I did for this assignment, back in the 3rd or 4th week of classes. I can't seem to tear myself away from that idea, much the same as my attachment for my incomplete toy logo (I hope this isn't a bad trend). I've given a lot of thought to the sword and I think that if it's too simple in itself, perhaps I could combine it with another large element...what I had in mind was that a bird (namely an owl) could be carrying the sword/have it dangling from one of its talons.

Of course, a picture is worth a thousand words (so they say), so once I've scanned in the relevant sketches, the concept will become a bit clearer.