The Angel Lives

The title of this post probably seems pretty counter-intuitive, given that angels are...not among the living, but allow me to clarify. Over a year ago, in my New Media Tools class, everyone designed skate decks, and then made vector-art versions of them, which we printed. I did a design with a guitar on it, which turned out fairly well I guess, then had it printed and stuck it on a skate deck. I don't think the image ever worked when I uploaded it, so here it is again at left.

Anyhow, I had another design which I was really eager to work on, more so in fact than the guitar one. That was the angel design which is in one of my earlier posts. Since I really wanted to see it to completion, I worked on it from time to time when I had a free moment, usually quite sporadically; I finally finished it a few days back. This is the final result at left.

At any rate, I like how it turned out; it has more visual interest than the guitar one. But any feedback would be welcome...I will accept criticism and suggestions with good grace, I promise!

Second Time Lucky

Alright; it seems I overestimated my likelihood to keep up with my blog. However, it IS a new year, which is always a popular time for resolutions (I'm going to conveniently ignore the fact that many resolutions are easily broken).
Anyway, I will say in my own defense that last semester was challenging and quite busy. In addition, I spent the Christmas break running my parents' business while they were abroad; I'm hopeful that I can start producing some interesting material soon though. Fingers crossed!

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.