CD Release Pix

The show at the Opera House went awesome. Here are some pix from the night, Michelle did these first the crowd shots.

Roller Blade Project

This is the Rollerblade “tag” we had to do for Joe’s class. Basically the idea was to take something we’d done in Andrew’s class and use it in this brochure type tag to promote these new inline skates. Most people were doing thing with paint for a background and stuff like that. I tried painting some backgrounds for this thing but nothing was really helping it along.

I thought about what project’s I’d done in Andrew’s class and decided I could use some elements from the skate deck assignment to make a pretty cool tag. I kept the big DNA strand looking thing; I just added another loop and used that as a kind of background to connect the different frames of the tag.

Front the state deck I really liked the molecular structure I had done and thought it’d be kool to emphasize that as a main part of this design. I went and made some bigger and thicker polygons which were going to serve as the picture frames for the inline skates; and I also threw the original in behind these with a warp transform on it. I used the same red and yellow texture I had in the skate deck for the outlines and I also put it over the Salomon logo. This turned out better than with the deck because there were thicker objects and you could see more of the texture come through this time.

The other thing I did was use the unique frame colour from each inline skate and made a monochrome version of the same texture for the name of the skate and the acronym next to each. This worked out well too because it made each skate stand out on it’s own much better than with the same colour texture over everything.

I use the same unique textures on the flip side of the tag for the skate headers and then just pulled a colour from each to pick a font colour for the details. Then I just brought in a few more polygons from the front, transformed the sizes and used them as frames for wheels and safety gear Salomon also offered. I use the same space / nebula background for the whole thing and after i folded it accordian-style that was about all.

I like how the design works overall cuz it gives a futuristic feel to everything which is good when promoting new gear and technologies developed for almost any product line. It makes everything seem hi-tech and engineered.

Magazine Ad

This was the Magazine Ad assignment for Joe's class.
<-- Click for fullsize

I had alot of stock photography of my band lying around from a photoshoot a friend of mine did for us at Ryerson. The images were print quality so I thought it'd be a good starting point to do something along those lines.

This thing took a few tries to get right at first. I was messing with different colours and such, mostly with the photos. I was trying to go for a monochromatic thing in the beginning using the colorize option (Image > Adjust > Hue Saturation) in Photoshop. Eventually I gave up on that and just used the natural photos and took the rest of my colours from that.

After that I just grabbed some pix of distortion pedals off the net from the Digitech website. I through a wave distortion Filter on the header text as well (rasterized) to stick with the theme and that was about all it took. I like how the 2 photos create a bit of depth as well with the right pic in the foreground and the guitar photo in the background with a bit less opacity. I ended up getting a good Z-pattern out of the eye movement too.

Sculpture

First thing i made was the head. I went for some really exaggerated features to make him look almost inhuman. I thought some dredz would be pretty sweet too for the hair and pretty easy to make so i went with those.



Next thing was the torso. The head only took me about 4 tries, but this thing too like 12. At first i was trying to build some bigass amps into his shoulders and go for the transformers look but that ended up being impossible for me (sorry, i've never sculpted anything before....shut up). Also i was trying to make it smaller at first but the only way i could ge thte detail i wanted was to go a bit bigger. The shoulder strap i ended up switching over to the other side too.


After the torso the legs didn't take too much effort. Since the top was pretty heavy i threw some wire in the legs to help support the weight later. Then i attached the two sections together with more of a waist and ass so he'd be able to stand upright better.

Next thing was the guitar. I went with a Parker style guitar, it was the most futuristic looking one i could think of. My guitarist has one of these too so i thought it'd look pretty badass. I wasn't gonna make it from scratch so i printed a black and white outline of the thing and just lined up the clay over the paper. I had to put some wire in this thing too cuz it was kinda flimsy.






I added the guitar to the body i already had going with the right arm being build directly into the bottom of the instrument.



After that i attached his head to his massive neck.








After i attached the head i decided to make his hair like huge wires that went throughout his body and hooked into this power box type thing on his back.










Then i just kept adding the wires where i could and built him some feet. I knew i needed alot of support for the feet so i tried the sticky suction-cup style feet u see in comics alot. It worked perfectly until i actually put him in the oven...see no one told be that...before the clay hardens, it actually gets softer. It still worked out alright, his legs just ended up doing more of an 80's style power guitar stance than the one he started out with. I had to take him out of the over a few times during cooking to make sure the whole thing didn't go to hell. once his left elbow was resting on his left knee he had enough support to not droop anymore. After that all i had to do was paint. Painting wasn't so fun, there were lots of awkward spots to reach around wires and such. His skin was white cuz i wanted him to look pale like a borg off Startrek type deal. I went with bright colours for the guitar added some warpaint to his face and arms, kinda tattooish, and lastly my initials on his chest. I was pretty pleased with it in the end.

Winter Time Table

Got next semester's time table done...

Sports Logo / Effects

This was the sports logo we had to trace in the illustrator for Joe's class...i wish i chose one with less curves. But the bull looks kinda badass.

CD Release Party

Skate Deck

So the skate deck for Andrew's class had alot of texturing to get the effects i wanted. The basic elements were the DNA strand, the molecular web on either end, the text in the center, and of course the P70 logos.

First thing i did was use the pen tool in Illustrator to draw some basic curves for the helix design and then import them into Photoshop to do my texturing.

Next I imported some stock textures I found online and threw a few more filters on them. Then i set up a layer clipping mask over my helix design to give it a bit funkier a look.

To make the lattice pieces that connect the sides of the helix i found this graphic with the same textures and ended up making 3 different colour versions i repeated to fill out the strand.

This was a satellite image type texture i started with for the text. I threw a bevel and emboss effect on the text and a black outer glow to help it pop out from the layers behind it.

I colourized the texture with a red at first and created a clipping mask again. The next thing i did was ctrl click the lattice layer and copied that selection from the red texture I'd already created in a new layer. Then i colourized that layer yellow and added it to my existing clipping mask. This was to emphasize the lattice that went behind the text in the texture. Worked pretty kool.

Next I created 3 different molecule diagram type polygons using photoshop's vector masking layers and some text. Once i had the basic molecules created a threw some different transformations on them to distort them a bit and then duplicated them to build the structures. After that i took the texture from my text and made a clipping mask over the whole molecule structure.

I used the same texture over the P70 logo and put one on either end of the board.

Also, to make the SKATE DNA text a little trippier, i added a scaled down version of my molecule structure to the texture mask. It's kinda subtle but worked.

I also wanted to give a crazy depth feeling on the board like the whole design was just floating in space. So i found some random telescope pix and added some cloudy looking nebulas over top to make my background texture.

CD Cover

These are all final graphics i did for our cd (Click to see fullsize). I have alot of rough ideas from these lying around that i'll get together and throw on later. (if ya want a cd they're 10 buck, ask me! lol) http://www.myspace.com/fnamusic