Emblem Update

After many revisions and attempting multiple colors, It was decided to use a monochromatic color palette and something for the design to rest on. A shield was used, not completely finished yet there are some minor things that need to be looked at such as the eyes or possible use of text, emblems on a transparent background.

Final Emblem design used, uploaded into player made 'legion sets' for an MMORPG that I'm fond of. The transparency was tricky due to only old format .targa or .bmps being accepted and the finite space of 256x256 pixels. But it was a fun personal project.

Student Marketing Commission

I've recently assisted a group of marketing students, who go by the ALIAS of 'Team Iconique' to assist in creating their designs of a new product for L'Oreal Paris's Wildcard Contest. Based on their market research I was tasked to design two products, a 'Gloss Perfector' and a 'Wave Perfector' alongside other promotional material.

One of the team members works part time at my day job so I was able to discuss this work conveniently as well as messaging online, which proved useful to receive constant feedback from the team on initial ideas and prototypes. After the initial product designs were finished it was on to designing the press advertisements for their presentation.

I enjoyed this part of the project the most as I was able to show up my photo retouching skills, inverted high pass filtering, color and curves adjustments, gradient map and channel mixing.

With regards to my photo retouching skills I have been meaning to upgrade to Photoshop CS6 so I can make use of the oil brush filter tool for retouching hair properly, though with the Adobe suite packages being discontinued and creative cloud thriving, it is currently not in my budget to upgrade at the moment.

Final Pieces used, a variety of models such as phone apps and online advertising were produced for their contest entry, everything can be found on their presentation entry at this link on youtube.

Sketchbook

(Late) Happy new year to all, asides from my diligent practice in digital painting I tend to keep my traditional drawing in check on a regular basis. Here are some photographs from my special ' black ink book' featuring sketches in my editorial styles.

Dark Knight Speed paint

I've been keeping up with practising for my speed paints, I looked into some more tutorials and painting techniques in some art magazines.

no reference or stock material used, I painted this entirely from my mind. 

Software used: Corel Painter.

Photo Retouching

Hi everyone, posting some examples of photo retouching that I have been practising in Photoshop.

My intentions were to make the cup of coffee appear warmer and more inviting, an image that could be used at a coffee shop.

Envelope Designs

While applying for an intern ship I was required to design an A4 sized envelope to see if I was suitable for their requirements. The first steps proved to be the most challenging because of the stock and template for the envelope, with no success with a template design online or from a printing company, I decided to make my own to exact measurements in In Design.

my first idea was this hypnotic al pattern which I submitted in various scale sizes and colour variants, patterns produced in Photoshop CS5.

My second idea is this creative design that I found inspiring from sound and vision's illustrations, who have also produced similar work for music companies. In comparison to my first idea I also submitted this design in other scales and colour variants due the paper stock. Unfortunately the designs were not quite what they were looking for as the logos appeared static and placed while they were looking for a design that would gel into their logo's some more. It was quite a large learning curve for this small project and I have gained a lot more professional skill doing these.

Clean Illustration, produced using Illustrator CS5

logo process for personal portfolio and blog

I have recently added a personal logo tag for my professional art portfolio, the process in the image is from top to bottom. I had difficulty with the fonts in the beginning because of  difficulty finding a strong font that was also legible for logo, using thin fonts for a subheading was not suitable for the logo either. The end result of this design is 'SVW ARTS' with a spot colour transition to differentiate the two words without needing to use too much word spacing,.