Self Initiated Project Final Images

The project personally turned out to be a great success, it took me roughly four days to get the final images done, with balancing my hours at my day job. I now have another string to my bow which I will proudly add to my portfolio to boost my storytelling, story boarding and my general all round skills as an illustrator.

I'll be uploading these on my other sites soon though I will want to upload the full sizes of each image under a new section. I believe it is now time to move to another time and build my own personal website from scratch.

Best used with either the 'screen' or 'soft light' filters under blending options in Photoshop under a mid level opacity setting. Don't forget to set layer masks if you with to take parts of the image away.

Self Initiated Project Working Progress

I've illustrated a small short story! cute and tragic, dark and bright. I have attempted to combine my vector and design skills with my restrained illustration style to create a personal way of image making. I beleive with the constantly evolving design and creative industry, multiple format outputs is necessary.

I already had a rough idea of what I wanted to do in my head before I started story boarding, something restrictive and dark that I could play with. With roughly twenty panels after some edits, I had a base for what I wanted to paint. Originally I was going to make the character a human child, though for multiple reasons I chose a minimalist looking animal instead, Better character design for this context of plot, cute looking animals are also great to use in stories! The other reason why I changed the character was because It would look too similar to the indie game LIMBO.

First step was to draw out the base of the image in 'Corel' very simple and easy to use brushes that work perfectly with my tablet. After the inital drawings were done, I exported all of them into .psd files and switched over to Photoshop.

Next I added textures and final touches from stock which I take with my camera (I'll attach the stock image for free in my next blog post it's a perfect rock texture for caverns) and vectors if needed for the monsters.

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.