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This is where I play with things that come my way on the digital front.
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So, let me see, the font is called All Used Up and I have no idea where I got it. One of the textures come from Media Militia and the others come from Urban Dirty. There is also one from Treasa Lynch but you can’t see it because it’s been manipulated such that you can’t. This has been done for a project that I’m not sure is really under control yet. I had this idea in my head for ages but I have been so busy it’s been hard to find time to sit down and do these things.
So. If, late at night, you run a yahoo search on the text “I love you” on your iPhone (in the interests of research), you will find lots of very happy bunny type work. Very soppy. Very, uhem, pink. The furry toy equivalent of graphic design. I had in my head something a bit more extreme – I may be an extreme kind of person, who knows – where the text “I love you” ran straight through a heart, almost like a dagger. I didn’t want to use a fluffy bunny type of script to do it either.I wanted something a little harder and edgier and this is pretty much the second iteration of the design. The first was nothing like what I wanted to achieve. The object of stuff like this is to highlight gaps in my Photoshop skills and this identified a few. Firstly I cannot generate 3D text in Photoshop. Most of the tutorials I looked at involved tracking down Illustrator which I don’t currently have, or, in one expensive moment, Cinema 4D. I eventually found Xara 3D6 which was also recommended to me, via Twitter, by Richard. It is a superb piece of 3D text software but their purchase and download process sucks, in my limited experience. Anyway. Xara3D reads from your fonts folder which was handy enough because I wanted to use a grungy kind of font and my favourite of late is Smudgers which I probably picked up from dafont at some stage. It’s by Jelloween. So I generated the text in Xara 3D and played around with in there. I applied a MediaMilitia mixed media texture while I was in there to get some interesting and edgy colour into the statement. Then I converted it to png because I wanted a transparent background in Photoshop. In Photoshop, I played around with the Warp tool and the transform tool to get the perspective I wanted. Then I duplicated the layer. When I had that, I started to build the heart. The heart turned out to be the hardest piece of the puzzle to get some way right (I don’t think this is even close to being right but it’s a guideline for when I go at this again. The heart was based on a custom shape in Photoshop, painted red by default and then attacked with assorted transform tools to get a perspective that I could conceivably use the text to stab the heart, basically. The heart went through an extrude filter followed by a plastic wrap filter. Then I duplicated it, shrank it, and converted the smaller version to black and white. Then I duplicated it again, shrank it a little bit smaller again and applied a lensflare to the top right and corner. Then I duplicated it again (yes, that’s four hearts) and applied a lens blur, not sure which actually. I was aiming for Gaussian but may have missed it. I used layermasks to adjust how much of what I wanted to appear. I used layermasks also to adjust how much of the text got seen. You need to arrange the layer order quite carefully with this, ie, bottom layer is text, middle layers are the heart, top layer is the text. When all that was done, I decided to fill in the background with a black and white gradient and a paper texture on top of it in overlay mode. The paper texture came from Bittbox. On top of everything I put a red photo filter to go some way towards softening the top right hand corner white. The original plan was to hang the heart/text element in something like a dark sky. The whole structure was – and I feel really weird saying stuff like this – to resemble a large space ship in the sky. I did have some considerations about placing basically black text against a basically black sky. The other issue is the heart covers over elements of the texture detail from the text which is regrettable. It isn’t helped by the fact that the text “I love you” is basically short on length. In terms of identifying some lacunae on the skill set, I have a vision of what the heart should look like which is basically a bit like a 3D glass button, heart shaped, and I have no idea quite how to soften the edges to achieve this. I suspect selection/feathering would help here. Anyway, this is iteration 2 of the concept, and hopefully, at some point, I will get through iteration 3 with a heart more in keeping with the inner vision. Last night I finished a book called Tra which is a collection of 25 Irish beach photographs which I have taken. You’ll find it here. Today I set a brief to start creating a poster campaign to advertise Ireland as a tourism destination. It’s a rotten year to do try and do this because of the volcanic ash messing up the flights big time this year. However, that’s irrelevant to me from the purposes of carrying out this exercise. Ireland has always been heavily dependent on tourism and some years ago they moved from depending on historic and scenery interest to all the things you could do in Ireland by way of action sports. Despite the cold, it can be one of the best surfing destinations in the world, we have a lot of climbing options, and a load of other related stuff. Someone in FailteIreland probably knows a whole lot mrore about it. Anyway, in summary the brief was:
I have three posters coming up (they are hosted on the flickr account by the way) and the one regret I have so far – but this will be an ongoing project I suspect – is that I have no cityscape. On the other hand selling Dublin isn’t always easy. (in fact the one idea I have probably isn’t appropriate for a poster campaign but anyway…) Anyway, out of the three posters, I have Galway, Surfing in Cork and Scenery in Mayo. Coincidentally these photographs were all handily arranged on my hard drive for ease of access. The first one I did was the surfing one. This is because the photograph came from a bunch of photographs that were shortlisted for the beaches book. It’s Inchydoney in Cork. Here it is:
One of the biggest problems I had at this stage – and I had it with the two kite magazine coverlayouts as well – was typeface selection. I really need to look at my font collection and see if there isn’t any way I can sort them more effectively. Maybe CS5 will allow me to do stuff like that – I need to check. Anyway. Eventually I went with the TallPaul script because I wanted something slightly informal but 10million miles away from Comic Sans. I liked this one because it was quite personal…friendly. I’d looked at a bunch of grunge fonts that I have lying around the place but they were too in your face and not really welcoming enough. When I chose TallPaul, I hung onto it for the three pieces for consistency’s sake. Having looked at it now, I really like it a lot and it will join AngryBlue on my list of preferred fonts. It’s not a very long list actually, as font lists go. Anyway, I’m a lousy copywriter which is why I don’t work in advertising so the textual units for the work didn’t come easy. The beach concerned, Inchydoney, is where I’ve done almost all my surfing lessons apart from some trips to Castlegregory in Kerry and Lahinch in Clare. If you’re into surfing at all, off the coast of Lahinch is Aileens which is one of the striking waves in the Big Wave surfing world. As an aside I think she’s one ugly, hungry looking wave. I wouldn’t go near her but she’s getting popular now. That aside, despite the arguments about busy beaches and stuff – I don’t think we really know what busy beaches mean – I chose this photograph which I took a day I went surfing myself by the way – I chose this to suggest that Ireland was quiet enough on the surfing front, something which would probably get me killed by a few surfers. As the beach is one of the WKBs (well known beaches) where we teach starters I’m really not going to comment on that one. Either way, the original plan for the piece was to say something like “How busy is it in Huntingdon today?” and suggest that Ireland was an attractive alternative. There were two problems with this. 1) it limited the potential market for the piece to California and 2) anyone in Ireland would laugh at it. So I changed that a little. I didn’t want to clutter up the image of a desertedish beach with lots of text so that’s all there is on it.It’s very clearly an international campaign type poster though because it refers to Ireland being a flight away. I do have about 30000 kitesurfing photographs so was thinking about concentrating on the action sports side of things. But I also wanted to do something that could be used within Ireland. We’ve had lots of attempts to do this. There are rumoured to be people in Dublin who’ve been on every Spanish Costa but who have never been further west than Liffey Valley Shopping Center. I also – subconsciously – was looking at the idea of siuggesting that life outside Dublin could be good. For a lot of people, life outside Ireland means somewhere in Kildare, Louth or Meath commuting in. I’m not sure Galway was quite what they had in mind.
This is Salthill in Galway and the idea was to show how close the urban could be to the peaceful. Galway’s weather helped a lot the day I shot the photograph. Additionally, the slogan could be localised for the specific market I was trying to push. For the last one, I wanted to highlight the isolation in Ireland and the fact that even though it was isolated, it was still connected. I chose a picture taken from Mayo. Where the photograph was taken there definitely is mobile coverage although it gets a bit patchy further west.
Mayo is an interesting case because their tourism authority have made several efforts to get intra-Ireland tourism going. They’re slightly screwed by the weather which in my experience is changeable at best. However, all that’s slightly outside the remit of this poster. Again, the objective was to get some brand identity in there clearly but unclutteringly and give the location its USP. I’ve never done anything like this. I’ve done the odd special poster or design for people in the past but this is something a little more targetted. The Irish tourism authorities have sufficient agencies running campaigns and god knows we’re going to get the sailing frat into Galway in 2 years’ time anyway. I’m not really sure where to get viable crit of this sort of stuff. I know I need it,. Because I wanted to try.
Ages ago, when they first saw the print of it, someone told me they thought that photograph would make a nice magazine cover. I never did anything much with it but it was at the back of my mind as I looked for something to throw up here, something a bit different. So I needed lots of things. To start with, I just had the photograph which is one of my own, taken on a trip to Western Sahara a few years ago, but I needed a magazine title. The good ones, like Kiteworld and Kitesurf and Kitesurfing Magazine were all gone. So I needed something a little punchy, and zingy. When I came up with KiteFever, I then needed a nice font to headline it. I don’t know a lot about the theory behind layout design so am depending on working out what I like and don’t like myself. I don’t much like the fonts used by Kitesurf or Kiteworld. They, on the other hand, seem to be commercially viable. I’m not. So leaving that detail aside, I wanted something a little grungy, blocky and not too scripty. The one I chose was Smudgers which came from dafont at some point. It’s not my default headline font of choice – usually I use AngryBlue but it lacked the emphasis I was looking for whereas Smudgers had that bit of extra oomph.It’s a Tjarda Koster font and her (I think it’s a her) deviantart is here. The content element font is Futura, in two styles, Book for the magazine tagline and secondary stories, and Bold for the headline story. So, that’s the basic tools saga. What did I do to get here? Well I briefly made up a possible front cover contents list. It consisted of:
I assumed that if the magazine was going to be directed anywhere, it’d be at the kitesurfing community in Ireland mainly because I know more about them. This made getting some possible stories that bit easier because a) we’ve just finished one big kite festival and b) we’ve a second one coming up. So much for the two smaller stories. The two bigger stories were weather related – one being the summer is back, one being you won’t be flying anywhere much because of a volcano in iceland. In truth, the stories could have been anything – I just randomly needed elements for the cover design. The photograph was an easy choice because it had plenty of empty space in it for the text. The bit I found incredibly hard was the typeface selection. Put simply, while I use typefaces for headers on photographs on a regular basis, this was completely different because I was aiming for a different impact. On balance, it turned out to be the hardest part of the exercise. The cover itself is a bit counter intuitive because it’s black and white. In adventure sports magazines terms, this is highly unusual. The next one I do will almost certainly be colour and I will do a few if only to see if I am learning anything from the exercise. ____________________ One day later.
I asked for and got feedback from a couple of friends and one comment that came back was that the mono made the cover look a bit flat. So here is another one in colour. I decided during the week that I wanted to change my avatar on various places like twitter and skype and pixie itself. So I did this.
I had some misgivings at first – in part it’s because although I use a lot of photographs of myself as a basis for digital art work, this seemed to lay me bare in some respects. Intially when I was going to replace the avatar, I was going to use the last Lamb piece (I’m going to do this song again to be honest) but felt it was overdone for an image that most people were only ever going to see as about 15mm by 15mm. I’m minded to do more of these, however, and will do them for other people if they are interested. In the meantime I am going to start more work on fantasy landscapes as well and try and enter more of the Photoshop mag competitions purely for discipline reasons. I’m also looking into doing other stuff like concept art for CD covers and movie posters and the like so thigns are likely to get kind of interesting in here. The site will at some point get a design overhaul so that it looks less like Atahuelpa and more like my own design. this will take a while though. On the product front, a design is gone to prototype status at Cafépress – this means I did a design, have ordered up one for myself and if it looks any good, I’ll put a Cafépress shop together and see how we go. It’s a kitesurfer water bottle and Cafépress got my attention because they print onto Sigg water bottles which I love.
It’s 10.30pm. I have been working on this since oh, about 7 and this is iteration 3. During the last 3 hours I have struggled with shapes (THEY WILL NOT DO WHAT I WANT THEM TO DO) and I gave up on the plan to have blood dripping out of the edge of the heartshaped bit you can’t see. In real terms, this has been hard to do from a technical point of view. Every day I get a feed of terrific digital art from a couple of sites linked in the sidebar and I get more inspired. Currently, inspiration is running far ahead of skill but I will get there. The song, if you don’t know it, is here. iTunes tells me it’s the most played track in my library but I happen to know that this is not true – changes to my hardware reset counts several times and at a guess, Escape from Pressure by the At Home Project has more plays. For me, it’s a slightly bittersweet song – the lyrics and the music are somewhat at odds, the lyrics full of love, the music sounds more full of regret. I do love the arrangement though. I’ve a feeling I’m going to look at this tomorrow and go “nah”, have to correct this or that, or add the other. Also, I’m going to actually have to shoot a few more photographs for this; I can only use the same base photographs so often.
This is a concept poster for a nightclub which does not exist. So don’t go asking me for it. It is not open. It only exists in my mind. Resources came from: iStock, Urban Dirty, Arbenting, ImageAfter, Lassekorsgard, ImagineFX. The halftone brush is from media Militia. Soundtrack for the art work was Tiesto’s ClubLife. I’m planning, when I have time (when that will be is anyone’s guess) to redesign the layout of this particular corner of LivingForLight which will hopefully make it better for getting the superwide images in. When I finished the Cosmic Love piece, I realised that I could line up the flames to work as hair, for want of a better description. When I had a quick look through what I had in the way of stock to do this, it was back to the photograph used for the Cosmic Love piece which is a little ironic. She looks a whole lot different, the piece is a whole lot more unhappy I think. Anyway.
The model is from Turbo and the flames are from Photo to Go That’s that all that went into this actually. Today’s song is the most excellent Cosmic Love from Florence and the Machine and by way of a contrast it’s not a million miles from the original concept thoughts. I still haven’t started carrying a notebook around.
Okay, some credits, as far as I have them. Pretty much everything came from stock here mainly because I lack on the people photographs for these things.
I don’t know if this song was actually used in the film “Twilight”. Fomr some reason I get the impression that it might not have been. Today’s effort
was not quite supposed to look like this. I am not yet in the habit of carrying a note book around with me to try and remember what it is…what I do remember is that this was going to be a bit warmer. Obviously my mood changed. The thing is, I will almost certainly revisit Incantations at some stage to redo it, maybe a little closer to what I was thinking at lunch time. And I will get a notebook, I swear. As almost everyone I mention this song to – including rabid Massive Attack fans (seriously – 100% of Massiave Attack fans amongst my circle responded the same way) – doesn’t know the song – I don’t know why – here is a link to it on Youtube. For some reason it just gets straight into my heart. The base photograph is of me, and apart from a single texture which I got from BittBox, all the photographs are from my own archive, and include a photograph of me, photographs from 1) Dalkey 2) Killiney 3) Cork (x2) 4) Trim 5) the living room here 6) Garretstown 7) Dollymount Not very much trickery went in to this at all. Basically, we’re talking layer on layer on layer and either they were 1) overlayed or 2) reduced in transparency. Here and there I used a layermask to hide bits and pieces and the only brush I used was 1000pixel round soft. I sort of like it though. |
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some jewellery I own and 9) Sligo. The texture is the musical script and I believe it’s La Mer by Debussy which is somehow appropriate I think. The lyrics are the opening shot from the song.