Last summer I played Softball on a team with a long-running history of hilarious team names. That year was no exception. I made our logo and we got these printed large and proud on our shirts and looked fab all season.
I posted this one earlier as a collection, but figured it deserved its own post.
Here’s an older drawing I did from a photo of my bro Adam and our family dog Baca. They’re both a lot older and bigger now.
Design for the Vibes dodgeball team shirt. It was pretty hard to make a character out of a phone that looked like it could kick ass at dodgeball so I took a different approach.
The non-basic app icons falling off the phone are the logos of the other companies competing in the tournament.
Here’s the team all geared up.
A bunch of us at Vibes have entered the Chase Corporate Challenge race. 3.5 miles of pavement pounding in downtown Chicago. Here’s the logo I designed for our shirts. I’ll post photos when they’re printed.
Here’s how I made it
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1. Sketch
I made a few sketches using my running shoe as a reference. I chose this one and took a picture of it with the Photo Booth app.
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2. Start a-Vectorin’!
In Illustrator, I placed the scanned image as the top layer, set it’s opacity to 30% and it’s blending mode to Multiple. This let me create the vector shapes underneath the scan while using it as a reference.
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3. BAD Vectors!!!
So here’s a view of the finished illustration that shows all of the vector shapes that make it up. The negative shapes between the white parts of the illustration are actually strokes. This is kind of a disaster when trying to print on a shirt because you really only want one shape to describe the white image.
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4. Ahh, that’s better
After about an hour of cleaning up the vectors, I’m done. Check out the difference between this version and the one above it. Way cleaner and easier for a printer to interpret where the ink needs to go.
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5. Halftone
Because this is a one colour print (white on blue shirt), I needed to convert the faint speech bubble behind the shoe into a halftone pattern. This lets the printer simulate a fainter shade of the color it’s printing.
I’ve been having too much coffee at work.
On a shirt
Here’s the design as it might appear on a shirt. I used a halftone pattern to fade out the sunshine rays and shadow.
Got down with a sketchbook on Sunday morning and made this. Pencils into Photoshop. I’ve been thinking of putting together about 10 images in this style or so and printing some shirts eventually.
It’s a pencil drawing coloured in Photoshop.
Here’s a scan of the original.
Over the years I’ve worked on a bunch of web projects and have somehow managed to work the Pawns into most of them. The early green Pawns are from a (now gone) Facebook application called Up4 and the ones at the end are from my time at Zeep. They’ve also been making appearances in various demos and presentations at my current company, Vibes.
Godspeed you Pawns!
A design I made a while ago and submitted to Threadless.
Guitar robot based on my old Yamaha acoustic.
Quick illustration for a section in an internal newsletter about an RSS project. Inspired by Leo Blanchette’s RSS Robot.
A blast from the past, but one of my favourites.
Working on a drawing of a boombox/tuba combo. Drew this from a picture of myself. Might just do a drawing of the boombox itself though, not sure if the figure adds much to the concept.
I’ve been enjoying drawing hands lately and drew these concepts. I’ll probably make some finished pieces in a similar style.
Gave myself an assignment to do a piece over the weekend and here’s the second. This is Sharpie and Tombo Markers on marker paper – 17×11.
Gave myself an assignment to do a piece over the weekend and here it is. This is Sharpie and Tombo Markers on marker paper – 17×11.
Here’s the second in the series.
I’ve always liked drawing with Sharpie pens and have started drawing on small canvases. I made this for my roommate Benita for her birthday.
I’ve got another on the go which I’ll post sometime over the weekend when I finish it.
I’ve received quite a few comments and emails asking if I’d print this design on a shirt. I caved to the pressure, and now you can…
…buy it on a T-shirt!
Get it at my RedBubble store! →
I’ve been playing a bit of magic again, and loving the awesome artwork. I did a cover of one the cards I liked this morning. It’s a work in progress.
Things to remember:
- Use a low opacity brushes to slowly build up colour
- Try to find a better way to paint the background, large protoshop brushes leave their telltale signs (especially with lowered opacity)
I’m happy with it so far. Right now the city in the background and the wizard pretty much share the same colour scheme. I should try to differentiate that a little bit to bring him to the forefront. Maybe I can do some out of focus type blur for the background.
I had trouble mimicking the range of colours in the spirit thing from the original. There’s some yellow / beige / peach / green / blue in there and it all somehow fits together. Something to keep working on.
Here’s the original:
About a week ago I picked up a copy of ImagineFX, a digital sci-fi art magazine. It’s a really great magazine, full awesome art and tutorials. Anyway, it inspired me to do some digital painting of my own.
Lately I’ve been learning to play blues on my acoustic guitar, so I wanted to paint a guitarist. I like the look of those old school guys, but none of them are that recognizable (at least to me), so I picked Mark Knopfler instead.
Here’s what I came up with:
I’m pretty pleased, but also feel that it needs a bit more work to feel really finished.
Here’s how it went down
I used this reference photo.
I placed the photo into my Photoshop CS2 document and started painting using my small 4×5 Wacom Graphire tablet.
First, I tried painting from the unaltered original photo but it wasn’t turning out very well. I was having a hard time picking out the key shapes and details, and was also screwing up the proportions.
Here’s how it looked:
Not satisified, I decided to adjust the contrast (via the Curves dialog) of the original photo to help simply the image. Once I was happy with the contrast adjustment, i started painting.
This helped a lot, and my painting was fairly close to the original.
Here it is:
I used a chalky brush to define the outside of the black areas to make it seem more like a non-digial piece. I found a brown paper texture and a photo of a Fender Stratocaster to complete the piece.
In the future, I plan to use this technique as a starting point to a painting. Once I establish the general shapes / shadows, I can fill in the smaller details.
I was drawing some pigs for Donna’s mom, overdosed on cuteness, and came up with Griswald.
And here are the cute ones:
I was looking through my projects folder and found this motorcycle. I remember at the time that I was painting it, I was really happy about the new techniques I was learning about. I was also really excited about maintaining momentum and to keep on painting and learning. That was two months ago and I haven’t finished it. Regardless, here it is. I’ll make some time to finish it soon.
I thought I liked painting. Rather, I wanted to like painting. Turns out I don’t. I wanted to like it like I like drawing. But it’s not the same. I don’t have the same control. What I visualize in my head doesn’t materialize. Maybe it’s because I never learned to think like a painter. I can certainly think like a drawer. Or any other piece of furniture.
Maybe my frustration is limited to physical paint. I’ve had better success with digital painting.
