icon dump

Sometimes at work I get to do really big projects like animate a song. Or a cool online game. Or illustrate books I wrote. Sometimes there's a lot of busy-work. It's all good, it keeps life from getting dull. Lately I've been making icons of words for a game that teaches syllables. Here's a taste from the 40 I've done (40 more on the horizon).

the mighty nathor

Yet another co-worker doing a cool thing (see yesterday's post about Jed's kickstarter).

Nate Baertsch is starting his own 30-day challenge. A connoisseur of toys, he'll be posting a sketch a day for August, each a potential design for a toy/action figure. Have fun Nate!

day 14: bevels

I think Sundays will be good to do some kind of tip or tutorial or some such thing like that. Make it a weekly thing. That being said, today I think I'll talk about the Bevel Blending Option in Photoshop. I used to avoid it like the plague. It always made me think of bad logos and ugly UI buttons. But I've been using it more and more lately. Maybe I shouldn't, but I'm kind of liking it.

Puppets made in Photoshop for animating in After Effects

Right click on  your layer and click Blending Options... or just double click on the layer's thumbnail.

If you've never used the bevel tool, you can find it in the Blending Options palette for a layer. I try to keep it on the subtle side so it's not too obnoxious. It's usually in the 1 or 2 pixel range. In addition to adjusting Size and Soften, don't forget to try Depth as well.

Kind of a tangent, but I thought I'd show the steps of how I made those animals above. These were made to animate, and the bevel, along with a little drop shadow, gives them just enough dimension to seem more like actual little paper cutout puppets. Sort of. Anyway...

Original sketch. I was looking at Oaxacan folk art when designing these guys.

I brought the sketch into Flash and made all the separate pieces on different layers. Then I exploded them out so nothing overlapped, and exported the pieces as a png. I reassembled in Photoshop, lining up all the pieces on separate layers.

I have folders full of textures and fabrics. Mayang Textures is a great resource.

Here's a piece of tweed I found and then played with different colors and layer properties until I got something I liked.

I want to add the texture to the top shell. When I hold down the Command key and click on the shell layer thumbnail, it selects the shell. (The shell layer doesn't have to be selected to do this.)

Making sure you have the texture layer selected, click on the little gray box with the white circle at the bottom of the layers palette. This makes a mask from your earlier selection. If you click on the chain between the mask and the layer thumbnail, then make sure the layer thumbnail is selected, you can move the texture around beneath the mask to position it just how you'd like. Then add your blending options, and you're done!

Here's another example of using the bevel tool. The illustrations in this project were meant to be those chipboard type stickers in scrapbooks. So after making the characters in Flash, I brought them into Photoshop. I Command clicked on the layer thumbnail to select the image and then in Select>Modify>Expand... I expanded the selection about 10 pixels or so, then on a separate layer filled it that cream color. I then added the Bevel to the cream layer.

And one final little step-by-step with bevels. Sometimes the bevel tool isn't enough and I have to paint in my own bevel.

Finished illustration for three rhyming words in Russian: Picture, Car and Tire (or was it Wheel? don't remember.)

Character imported from Flash.

Standard Bevel and Drop Shadow applied to the layer.

Because this guy wasn't in lots of pieces like the armadillo, the standard bevel wouldn't cut it. I had to go in and paint some of my own bevels and shadows. Then I added a little bit of shading and accents to finish him off.

 And thus, there is how I use the Bevel tool.

day 11: quackers

From today's Vision Conference event...

day 10: field trip

Every July at Imagine Learning, we have a week-long Vision Conference. There are motivational speakers, company updates, training, teamy togetherness, fun-time activities and lots of food. Today the Art Department went on a field trip up to Salt Lake. We spent the morning at the new Rio Tinto Natural History Museum at the University of Utah. It was fabulous! It just opened in November. Beautiful architecture and engaging well-designed exhibits made it a great trip. I'm not a natural history or dinosaur buff, so while it was interesting, I didn't looooooove it. But it was a nice visit. I'd definitely recommend taking the fam to it.

After lunch we headed over to The Leonardo, a new contemporary art museum in downtown Salt Lake. We met up with the Writers and split up into teams to go on a scavenger hunt through the exhibits. We were a slacker team, and ultimately gave up and did a multi-tasking experiment. We each spit into our own cup for about 5 minutes and then memorized letters while doing math problems. The idea is to see if multi-tasking is a genetic trait. We'll have to wait until October to find out the results. Btw, I am not an excellent multi-tasker.

The museum was lovely. There were some neat exhibits. But I kinda don't really care all that much about contemporary installation art. So no big rush to go back, but I'd be interested to see what new exhibits pass through.

day 5: freelance v. inhouse

Imagine Learning inhouse flyer for trip to Soldier's Hollow.

Today is my seven year anniversary working at Imagine Learning. It's a good gig and I work with some great people. The art team has doubled in the past year and a half. For the longest time it just just me, Jim Madsen and Nate Baertsch. Then Jed Henry came along to spice things up. And last fall we hired Hollie Hibbert and Jake Parker. All very talented folk. Check 'em out, they've all got really interesting things going on.

Illustration for The Friend Magazine.

One thing we all have in common besides working at Imagine Learning is that we all do freelance. Students like to ask which is better: freelance or inhouse? I guess ultimately it comes down to opportunity and personality. I prefer having to get up and go somewhere else to work. I like having the security of the paycheck and health insurance. But some people prefer to be their own boss and like the flexibility that comes with the freelance life. I, personally, was terrible at it. I was bad at dealing with the financial side and was always broke. And was maybe going a little stir crazy being by myself all day every day.

Anyway, not much going on today. I've been flat on my back most of the day, which was annoying as I have a lot to do. At least the cat was being cuddly and made for a nice heating pad on my side.

day 3: happy july 4th!

 

Happy Fourth of July to those of the American persuasion. Hope you are enjoying a lovely holiday! Here was my take on the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I illustrated a little book about Ben Franklin at Imagine Learning a few years ago. I am crap at caricatures and likenesses, so this is the style I came up with to help me fake it. :) And since it's a holiday, a brief step-by-step for your perusing pleasure.

Thumbnail: I work very hard at accuracy at this stage... heh. This is the thinking stage, and this is what my thumbnails generally look like. Lots of smiley faces.

 

Here's the finished sketch. Already you can see I keep the background separate from the foreground elements.

 

Finished line drawing. I have a brush that makes a more pencilly line I made from the default spatter brushes. Background and foreground lines on separate layers. I grabbed a copy of the Declaration of Independence form online and used the Transform/Warp tool to make it fit into my drawing. I set that layer to Mulitply so whatever color underneath will show through.

 

Color fills and some simple shading. I use lots of layers at this point. There's a layer for hair, a layer for skin, layer for coats, layer for vests, etc etc. I fill in a flat color for the area and then can set the layer to Preserve Transparency. Then the shading is super fast, and it's easy to select areas or adjust individual colors.

Getting closer to done. The foreground color layers and lines have all been merged together. I used the Blending Options to add a Drop Shadow. Then I went in with my rough pencilly brush and added more scribbly lines and details.

 

And here's the final with text. I added a few old paper textures over the top set to Overlay and Soft Light, and there you go!

day 1: 30 day blogging challenge

Hello vast tubes of the internets! I'm going to try something new. I am going to post a new entry every day for the next 30 days. The posts will be art/illustration-related, but that's about as far as I'm going to worry about structure. I figure I'll post what I'm working on, what I'm thinking about, things I find interesting or inspiring. We'll see where it goes.

Why do this? Mostly I think it's to help me get into a routine of making time for inspiration and personal projects. I get so busy with the full-time job and freelance projects that I don't make time to just be creative.

How'd this come about, you wonder? It started over the weekend. A friend of mine is heading off to grad school in few weeks, so we decided to have a tiki party before she left. I was in charge of decorations. And if I was having a tiki party at my house, I of course needed a giant tiki head with glowing eyes and smoke that billowed from its nostrils.

 It was a busy week, so I didn't get started until Saturday morning. Lots of trial and error, but I love the process of troubleshooting and making it up as I go. Sadly the dry ice billowing smoke part did not work on first try, and I ran out of time to fiddle with it, but I think it turned out pretty fun nonetheless. Best happy accident: the spray paint disintegrated the top layer of foam and gave it a cool rough rocky texture. Sweet!
 

I spend the majority of my time sitting at a computer. All of my illustration is digital. Half the time I can't even find paper or pencils. While I enjoy Photoshop and Flash and After Effects, I do miss the act of making a mess and actually creating a physical object. Things like this tiki project get me re-energized and excited to create more stuff! So I've got all this energy, but was not sure how best to channel it.

I've been working on animating the song Pin Pón (a traditional Spanish kid's song.)  This morning I had to make a couple fixes and was re-rendering the intro. The render ended up taking about an hour, so while waiting I read Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. Great little book full of inspiring ideas. One of the suggestions is to keep a logbook, which I'm planning to do analog-style. But many of Kleon's ideas synthesized for me with another...

Last year, good pal illustrator Jim Madsen told me about this Ted Talk by Matt Cutts. It's a quick 3 minute talk about trying new things for 30 days. That concept has been floating around in the back of my head for a while, but until today I didn't have a strong conviction of anything I wanted to try. So for whatever reason this 30 day blog idea hit, so that's what I'm gonna do for the rest of the month.

Wish me luck!

Imagine Learning Pic Spam

It's a Friday afternoon and I just finished a big project, so how about an Imagine Learning Pic Spam (tm)? I haven't posted any IL stuff for awhile, so this should be swell. A couple months ago we did a whole pile of illustrations for some little books. These were all about how to do them as fast as possible, so lots of shortcut experiments were done. Below are some of the less horrible results...

And then one of the books is a biography of ME. Actually there are two books about me. One is an example of a memoir, which I then illustrated. The other is the biography, but uses photos so won't bother posting that one.

Me making crafty things at the foot of my mother's sewing machine.

 

Visiting Disney Feature Animation and deciding I don't really want to be an animator.

At my desk at Imagine Learning! Please note I have since quite drinking Diet Coke. Really. It'll stick this time, I swear! Also, I now have a lovely 27" iMac. So pretty.

Have a great weekend! I am off to Park City for a two-day encaustic painting workshop with Jeff Juhlin. Good times.

Booster's Costume Creator

I better post this before it's actually Halloween! I did the artwork for this fun little ecard deal at Imagine Learning. Pick from two of the Imagine Learning characters, then click to change their costume and background. Then send it to a friend! Or lots of friends! Or casual acquaintances!

I always love doing these flipbook sorts of things. It's a fun challenge to get all the pieces to work together properly, plus, gotta love making costumes. We decided to make it a little "educational" - each character got three historical figure costumes plus one halloween-style costume, plus one Imagine Learning character costume. So much fun to make.

The rest of the Marketing team did a great job with the opening sequence, the site design, music, programming, writing, they are a great bunch to work with. Thanks guys!