In the past month or so I’ve been trying to work on illustrations and designs everyday, and found that contests and competitions are the best way to do so. Having parameters and guidelines helps me focus on a project and always gives me a better result.
This piece is for the World Collabs Challenge at Abduzeedo in collaboration with James White of Signalnoise. The intention of the challenge is to work with a great designer’s PSD and apply your own style and twist to it. So check it out!
Here’s the slate/intro for the upcoming Frozen Four coverage by RIT sportszone. It was another quick turnaround, but I really like the final result. Comments are welcome!
From Vimeo:
Intro Animation for RIT Sportszone and University News’ coverage of the 2010 NCAA Frozen Four playoffs. I designe the layout and effects in Photoshop, then animated the layers in After Effects. The shatter particles were created in Cinema 4D with 3 different explosion renders and composited into the final animation.
Sound design by Steve Czompo. Created under executive producers Mark Fragale and Steve Wunrow at the Wallace Center ETC Production Services at RIT.
I tweeted, facebooked and talked about it, and here it is. Was a rush project – lots of nights and weekends, but I pulled it off with the help of my creative students Mike Dennery and Ryan Dixon, and the editorial stylings of Amanda Wade.
From Vimeo:
30 second intro for the 2010 season of Sportszone Live’s tiger lacrosse coverage. I produced, illustrated and animated the intro with some creative input, illustrations, and single-frame animations from New Media Design students Mike Dennery and Ryan Dixon. A special thanks to Amanda Wade for sifting through and cutting the source footage from last season.
Created at RIT, in The Wallace Center’s ETC Production Services group under executive producers Jim Watters, Steve Wunrow and Mark Fragale.
I’ve been a big fan of psdTuts+ for awhile, when they tweeted about their sister site’s contest. aeTuts+ was having an awesome March design competition and I got started!
I used this as an opportunity to try different styles and apply some of the techniques I’ve been building up in the past year from several tutorials (psdTuts in particular) and personal projects, too. While I didn’t quite make it to the voting stage, I still had alot of fun. Below are my final 4 designs as low res version. Full resolution is coming soon.
I won the competition over at the Leaky Cauldron (yay!), so I wanted to post some process work to show how I built the illustration from the bottom up. Below is the breakdown
First, I blocked out the scene using a big soft brush to plan the overall layout.
Next, I added the sky and water. For the sky I used a series of rough, pastel brushes combined with some soft brushes for shadows and some watercolor brushes for details and complexity.
For the water I made a custom brush using a photographic reference. I painted over the highlights of the water, converted to B&W and assigned it as a Photoshop brush.
The sun rays were achieved by merging filtering a layer with “Difference Clouds” and merging it with a layer that I ran the “Add Noise” filter to. I then applied a zoom blur to the merged layer, changed blend mode to screen, and moved and masked it till it looked good.
Here I added the mountains in the background. This was a long process, but was worth it. I made 3 or 4 mountains and scaled and masked them to fit together, then added more and more detail and contrast with a rough pastel brush. I quickly rendered a beach and a background, then painted the trees on top.
I duplicated the previous sun rays layer, scaled it up, and blurred it to add some subtle sun beams in the foreground. For the fog, I duplicated the background clouds layer, tweaked the curves, tweaked the mask and changed the blend mode to screen.
Finally, I added my color correction layers. I added a couple color fill layers at 90% fill and masked them out in certain areas so some of the colors came through. I also added a curves adjustment layer, and added another scanned paper layer over the dragon for more details.
For the overall paper effect, I used different scanned paper images and used multiply and color burn to create a coppery, aged parchment look. I also did an overall noise filter so the different parts would feel more cohesive. Then I just added the text, using some watercolor brushes to give some texture. THAT’S IT!
Finally finished that illustration! It was for a contest over at the Leaky Cauldron, a great Harry Potter fan site. The objective was to illustrate a scene from any of the 7 HP books, and have that scene evoke the same emotion or sentiment as the text did.
I actually began the illustration thinking I would portray Dumbledore’s funeral. While it was a sad part of the books, there was still a sense of camaraderie and honor as hundreds gathered to attend. As I began illustrating the scenic background however, I kept returning to the chapter in Deathly Hallows. This made it obvious that the latter had such a strong impact on me that I would have to illustrate that instead.
So I chose the beginning of chapter 27. It follows a long, exhausting ordeal from the previous chapter at Gringott’s bank and starts with stunning imagery and captures the sense of tiredness and preparation for an overwhelming journey ahead. It’s the last time the trio is together before the final, epic events of the books’ finale, so there’s an overwhelming sense of quiet and retrospect.
Here it is! Hope you like it. Click the image for larger version.
Working on something new at the moment. Trying to get the background down before moving onto the main scene. I’m going for a golden, dreamlike sunrise.
The water effect is coming along nicely. I used a reference photo and make a selection of highlights, tweaked them a bit, and converted to black and white to use as a brush. I did the same thing for the lowlights. Then I applied a midtone blue and painted lowlights and highlights on a layer above. Will probably go in by hand later and intensify the contrast in the foreground.
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Some more work done on the Gonna Be 3D type illustration. Really liking the look but I feel like it might be missing something. I have some photo ideas for compositing, but for now I’ll keep it as-is.
Started work on the matte painting. Spent a lot of time finding some source imagery – a combination of stock photos, personal photos (some from freshman year) and some cg-texture sexiness.
Here is the start of the project. Once I identified some photography I started blocking the scene out, figuring out the camera angle and the geography. I used some rudimentary masks and retouching to get things looking right. Once everything is blocked out I will start refining the masks, adding some lighting effects, and finally add some details like the shoreline, waves, and maybe some birds or other wildlife.
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