Josh McDowell

I colored a Scud Page!

2011-04-27T01:41:00.008-04:00

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My cousin is getting married. In San Diego. The weekend before Comic-Con. I immediately began planning a way to convince my wife to spend the money to stay at least a couple of extra days past our original planned trip. I wanted to geek out a bit at a massive comic convention. Turns out my wife is awesome and we're staying. The next hurdle was to procure a pass, but all the passes were sold out. Thus enters Rob Schrab bearing his full-on manliness.

A few years ago Mr. Schrab turned out to be awesome as well. He granted me the privilege of working on his Scud omnibus. He then proved himself even more of a stud by actually printing my name in the credits of the book, something I totally was not expecting. Little did he know that he just bestowed upon me the status of professional in the comic industry. Thanks to him, I was able to apply for pro status with the Con and they gave me some credentials. I like to think Stan Lee himself vets every applicant and he deemed me worthy. So now I'm going. I'm a professional. And I'm excited.

I wanted to thank Rob Schrab for opening the door to Comic-Con and to remind people that he rocks.

Welcome to the Gun Zoo

2011-04-21T16:33:00.012-04:00

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A couple of months ago my friend from high school contacted me and asked me to color a comic that he was working on and pitching to various comic publishers. Being a person who loves to try new mediums of art I answered with an immediate 'yes' and asked him to send me some pages. Once I received them I began the coloring process.

I've never really colored a comic other than one panel that I did for fun a couple of years ago. This means I didn't really have a process or approach to working on an entire page. I'm happy to say after doing a few pages, that I thoroughly enjoy doing this. I often wish I had more time to work on them.

Since I don't really know how it's done in the actual comic book industry, I just kind of made up my process along the way. I began by taking the scanned images and removing the white so that I only had a line drawing. We scanned them in as bitmaps so there would be no anti-aliasing of the blacks which allowed the easy removal of the white. I then began filling in all the flat colors with a lasso tool and paint bucket in photoshop, again keeping aliasing off. I generally kept each panel on it's own layer. I then created a layer for the shading that was separate from the flats layer. Using photoshop's pixel lock option I could easily do line holds on the line art for certain elements like glass or smoke. I did all of this with a wacom tablet.

Below is the final cover. The thumbnail above is a link to more images in various stages. Like always I'm having tremendous fun with this and am already developing an argument to purchase a wacom cintiq for personal use.

Chris Paschal - Writer

Morgan Burke - Pencils and Inks

Josh McDowell (me) - Color

Brian de la Cruz - Logo Design

2010 Purdue Christmas Show

2011-03-25T00:34:00.001-04:00

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This year I was asked to make animated set extentions for the 2010 Purdue Christmas show. The image ended up being projected onto a 50 ft by 30 ft screen and it was pretty exciting to see all my hard work filling up our stage.

Steve Hall was the producer and he came up with the scenes and set design for the show. After talking with him and seeing some of the art style that was used for the stage elements I went to work on my Wacom to draw the sets. I had a lot of fun working with the new brush dynamics in Photoshop CS5 for this project.

After completing the paintings I brought them into After Effects and animated them. All the set extensions were animated and seamlessly looped. I also created transitional animations from day to night, evening to night, northern lights, snowfall, etc.

Overall this was a lot of work, but very fun and rewarding. Below you'll find some of the animated sets I made.

Better Know Your Boilers

2011-03-24T21:38:00.003-04:00

We had an in-game segment for the Purdue women's basketball team where they were asked a series of questions and we'd edit together their answers.

I was asked to make a title slide and a set of question slides that could easily be updated for each game. Scott Horton was the art director on the project and I animated everything in After Effects.

Title Slide:

Example Question Slide:

Excellence in Awesomeness

2011-02-15T16:17:00.008-05:00

My friend, JC Trombley, and I were talking one day about how we'd love to have something that would drive us to make all the crazy ideas we often would talk about, but not take the time to produce. Through these conversations we decide to create Excellence in Awesomenss, a place where we can post work that we make for ourselves in our own styles and explore art and design in the ways we find interesting. For me that means the ability to create things that aren't branded with Purdue University and can use colors other than gold and black. This is exciting for me. Gold and black lurk in my nightmares.

We have a lot of ambitions for this page and are working on a plan to roll out everything at some point, but first we'll start with a blog format where we can post our process and final work and gather feedback from whomever feels the need to espouse knowledge upon us.

We are working on getting the site up and running as I write this and wanted to give you a heads up.

Here is the link: excellenceinawesomeness.com

Here is a wallpaper: PURE AWESOMENESS!

Christmas 2010

2011-01-22T00:16:00.010-05:00

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So I know it's been a bit since I posted last. It's not because I haven't been up to anything. On the contrary, I've been up to many things. First of which being adding a new member to my family. A daughter named Ada. She joined us on December 30th and life's been twice as hectic since.

One of the things I was able to get done right before she came around was to create this year's family Christmas card. This was sent before baby number two so that explains her absence on the card. For some reason my wife let me do whatever I wanted and was even on board with the angry picture thing. Maybe she thinks I'm a genius, but most likely she was nine months pregnant and had other things on her mind. We'll know for sure when next year rolls around and I pitch my next idea to her.

I created the card in Illustrator and added the photos in Photoshop. I drew slight inspiration from Olly Moss. Mainly just using a couple of colors and solid shapes.

Enjoy and Merry Christmas.

Twitter Page Background

2010-08-26T11:16:00.004-04:00

i decided to finally sit down and customize my twitter page which is basically making a background and applying it.

i have never really tried to make a complex tiled background for a webpage and decided this would be a good opportunity to do it. i wanted to make an exclamation/talking/blurb type background to fit in with what twitter is all about so i settled on making a few word bubbles and arranging them into a texture.

i began by creating the word bubbles in illustrator and then bringing them into photoshop and using the offset filter to create the seamless wrap. honestly it turned out to be easier and more fun than i expected.

the tile is below and you can see it in use on my twitter page here. hopefully the colors don't make your eyes bleed. be warned.

New Demo Reel!

2010-08-08T17:13:00.008-04:00

It's been a number of years since I last updated my demo reel so I took some time recently to finally make a new one.

I worked on everything in this reel in some way or created the project in its entirety. The people who worked on some of the pieces in the reel are Scott Horton, Brad Sommer, Adam Ruud, Louie Dierckman, and JC Trombley.

I'll post a shot breakdown with links to the full videos and credits sometime. Below is the reel.

Epic Mix Tape

2010-07-13T20:43:00.013-04:00

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One of my coworkers recently moved to Texas. She asked all of us to make her a mix tape with some of our favorite songs for the drive. I took the opportunity to make it a graphics challenge with everyone involved. In order to win I decided to make the artwork on the disc as epic as possible, even if the songs didn't quite reflect what was depicted in the art. The result was an explosion coming out of a crater with lighting coming out of the ash all tied together with some heavy metal text in pastel colors. ROCK!

Purdue Women's Basketball Opener

2010-05-07T14:38:00.005-04:00

This year we wanted to make a music video style opener for the women's basketball team. We ended up shooting all the players on blue screen and keying them out in After Effects. We shot them in 1080p with a Sony XD Cam so they'd be easier to key out. I then created a light wall to place behind them in photoshop and AE. Brad Sommer and I composited them all and handed the completed footage off to Stephanie Mae who edited it all together.

My favorite thing I made was the "Fast P" logo at the end of the piece. Too bad we had to have this completed about a month before Andrew Kramer's optical flares plugin was released.

Purdue Men's Basketball Opener

2010-05-06T00:39:00.009-04:00

Every year we get to make a new opener for both the Purdue men's and women's basketball teams and I just realized I never posted anything about them this year. First off is the opener for the men, which you'll find below.

The still images are taken from photographs and we cut them apart and rebuilt them with z-depth so we could pan a camera across them and have the elements move. We also used the After Effects puppet tool to add some slight movement to Purdue players.

The flash images we created with photographs we took of the players and cut them out in PhotoShop and replaced the backgrounds. We had the players perform basketball type actions and we shot them with a DSLR using a rapid shutter speed.

The graphics were done by myself and Brad Sommer. The individual player photos were taken by myself and Les Eller, and it was all cut together by Louis Dierckman.

Enjoy!

A Fight For Hope

2010-05-04T09:57:00.008-04:00

Recently at Purdue I was tasked with creating a few graphics for a professor who is working on a cure for epilepsy. The goal was to present some information about how widespread the disease is and to set up the story of a few individuals who suffer from the disease.

The professor then did a PowerPoint presentation detailing his research followed by a question and answer period.

This first video below is the introduction I created. The voice-over was provided to me and I built everything in After Effects and Illustrator. I thought it would be fun to build some objects in 3D space within AE. I used some solids to construct the box along with a light and camera.

One thing that helps tremendously with camera movement in AE is to use the Separate XYZ preset. You make a null object and set it to 3D and then parent the camera to it. Then apply the Separate XYZ preset to the null object and you can then control the camera's X,Y, and Z axis independet of each other. It gives you much better control of the camera and lets you finely tune your movements with great ease.

Here is the first part of the opener:

The middle part was an edit highlighting the stories of the five people stricken with epilepsy and this second video below is the last part of the introduction. Again it was all done within AE:

A New Way To Do Things

2010-05-02T10:24:00.005-04:00

In an effort to make my life simpler I decided to use my Vimeo account to post my videos. I will just embed them from there into my posts. This should also be better for you, the viewer, because it won't navigate you away from the post. I hope this is a suitable solution for everyone.

I also plan on updating all my previous posts to be this way, but it may take a little time.

Enjoy!

"One" Campaign

2010-02-20T03:22:00.013-05:00

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I recently was asked by my church to make some PowerPoint slides and some banners for a 4 week series. I was basically left wide open to do whatever I wanted. All that was provided to me were the phrases "one vision" "one commitment" "one hope" and "one confession"

I took those and decided to have the same look and feel throughout, but assigning a color for each week. I wanted the banners to work together slightly so I designed them all as one image and cut them out. That way the background elements would run throughout all 4 banners. The finished banners were 6 x 1.5 feet.

I tend to use a lot of stock images for textures and other elements and really wanted to make everything from scratch for these images. The texture in the background was from using a custom textured brush and varying the size and transparency along with some noise and photoshop clouds layers.

I always enjoy doing this stuff because I'm left wide open to do whatever and I really get to use the opportunity to play around with other styles. For these I would say my influences were Chuck Anderson and James White.

The images above are of the four title slides, one note slide and the banners.

Merry Christmas! ... really late

2010-02-19T23:35:00.002-05:00

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So my wife asked me to make a Christmas card this last year. It's the first one I've ever made and quite honestly she kind of drug me kicking and screaming into it. I just ended up waiting until the very last minute and stayed up late making it, when all I really wanted to be doing was playing video games.

After I was done I really liked how it turned out and I'm pretty glad Katie prodded me into making it. I know this post is way after the holiday (don't worry the card itself was done in time to hit the family's mailboxes before the 25th), but I liked it and thought I'd share. Maybe this will kick me into posting some more stuff.

I hope everyone had a great holiday season.

UPDATE: Kindle 2 Design Contest

2009-12-02T21:17:00.007-05:00

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So it's finally here! After months of waiting my Kindle 2 has arrived and I love it. It's made me a believer in the digital delivery of books. I want to thank engadget.com and adafruit industries for putting on the contest and all the people who voted for me to win one. I wish I could give you all free kindles as well, but I can't, so deal with it.

In the image link above I'm including my concept sketch that I drew up on the hotel provided notepad while I was in the middle of working a PowerPoint presentation. After that you can see the Illustration line art and a couple of photos of the completed Kindle.

Here is a link to a feature engadget did on the etching process and adafruit industries. The etching of the Kindles is towards the end. Also, here's a link to images of the five winning Kindles.

Thanks again!

Superman Shirt

2009-11-24T00:30:00.006-05:00

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One of my best friends turned 30 just a little while ago and his wife asked if I could make him a t-shirt. He happens to be a Superman fanatic so I felt it was only fitting to pay homage to his childhood desires. I hear he likes it.

I sketched up what I wanted and then drew it up in Illustrator. Pretty straight forward, but a lot of fun to do. I've been working with Illustrator more and more and am enjoying it. I'll post some more stuff soon!

College of Science Event Video

2009-10-01T15:22:00.007-04:00

This week we were asked to make a welcome video for a College of Science event. It was a series of talking heads highlighting the College of Science and welcoming the guest of honor, who is an astronaut.

We shot all the video on green screen and I took the edit provided to me and recut it in After Effects. I took each scene and keyed it out using Keylight and then created the backgrounds and animated key phrases from each person behind the subject. I also created the bloom effect between the cut-a-way shots in After Effects. The whole project was done in HD 1080p.

It was fun to do because I wasn't required to stay within the standard Purdue graphics which is predominantly gold and black in color. So thank you to the college of science for letting me make something different than what I usually make.

2009 Football Fireup Video

2009-09-25T14:30:00.006-04:00

I did most of the compositing for the football fireup video this year. Adam Ruud and Brad Sommer did all the 3D model work, including the texturing and animation. Louis Dierckman did the editing of the piece and also added all the footage to the 3D screens in After Effects.

I started by keying out all the green screen footage that Louie edited, then compositing that with the backgrounds and other CG elements that Brad and Adam gave me. I also added all the atmospheric elements and created the computer interfaces you see the players using. Everything was done with Photoshop and After Effects.

Each year I feel I get to learn more about composition and AE. This year was no exception. I worked a lot with using the 3D features in AE and the built in camera to do the focus-pulls and pans. If only I had more projects like this to work on!

Enjoy!

On the Horizon

2009-09-01T00:10:00.007-04:00

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It's football season again and that means another football fire-up video. One thing we try to do every year is push ourselves further and harder than the previous year. Last season was the first time we tried compositing footage and marrying computer effects with live action.

It was a good learning experience, but there was a lot I personally wanted to improve on. When this year rolled around we decided to continue down our path of CG and compositing and improving upon what we did last year.

Lets just say I'm pumped to finally have background elements to use.

The image above is a little teaser. Come to the game this weekend to see the debut of it! I hope you like it.

UPDATE: Kindle 2 Contest

2009-08-31T23:58:00.005-04:00

The winners have been announced and I'm one of them! Thanks to everyone that put a vote in for me. I appreciate it. I'll post pictures of the Kindle with my artwork on it when I get it.

Kindle 2 Contest

2009-07-27T00:52:00.005-04:00

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Engadget.com has a contest where they asked artists to design something that could be engraved on the back of an Amazon Kindle 2. If you win the contest you win the Kindle with the engraved back. The rules stated that it had to be black and white and in an .eps format. Other than that it was wide open.

I thought this looked like a fun contest and decided to try my hand at designing something. I don't get to work in Illustrator as much as I would like and felt this would be a good opportunity to work on my skill set with that software.

When coming up with ideas I settled on a steampunk design. I've always thought it would be a lot of fun to design things with that style and felt this would be a great time to do that. I spent my free time over a couple of days working up what you see in the link above.

I haven't heard back from Engadget about my design or if it's been selected as one of the finalist, but when I do I'll be sure to let you know.

Hope you like it.

Convocations 2009 DVD Opener

2009-06-15T12:09:00.014-04:00

For the Convocations 2009 season preview DVD we were asked to do something with kinetic text. Although I've seen a lot of uses of kinetic text in various commercials or on YouTube, I've never had an opportunity to make something using this technique. When Convocations came to us wanting to do this I was pretty excited to try it out.

Based on what Convocations wanted we decided to keep the movement simple and just focus on the message rather than a lot of flashy movements. Because of this I restricted most movement to the X and Y axis and kept the color pallet in line with their seasonal brochure, which happened to be rather muted with hints of color.

Convocations provided me with audio and music bed that I used to base all the text and movement off of. They also provided an outline of specific elements they wanted to see (the falling/raising stock line for example). I took the audio file and placed it in Adobe Premiere and used a new feature in CS4 that transcribes all the audio into meta data and places it at the appropriate time code. I then made whatever tweaks it needed and saved it out to bring into After Effects. Using another new feature in AE CS4 I imported the audio file and AE placed layer markers for every word of dialogue onto the audio layer based off of the meta data from Premiere. This allowed me to have precise timing for the words appearing and also allowed me to see visually what word was being spoken at what time on the waveform. I then proceeded to animate the camera/text to the timing of the voiceover. Check out the opener below.

I was also asked to make three short segments highlighting the pick 5 option for that season. Convocations had a few ideas for them and below are the ones that I created.

Overall this was a lot of fun to do and was a fun learning experience. Enjoy.

Pacers In-Game Segments

2009-03-08T00:44:00.008-05:00

At the beginning of the Pacers basketball season I was lucky enough to get to make a few opening graphics for small in-game video segments. The first one I made was a graphic for a segment called Bang the Drums Cam. Basically at the end of the this animated graphic there would be an image of some drums on the lower 3rd of the screen with an alpha channel for audience members to act like they were banging on the drums. I was asked to make it in a sort of Rock Band graphic style and the video below is what I cam up with. It was a lot of fun to make. I created some of the elements in Illustrator and brought them all into After Effects to add the animation.

The second one was an opener for an edited piece showcasing NBA bloopers. I came up with the self-destructing text idea and I had a lot of fun coming up with ways to make the text fall apart. I created the background in Photoshop and animated it all in After Effects.

The third one was a celebrity look-a-like spirit bumper. The producer would pre-select a celebrity and when the segment began they would look for a look-a-like in the crowd. Enjoy!

Addy Awards 2008

2009-02-23T23:29:00.007-05:00

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The local Addy awards are being held at our facilities on Purdue's campus again so I was asked to make the screen dress artwork for the second year in a row. This year, unlike last year, the local Addy association had no theme for the event. Because of this I was pretty much given free reign to do what I wanted in the time allotted, which was about 1 day of work.

I saw some of the work done by James White on his site Signalnoise and have been fascinated with it. I decided to take this opportunity to make something inspired by his work. To make the screen dress I took the Addy A logo and recreated and stylized it inside of Photoshop. I drew the shapes and layered them until I was happy. I just wanted something really clean and minimal.

The second image was created using elements from the screen dress. It's a background for all the submissions for this years competition.

It was a lot of fun to just play around with the layout and shapes and work on something purely design driven. I hope Mr. White would approve.

Frank and Felix

2009-02-17T22:58:00.004-05:00

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The third illustration for Finn's room!

Percy the Penguin

2009-02-15T22:57:00.005-05:00

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Here is the second illustration done for my son's room. Done the same way as the owl illustration. I promise the next one won't be a bird. Enjoy!

Oliver the Owl

2009-02-14T03:16:00.007-05:00

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A year ago, when we found out my wife was pregnant, she asked me to make some animal drawings for our baby's room. Now that our baby is 2 months old I feel I'm a little late making them (and she would readily agree), but better now than never.

The first one I made was an Owl. There really isn't any reason as to what animals I'm making other than they're ones that I think would be fun to create. There's also no particular reason that I named the owl other than I feel all animals in a kid's life have names and those names must begin with the same letter as the animal.

I began with a simple pencil sketch that took me all of 2 minutes to make. I then took that sketch and scanned it into the computer and proceeded to make a simple vector version of it in Illustrator. I wanted to have the smooth lines and simple shapes that offers. I then brought those shapes into Photoshop where I then made the final version that you see in the link above. I just used simple gradient colors and some watercolor brushes to create the texture.

It was a lot of fun to make and I promised to make 6 of them so you'll get to see at least 5 more of these little illustrations in the future. So keep checking back to see what animal will be next!

Composite Breakdown

2009-02-12T23:41:00.002-05:00

[click image to view video]

I decided to do a quick composite breakdown in an attempt to explain a little more in depth how the elements went together for the final shot of the 2008 football fireup video. If you watch the video linked to this post you will see 5 passes of the composite plus the final composite as it went to air. This project was really the first time I got to composite something with this many elements and there are things I wish we had more time to work on, but with the constraints in the production schedule we worked with what we had. It took me about 2.5 hours to assemble this entire shot.

Pass 1: Background Plate and Screens

The background is really something that was lacking and we just didn't have time to flesh out so it ended up being just a color ramp. I added some steam elements that rotate around the player because steam was something that found it's way into most of the graphics for the 2008 season. The screens were modeled and animated by Brad Sommer in Maya and textured by Adam Ruud.

Pass 2: Video Corner Pinning

I recived video clips of plays from our editor on the project. I took those and corner pinned the footage to each screen and keyframed them to move with the screens.

Pass 3: Foreground Elements

These were added for two reasons. To add depth and to obstruct the view of the player when we switch shots. The player was composed of 3 separate passes of the actor wearing various stages of the helmet being painted.

Pass 4: Mechanical Arms

These are the arms painting the helmet. They were modeled and animated again by Brad Sommer and textured by Adam Ruud in Maya. All three mechanical arms were rendered together as one pass so I rotoscoped them around the player.

Pass 5: Keyed Player Rotation Footage

We shot the actor in three separate passes, each pass with a different helmet on. We had one helmet that was painted silver, another painted gold, and another gold one with the decals on it. I used the foreground elements to make the transitions between the cuts. This is one area I wish we could have done better. When it was shot the actor just had to guess his stance from the previous shot and try to match it up and I think he did a remarkable job at doing that. Because of this there are slight jumps in his position. I wish we could have devised something for him to hold so that he would have been in exactly the same position. Though I do think for the short production time we had it turned out pretty well.

Pass 6: Final Composite

All the elements put together along with some paint spray.

Ultimately this was a lot of fun to make and I'm looking forward to doing more compositing in the future.

2008/09 Basketball Headshots

2009-02-03T15:50:00.004-05:00

This is an example of the headshots I made for this season of Purdue basketball. I was asked to make a motion headshot that had a grungy newspaper look so I dove into after effects and started to create something. We shot a bunch of footage of the players in front of a blue screen with our HD XDCAM. I digitized the footage and keyed it out using keyframe in AE. I took the footage and exported it out of AE using the filmstrip file format and imported it into Photoshop and applied a halftone filter to it. I then brought that footage back into AE and added to my comp in progress.

I then proceeded to flesh out the rest of the information by adding in the name, position, home town, etc. At around this point I stopped and took a look at what I made. Although I liked where it was headed, I didn't feel the look was fitting the look of the graphics for the season. It was turning a little too much into a western wanted poster. After talking it over with the art director we decided to scrap it and start with something new. Below is the work in progress of the version I scraped and ignore some of the text placement. I didn't actually get everything placed where I wanted it.

After talking it over more with the art director he suggested I base the headshots off of another headshot I made for the preseason opener. Below is a still image of that design.

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I took the elements from the above graphic and some ideas I liked from my original headshot and created the final one. I again used AE to key out the footage and animated it all in AE as well. The headshot comes in over video and the begining and end is transparent. The video below is the final version.

Tiller Roast and Toast

2009-01-24T19:03:00.009-05:00

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I know I haven't posted anything new in a while and that's because my wife and I had our first child, an awesome little boy, in December. We're both really excited and are both looking forward to raising him. So I've been a little busy learning the ropes of being a new dad. I had some time off of work for parental leave and I just got back a week or so ago.

This graphic is the first thing I've gotten to make since I've been back to work. I admit I felt a little rusty, but I had a great time making it. Coach Joe Tiller retired from his position as Purdue's head football coach this season and they're honoring him with a Roast and Toast party at the university. They asked me to make a graphic for it and the link above is what I made. I only had a day to make it and overall I was happy with the results.

Enjoy.

2008 Football Fire Up Video

2008-09-23T23:18:00.009-04:00

This year for the football opener we wanted to try something we haven't really done before. We wanted to try incorporating 3D animation with live footage that was shot on blue screen.

Brad Sommer spent the better part of a month modeling all the elements in Maya for the video. He had the pieces that we used for props available to him in order to match the CG ones to the physical ones as closely as possible. Scott Horton then directed a shoot with an actor in front of a blue screen over the course of an afternoon using a Sony XD camera in HD. We had three sets of pads in different stages of being constructed and shot scenes multiple times with different combinations of pads.

We then had a couple of weeks to assemble the entire opener. Louie Dierckman edited all the video that appears on the screens and between the shots of the player. Adam Ruud textured all the CG elements in Maya with shaders he wrote. I keyed out all the bluescreen shots and composited all the CG and video together. I used After Effects and Keyframe to key out the footage. I then added the background and the CGI to the shots. I adjusted the lighting and color and tracked the shots together. Finally I cornerpinned the video to the CG screens and created the end graphic that the team walked out too.

Overall this was a fun project to do. We learned a lot in the process and we're looking forward to doing it even better the next time around. Enjoy the opener.

Football 2008 - Spirit Bumper

2008-09-15T14:46:00.008-04:00

The 2008 Purdue football season is in full swing and we got the opportunity to create a lot of new graphics for the season. Most of the grahics we create are sponsored elements. This video is what is sold as a spirit bumper. All it consists of is the sponsor logo and some fire up text. In the past all of this stuff was created out of house for us to roll on the LED boards, but this year they came to us to make everything in house. I wanted to do something a little more interesting than the typical one of these which usually is just the logo on some bad background with plain text. I didn't have a lot of time to create these (just a few hours) so I tried to make them as interesting as possible in the amount of time I had. The main thing I changed from what typically is done was to add a motion reveal for the intro. The video below is what I came up with.

Due to the lack of time I purchased the light images online. I composited the rest of the shot together with the text and logo in After Effects. The background was created with a black solid and a couple of lights with the Trapcode Lux filter applied to them to make them volumetric. I added a stock video of the steam to add some motion. The logo and text I animated in After Effects in 3D space. The text has a glow filter on it. I used another layer of text behind it to create the dark rays in the light by applying Trapcode Shine and changing the color to black. I then changed the layer type to multiply to have it blend with the background. There is a separate light on the logo and text to illuminate it accordingly.

Enjoy.

Upcoming Project

2008-08-22T16:20:00.006-04:00

[click to view - 2 images total]

I know I haven't posted in a long while. That's because I've been busy working on the upcoming football season. I'll write up a good in-depth post when we're done with the project, but for now you'll just have to make due with a couple of rough still composites of the project.

Enjoy!

Convos 2008 Season Opener

2008-05-16T13:27:00.008-04:00

Each year Purdue Convocations asks us to make their season preview DVD. It's one of the more fun projects we get to do each year. We undertake most aspects of the DVD's production, from creating all the motion graphics to editing every segment together to creating the entire DVD menu functionality and animation.

We started the process by meeting with the client. They asked for a clean line opener and that's about all the direction they gave us. With that to go on we came up with a concept. We wanted the whole thing to look like vector graphics, but have motion through 3D space. To do this we asked Brad Sommer to create the motion lines in Maya. Brad and I decided to have the lines create the Convocations logo and have a camera flying around through the lines.

When Brad was done animating the lines along paths in Maya, he handed the rendered file off to me to work on in After Effects. I took his animation and added camera shake and a camera bounce to the audio. I then took a depth render pass that Brad created and applied it for some depth of field. Brad's animation ended with the spinning blue line so I also added the full Convos logo and camera pull to reveal it.

We shot the Convocations director on a green screen and both Brad and I keyed him out in After Effects. Brad then took my pass of the opener and combined that with the keyed video footage. I then took that After Effect project and added an animated lower 3rd ID and transition to the opening segment.

Frustrating

2008-05-14T09:34:00.003-04:00

So I have two new videos to post, but for some reason I can't get any new videos to link up from my website. I'm sure it's just a check box or something I'm missing. So know that I'm trying to get new content up here, I'm just having issues. They'll be posted as soon as I figure out what's going wrong. Please be patient!

---EDIT 5/16 ---

So I fixed the problem and the post below this is actually the first of the two new videos (I just hid the post until I could fix it). The post after this will be the second. Enjoy!

Sports Graphics Reel

2008-05-07T23:14:00.016-04:00

This video is a sampling of all the sports graphics we made for football and basketball last year. We're gearing up to start conceptualizing the look of this upcoming football season and I thought this edit was a very good look back at the variety of graphics we made.

The edited piece was cut together by Scott Horton. All the graphics were a collaborative effort and most of the ones I worked extensively on are already shown in past posts.

Enjoy!

Purdue President Inauguration Backdrop

2008-04-10T18:19:00.014-04:00

[click to view - 2 images total]

I've been working pretty hard on a project that I can't post yet but here's an idea of what I've made for the project's DVD. It's a screenshot of all the after effects compositions I made for the menu's transitions. If you can count how many are there you'll get a prize. So in the meantime I'll post something I made today.

I was asked to make a quick background for the Purdue president's inauguration. It was used as a backdrop for the entire stage. Basically they just wanted something with the Purdue Seal on it. I thought it turned out nice for what it is.

I also found out that my "I am a Boilermaker" poster won a regional Gold Addy award and has been submitted to the national addy awards. I guess it's going up against the major players in advertising now. Wish me luck.

NVCL Desktop Wallpaper

2008-04-04T07:45:00.008-04:00

[click to view - 1 image total]

Widescreen Version
4x3 Version

My church has been on my mind recently because I'm helping them with a bunch of short little edits about revolutionaries. They're for a series of talks that happen over the next few months. Last night I found myself bored and I guess my church was still on my mind because I started making a desktop for their computers.

I used part of the church's logo and just wanted to use that as the central theme of a designed piece. After a couple of hours of tinkering I created what you see in the link above. If you'd like to download it just follow the links to the widescreen or 4x3 versions. The church's website is http://www.nvcl.org/

N.U.N.C.H.U.K.S.

2008-03-17T22:29:00.011-04:00

[click image to view video]

This was a short video made for Young Life to advertise an upcoming ninja club. It was shown in the previous week's club to get the kids excited about everything that involves stealthiness. Again I had the help of Matt Wallace, of the Dodge ball commercial. We thought it'd be fun to to make a commercial for a home ninja correspondence course like the old Sally Struthers diploma at home advertisements.

Matt did the narration with the only exception being the brutally manly battle-cry at the end voiced by me. He also helped with the edit and coming up with a list of all things we believed ninjas needed to be adept at.

I used Photoshop to make the parchment and Premiere Pro to do the editing and text. The old Asian man clip came from the movie Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.

It was a lot of fun to make and all the Young Life leaders got to be involved. Hopefully I'll get to make some more in the future. Enjoy!

Challenge 2006 DVD Art

2008-03-07T11:08:00.012-05:00

[click to view - 7 images total]

Since I'm busy on stuff I'm not ready to post yet I figured I'd post some past work. A couple of years ago the Challenge conference came to Purdue and all the shows were held in the Hall of Music. We recorded every one and I was asked to make a DVD box set of every show.

I divided the shows up by day and created a 2-disc case for each day. The front covers of each case are identical - with the exception of the date, but the backs of each case are different to show the speaker for that day. It was a lot of fun to design and I hear the client was very happy with them.

You can see a snippet of the menus here.

Layout Updates

2008-03-05T11:05:00.010-05:00

I am adjusting the look of my blog slightly. Due to my rough around the edges coding skillset the page may change many times in small (or huge and unexpected) ways until I get it looking the way I'd like it to be. Please be patient with me until I get this completed. Thanks!

ADDY Screen Dress

2008-02-22T16:04:00.020-05:00

[click to view - 3 images total]

This year we hosted the 2007 ADDY competition. Because of this I was asked to make the screen dress for the awards ceremony. The ADDYs decided to have a Broadway theme and asked that I create my design to fit a Broadway look.

I started by taking the ADDY logo into after effects and created a neon version of it. I did this by creating mask splines and applying Trapcode's 3D stroke to them to create thickness. I then added the glow effect. I changed the comp to 32 bit float to achieve the hot glows and then rendered out a still of the logo. I brought that into Photoshop and created the rest of the comp.

The dancers I cut out and brought into AE to create the lights shining behind them. For this I made spotlights and applied Trapcode's Lux to make them volume lights. I rendered out the still and applied it to my Photoshop comp.

Hope you like it.

On a side note the "I Am A Boilermaker" poster campaign took home 1 Silver, 2 Gold, Judge's Choice and People's Choice ADDY awards. It was a fun night.

Scud Color Study

2008-02-08T13:08:00.015-05:00

[click to view - 2 images total]

Recently Rob Schrab was kind enough to allow me to help him cleanup some books for his Scud omnibus. While working on them I ran across a panel of Scud discovering that his loaner arm once belonged to a werewolf and I found myself remembering how much I loved that illustration. One thing that I've always wanted to try was coloring a comic. Suddenly, with this panel drawn by Rob, I had a black and white comic panel to work on and found myself wanting to try it out. The other day I had some free time and sat down to work on it and after showing it to Rob and finding out he liked it I decided to post it here. Please be sure to go over to his blog to find out more about Scud.

I used Photoshop and a Wacom tablet to do all the work.

Kiss Cam

2007-12-12T10:06:00.005-05:00

This is a segment that runs during the games and the winning couple gets a free meal to the sponsor's restaurant. I tried to keep with the theme this year and created the heart with neon lights. I made the lights and heart in Photoshop and added the effects in After Effects. I made the heart composition 32 bit float so the neon would really glow and pop. I rendered that out and then put it in a 8 bit comp for the rest of the piece.

It runs in 3 parts, but I assembled them all together for this.

2007 Basketball Head Shots

2007-11-14T08:15:00.004-05:00

We were asked to keep the same theme from football and carry it over to basketball. So one of the common threads migrating from our football graphics is the metal and steam background. I used that in combination with new elements to create the head shot seen below.

The spinning transition was modeled and textured in Maya by Brad Sommer and given to me as stills. Everything else in the head shot I created in Photoshop and animated in After Effects.

Football Pregame Roll

2007-10-29T12:18:00.006-04:00

This is a small snippet from the Purdue football pregame rolls that air on game day. They're basically a series of messages that roll on the LED wall. The frame was modeled in Maya by Brad Sommer. The content slides and compositing were done by me in Photoshop and After Effects. Everything we created for these rolls loop and were designed to be pieced seamlessly together in editing software.

Blast from the Past FINAL

2007-10-16T09:18:00.004-04:00

I said in a previous post that I'd update the blast from the past video with a final render when done. Well we finished them so here's the final product. If you've been to any Purdue football games you've seen this on the jumbotron.

Purdue Football Poster FINAL

2007-10-03T20:28:00.008-04:00

[click to view - 3 images total]

So I know I haven't posted in a while. That's because I've been swamped at work and haven't had the energy to do so. Well, I hope to remedy that in the coming weeks and I'll start here with this. The final design for one of the Purdue football recruitment posters.

I played around with a bunch of different slogans and variants of the text and ultimately decided to go simple and just have "I am a boilermaker" on the poster. I sometimes struggle with combining the image with the logo and text elements, wanting the image to just say it all, but overall I feel these play well together.

As you can see I added the crossing hammers logo on the poster. I guess we're hoping this becomes a standard Purdue athletics logo and by branding everything we make with it, we'll achieve that goal. It worked for Purdue Pete (the boilermaker special is the official mascot) and we're hoping it'll work for us. Enjoy.

You can go to this post to see a little more on how I assembled the poster.

2007 Football Commercial

2007-08-21T12:34:00.006-04:00

We were asked to make a 30 second commercial for 2007 football season tickets. The client asked for a simple football edit with a 3-2-1 countdown and information at the end. Below is what we came up with.

Brad Sommer made the train animation at the beginning in Maya. Louis Dierkman edited the video, Adam Ruud created the lower 3rd in Maya, and I created the countdown and end information in After Effects. We then took all the elements and composited them together in After Effects and added the grunge and camera shake. I also helped with the overall "look" and created the text for the Highlighted home games.

We were pleased with the final product. Hope you enjoy.

2007 Football Posters

2007-08-09T17:05:00.012-04:00

[click to view - 5 images total]

We were asked this year to create some posters for the Purdue football team. This is one that I worked on today and is in progress. It still needs text and logos applied and I'm still working on the overall look and may possibly change the sky. I took the pictures of the player, stadium and sky and composited them together in Photoshop.

[update]
I was asked by our creative director to add shoulder pads to the player that we originally shot without pads. He put on a pair of shoulder pads and a jersey that we have in the office and we shot a picture of him trying to match the light as best we could. I then took that image and cut out the pads and added them to the original image that I took. I also had to change the numbers on the shoulders to match the number of the player. Above is a link to the updated poster.

Blast from the Past

2007-06-18T16:55:00.007-04:00

This is the first piece we've made for the upcoming Purdue football season and I'm excited about the way the whole look turned out. This piece is a 'guess the year' type of thing that will run during football games on the new LED wall Purdue is installing. Scott Horton is the creative director this season and he wanted a 300 look with some steampunk elements and this is what we created. Scott edited the little video in Premiere Pro that plays during the piece highlighting the events that happened that year. Adam Ruud and I created the base frames in Photoshop that surround the elements. Brad Sommer created the title and spinning numbers in Maya. And I assembled the whole piece in After Effects. To do that I edited the frames created by Adam in Photoshop so they would work the way I needed them to for the piece. I created the background in Photoshop. I then took all the elements assembled them in After Effects and put 3D motion to them and added a camera, lights, shadows, and color correction. I then animated all the pieces to create what you see below.

[ note: this is a rough version. the motion blur was turned off to shorten render time and the voice-over is a temporary one until we get the real one recorded. I'll update the video when we have a completed piece ]

Demo Reel Shot Breakdown

2007-06-08T03:09:00.004-04:00

[click to view reel shot breakdown]

Hey! I just posted a complete breakdown shot-by-shot of my demo reel. Now you can check out each individual clip and read exactly what it was I worked on. Just click the above image or the link to the right to view it. Enjoy!

Past Perfect - Post: 02

2007-06-05T00:19:00.006-04:00

[click to view - 2 images total]

Some more sketches and color studies. Stu drew the O'Malley image and I colored it. I drew some concept art for the Arc machine.

Young Life Golf Outing & Nerf Wars

2007-05-10T19:00:00.007-04:00

[click to view - 1 image total]

I was given the opportunity to make another poster for Young Life. This time for their annual golf outing fundraiser. I wanted to make something that had a little Scottish influence to it since that was the birthplace of the sport. So in Scottish clan tradition, I made a Young Life golf coat of arms. I used Illustrator to modify the shield and golf clubs, then brought it into Photoshop to create the rest of the poster. It's always fun to make stuff for YL.

[click to view - 3 images total]

On a separate note we recently purchased an arsenal of nerf guns at work and decided to make some action photos. Below is the one I did of me wielding dual Mavericks. I have two images. The first one is the original photo we took and the second is me in the heat of battle. Everything was done with images from google image search and about 1 hour of playing around in Photoshop. It was just a fun exercise... a sort of graphics challenge.

Past Perfect

2007-05-04T03:00:00.004-04:00

[click to view - 4 images total]

Over the past month or so my friends and I have talked about making a comic together. The whole point being a tool to be creative and keep in touch on a regular basis since we live states, and even continents apart.

We all started out much more heavily in the traditional arts and only in college really moved over to the digital arts. After many years of just working on computers we're itching to put some pencil to paper and just draw a bit. Through this desire we came up with the idea to make a comic that we can all work on and then post the pages on the web for others to read as we complete them.

Right now we're sorting through all of our schedules and figuring out what a possible production timeline could be like and pooling all of our ideas into the story, concept art, and technique. We're all really excited about this project and are looking forward to making the first finished page.

Once we get everything fleshed out I'll post more about the story and characters (most likely in another blog dedicated to the comic) and I'll continue to post concept art and images as we create them. Here's the first peek.

JC Trombley drew up some quick concepts of characters and a guy getting pistol whipped and drew the revolver and vacuum tubes.

The colored one is my first attempt at trying to determine how the colors will look. I really haven't done a lot of this and every time I did I just filled the outlines with a solid color and used the dodge and burn tools in photoshop to create the shadows and highlights. This drawing I wanted to try to get away from that and experimented with different brushes. The main brush acted a bit like a marker. I used broad strokes of color and then refined it until I had what you see below. At the end I added his stubble and used a speckled brush in photoshop to create it. This got me thinking of what other great brushes could be created. I feel the next one could be a lot different because of this.

These are the first drawings I've done in a while. It's taking me back to my childhood when all I wanted to do with my friends was draw. It's a great feeling.

Photography

2007-04-21T22:27:00.005-04:00

[click to view - 3 images total]

My wife and I recently purchased a Nikon D200 for our upcoming trip to Africa. We felt that pictures would be better memories and last longer than some expensive trinket we could find while over there. Since then, we've been taking photos around town trying to brush up our photography chops. I'm finding that I'm pretty rusty, but I'm having a lot of fun with it. It got me thinking of what I feel are the last 'art' photos I took. Some black and white film shots that I developed in the darkroom. Back before photoshop ruled my life. Don't get me wrong.. I love photoshop and the creative freedom it gives you, but there's something about actually going through the process of developing your film and trying to produce the best print possible with the proper contrast and exposures. Also, finding the perfect filter to use and the smell the of the development chemicals.. I just sometime miss that creative process. But I digress.. I love this new camera. Now, just to learn it well so not to miss any opportunities while on safari in Africa. I've posted some of my photos I developed through the now archaic methods and one of my dog, because he rocks.

The chair is a light study. I found it in an abysmal abandoned house on the outskirts of town. I truly believe if the blair witch house existed it would be this house. I never felt at ease here, but I really do love this picture.

The woman is a motion study. It was a series of photos that told a story and this is one of the final panels. The whole project was of her running from someone through the woods. I believe I shot this and the chair with a stock Pentax camera and a 50mm lens.

The dog is my dog - Brody. I took it with a point-and-shoot sony digital camera. Enjoy!

SCUD!

2007-04-11T21:33:00.008-04:00

[click to view - 2 images total]

V1: Widescreen, 4x3
V2: Widescreen, 4x3

Back in the day one of my favorite comics was Scud: The Disposable Assassin. It was written and illustrated by Rob Schrab - one of the men behind the movie Monster House and the Sarah Silverman Program. The long and short of it is the comic was supposed to be concluded in issue 21. Well through a series of absurd happenings and unfortunate events (that can be found here) the series stopped with issue 20, leaving all the readers wondering how it all ended. Flash-forward 10 years to now and Rob decided to finish it and compile all the comics into one book. Fans rejoice. Well a few days ago he posted the cover art on his blog and I really liked it so I decided to make it into a desktop. After creating the cover desktop I decided to make a variant with just the main character - Scud. After all this I was pretty happy with how they turned out and figuring Rob was a cool guy, I felt he may like them too. I emailed them to him and that night I received a reply telling me how much he liked them and that he set one as his desktop. I got excited and geeked out a bit... prompting this post. Thanks for liking them Rob.

The artwork was done by Rob Schrab and the cover was colored by Jack Gray. The handguns in the background were also drawn by Rob. I took those elements and created the layout and design in photoshop. Hope you like them. Use the links above to download them.

Convos Season Opener 2007

2007-04-09T12:52:00.008-04:00

[click to view - 5 images total]

For the last few years I've had the opportunity to work on creating the season opener video for Purdue Convocations. It's been a good working relationship and everyone has been happy with the past products. The convos dept creates a season opener brochure and provides the Adobe InDesign project for us to pull elements from. The idea is to make the whole feel of the edit fit with the brochure so the look of the piece draws directly from the provided elements they give us.

I'm posting the opening graphics that I created for the whole video. I started this graphic by creating one image that contained every category in one long comp. I originally was going to set the layers to 3D and pan across them with a camera. Once we started to make it, we decided to make it more dynamic by having the camera push through the individual categories to the music. What we came up with is below. I created all the comps and the other graphics designer, JC Trombley, put in the camera motion. I then polished and fleshed out each individual comp and added motion to the elements. I then smoothed out the camera movement and added the convos title on the end. You can see the full comp above.

The Completed Opener:

The whole opener took us about 3 days to complete. I pulled elements from InDesign, edited them in Illustrator and Photoshop and compiled the finished comps in Photoshop. I then pulled them into After Effects and added 3D motion to them all. Above you can see the finished motion version.

Dodge Ball!

2007-04-02T10:06:00.008-04:00

In my last post I talked about fun things I've worked on for Young Life so I decided to post a 30 sec. commercial my friend Matt Wallace and I made for a YL event. It's a commercial for an all-area dodge ball tournament that was shown at the various clubs around town leading up to the event. We just thought it would be funny to have some guys training up for the tournament with bad 80's big-hair rock music and cheesy graphics so that's what we made. We shot the whole thing in about 1 hour and edited it that night. Matt did all the vocals and V/O and I edited it and made the graphics. The graphics were all made in after effects and I just used the stock lightening effect which I always found a bit cheesy. Throw in some explosions and in-your-face 3D text and call it a night. Overall the commercial was well received by the kids and the closing "DODGE BALL!" gut-belting lyric that Matt threw in at the end became the de facto rock phrase to yell randomly at clubs the remainder of the year.

Western Carnival

2007-03-09T11:03:00.005-05:00

[click to view - 1 image total]

A while back I was a Young Life leader and while I'm no longer a leader, I still make posters and edit videos for them as needed. I was asked to make a poster for their end of the year event that is western themed - kind of a barn-dance type club. I used Photoshop and Illustrator to create the poster. I always enjoy making stuff for Young Life because they always let me have a lot of creative freedom when making things for them.

Men's Basketball Season Highlights

2007-03-05T16:04:00.005-05:00

We were asked by the basketball department at Purdue to create a season highlights roll for the end of season banquet. We worked with our producer and came up with interesting shots to fill in the timeline and I was asked to come up with a way to ID the 12 players. Scott Horton, the editor, asked if I could make them with a film look. Below is what I came up with.

The game opener is in black and white so I tried to keep some of the desaturated look of the it. With all the work we have going on I only had one day to create the graphics and I think in the end I spent 14 hours creating all 12 id's. I would have liked to create variations of the look, with different in's and out's and having the filmstrip in different locations, but with the lack of time, I could only create the one look you can see below.

As far as what I used to create the graphic, it was the standards - Illustrator, Photoshop and After Effects. Enjoy!

Mens Basketball Fire-Up

2007-01-30T01:07:00.004-05:00

Over the last couple of years we've had the opportunity to create fire-up videos for the Purdue men's basketball team. Basically these videos play before the players run onto the court to begin the game. The intention is to fire-up the crowd and get them ready for the team. In the past, due to time restraints and budget, we've always been forced to basically do clip shows of past big plays from game footage. This year we had some time to work a little more on the piece and we created what's above.

The idea is the preparation the team does to get ready for the game.. the practice, the pain, the dedication, etc. One thing we've been limited to with video is the lack of good slow motion. It's not like film where you can just shoot more frames and play them back at normal speed. Enter NAB 2006. At the conference Sony introduced the XDCAM format. This allowed us to shoot in the HD format in true slow-motion. Since it uses a digital interface and not analog, the camera is basically writing files and frames so you can over and under-crank the footage. At least this is how I understand it to work... remember I'm a graphics guy, not an engineer. Anyways, we were eager to do something with slow motion so we shot the piece over a couple of practices using the Sony XDCAM and edited it in a few days. I, along with a co-worker, shot all the footage and Scott Horton, the editor put it together into the piece you see below.

[click image to view video]

Along with the opener video we created supporting graphics to fill the screens that hang around the court. These LED walls have just been blacked out in the past seasons so this year we wanted to make support grapihcs to video. The idea was to focus on the chorus of the song, but not be distracting. The main focus should be the video itself. I made the graphics in a day with photoshop and after effects.

1984

2007-01-29T21:42:00.014-05:00

The play 1984 came through our campus and we were commissioned to make a 30 second commercial for it. I split the work with JC Trombley, my coworker, and we came up with this. JC worked on all the scrolling text on the first half, I created everything from the flashing images on. I then combined the two halves and put a final red video look on the commercial. Play the video below to view it.

I created the DVD box art using elements from the commercial and the logos that were provided to us.

[click to view - 2 images total]

After showing it to the people who were producing the show they liked it so much they asked for a copy to send to Tim Robbins, the artistic director of the play. We were all very gracious towards the reception it received.

HFS Celebration DVD Art

2007-01-29T16:23:00.005-05:00

[click image to view - 2 images total]

I make a lot of DVD artwork for my work so I thought I'd post what I made today. Sometimes there is no budget and I have about 30 minutes to make the whole package. This is one of those instances. All I had to work with was a piece of paper with the title. The case jacket is flat so you can see the back, spine, and cover from left to right. It was all done in Photoshop. I hope to post more work soon.

Please feel free to post any comments. Have a great day.

Relish the Past

2007-01-29T15:46:00.004-05:00

If anyone was wondering.. my old blog is hosted here. Feel free to read up on my past happenings.

Mr. & Mrs.

2007-01-22T16:29:00.003-05:00

[click to view - 10 images total]

If you haven't heard, I got married about 6 months ago (August 5) to Katie. It was a fun day and we were blessed to have all of our loved ones attending.

We were fortunate to find wonderful photographers at Turtle Pond Photography who, we feel, captured the spirit of the day. They also designed a wonderful wedding album for us that we are excited to get. All pictures above were taken by them.

The beginning of something new

2007-01-22T02:07:00.002-05:00

Welcome to my new blog. As stated in the information panel to the right I created this to showcase some of my artwork and the process that goes into creating it. I will try to be diligent with this and keep it updated on a fairly regular basis so it doesn't become like some plant that is neglected, brittle and dead. I'm hoping to get some stuff up throughout this week. I'm working on a t-shirt design for threadless.com that my wife came up with. I'll post her sketch soon and as I work on it .. the stages that I took to produce the final product. I hope you enjoy everything in this blog and feel free to leave any comments.