I colored a Scud Page!

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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

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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

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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.

Christmas 2010

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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

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!

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

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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!

"One" Campaign

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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

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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

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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

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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!

Kindle 2 Contest

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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.

Frank and Felix

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The third illustration for Finn's room!

Percy the Penguin

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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

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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!

Tiller Roast and Toast

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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.

Purdue President Inauguration Backdrop

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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

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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/

Challenge 2006 DVD Art

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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.

ADDY Screen Dress

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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.