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.

Better Know Your Boilers

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

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

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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!