I don’t always Visit other planets but when I do…

Earlier today, while working on the Warp Gate, I had this crazy idea.  One of my stranger ideas, but I thought it would make a great painting!  The idea for this painting is a simple phrase:  “I don’t always Visit Other Planets, But when I do I leave crop circles.”  Time to collect resources and throw them together in a quick outline.

I Google search “The most interesting man in the world, saved a pretty low quality images, as I am using it as only quick reference, and for the layout and then I dug through all my original created space images, tossed them all into Photoshop and came up with this layout.

The resources I created from the ground up are in use in the small window, behind what will eventually be my alien.  This sort of quick mock-up is something I do often.  Most of the time I just combine a bunch of my own images, rather than using one I downloaded however in this case I am trying to match a very specific image.  So I cheated a little bit!  Of course by the time I am done formatting the image it will be a lot different.

Here are the two images I combined in the background to make the environment look good.  The layout and size I chose for this image so it could in theory be printed out at standard poster size.

This is the image I placed on the background layer.  I only wanted to use a chunk of the star field.

Another older digital painting, this time of an earth like planet.  I wanted this planet to be above the background layer, creating a sense of depth.

Two hours later…  Not quite done yet, but getting there.

-TheGrav

 

Related articles

• Crop Circle at Water Eaton Copse, Nr Hannington, Wiltshire. Reported 12th May 2012. (2012indyinfo.com)
• Polar Clocks and Messages From Crop Circles, Pass It On‏ (nalonmit.wordpress.com)
• Crop Circles -paranormal or Prankters (scoresofemotion.com)

Logo Challenge… oh god..

MARSHMALLOW PORCUPINES THAT FART GLITTERY RAINBOWS AND BREATHE SULFURIC FIRE OUT OF THEIR NOSTRILS!

This is what I get for asking my friends for help and inspiration.  And what do my friends get?!?

HARDCORE PORCUPINE!

Step one was to figure out how to even make a Porcupine… So a quick trip to Google, and then a leap into Illustrator, and this outline is born!  Now he isn’t a marsh-mellow, but he is a bit “fluffy”.

I also decided that if he was going to be “Farting” rainbows and shooting flames from his nose, he needed to be ROCKIN’ OUT!  Hairband Style.

Next step was to add an electric guitar.  Of course this work was all done WHILE listening to 80s metal.  Inspiration comes from all around after all.

I also added a few more spines, as well as the second arm, and detailing on the hands.  I gave the Porcupine a bit of a “war” face, after all he is playing “the devil’s music”.

Can you see the rainbows?  The FLAMES!?!?  I mean this little guy has gone through the Ozzy and Zombie school OF FACE MELTING!  In a fantastic 80s way.

I need an art show,  it would be like Bob Ross mixed with Emeral.  You know.. behind this “happy tree” is where I hid the body, but don’t worry because HERE IS A BEAVER DUAL-WEILDING CHAINSAWS!!!!!!!  Or a History Channel special: “Beaver: The Real Ax-men.”

BAM!  Now the Little bastard has a clip!  I mean a Rainbow.  So you guys can kinda follow along with what I do behind the scenes, this is the last step where this guy is in Illustrator.

I have some lines to clean up in photoshop, as well as color to add.  This does show that you can get a lot done working just in Illustrator .  Organic shapes are pretty easy to come up with after you get over the fear of how it might look.

I cover more on how to use Illustrator in my tutorial series.  CHECK IT OUT!  (Nothing says metal more than caps everyone ONCE in awhile just to make sure the reader is paying attention.)

So a lot is going on here, I have yet to decide on what I am gonna do at the end of this logo.  Often I like doing “painted” logos.  This works pretty well with the digital state of most media these days.  It looks good, but it does take more time.  However after just a few minutes of tweaking and messing around I went back to the base Logo and redid the color.

Basically I felt I was moving past the original intent of the logo, as well as starting to get a bit too deep into a fun/quick logo.  I have more logo work, that I will be featuring in the future, that does follow the “Painting” method.

And here he is in all his GLORY!! Praise the HARDCORE PORCUPINE!

 

 

 

 

 

 

-TheGrav

 

 

 

 

Related articles

• Guess the Logo! (fabsugar.com)
• I can haz new logo (thewayoftheweb.net)

City 7: Our Posters so far…

I have been splitting my time between all 3 posters, and my normal freelance workload.   It has really shown me one thing… I need a Patron!   Any takers?  🙂

Anyway on to my progress so far.

As you can see in this screenshot, I am primarily just laying down my colors and tones as well as my design and themes.   I also tracked down the fonts I wanted to use.

Our City 7 logo uses Boston Traffic, I tracked down the Friday the 13th font to use for the tagline.  And a quick jump over to Google helped me track down a font called Steeltongs, that looks pretty good for all the promotional information!

This is as much as I have done for Poster 1!  Poster 3 will probably be the first I finish.

Keep an Eye out for more!

-TheGrav

A new direction…

I have been fairly active since I rebooted my blog/site… Well fairly active when it comes to the blog side of things.  My site has sat for a few months, it seems that most of us web-peeps are unable to ever buckle down and work on our own sites!

I have played with the idea of migrating my posts as is, and installing wordpress on my personal site (this is how I operated for many years) or building my own blog from the ground-up.  As where both options have their pros and cons, I think that the amount of work needed to build my own blog slightly out weights the amount of SEO return on investment.

However as I am a digital artist by desire and training, and a graphic designer and web developer by need, I do should start to claim my own place in the wider blogging world.  The theme I currently use, Twenty Ten, is amazing and beautiful and in many ways still meets my every need.   It does use some-else’s amazing photography rather than my own art though.  Something I intend to change.

As my goals for this blog are to show a glimpse into the mind of a creative person, ME!, and the tools that person uses, it seems to be only fair that I chronicle a bit about how I am going to change this blog, on this blog.  Some of the first changes that I did have been in place for at least the last few weeks.  It is subtle, but it is also a good first step.

SEO and Social Media Marketing, two of the biggest things I forget to do for myself.  When it dawned on me that I wasn’t doing ANYTHING!  I hit google and started to look around at what other people were doing.  Viperchill had a pretty good break-down that I jumped into and used his tutorial to tweak a bit of what I was doing to get closer to the mark.   One of the biggest changes I did behind the scene, was to start to add tags to all my posts, and use alt text on the images I do share.

Now at this time that is not helping as much as it could.. as long as WordPress is hosting my blog, I have limited options, but I am forming habits, which in the long run is what most of us lack.(Well the good ones anyway.)  I also used the wealth of WordPress provided widgets to make sure my blog posts were syndicated to some of my other Social Media outlets and accounts.  Wordpress has really gone above and beyond to include a bunch of incredibly useful tools that just beg to be played with.

Another useful tool has to be more active on the blogs I read… I know right?  Be more active in a social setting if you want to be more social??  WHAT!  Anyway I regularly follow: Geeks are Sexy, Geek in Heels , Laughing Squid, and Slashdot . (Not to mention webcomics like: Penny-Arcade, PvP, XKCD, and a few others…)  And I just added a few more to my daily list including: Has Boobs, Reads Comics.  Commenting on articles I find interesting or that I have relevant input on shows those I read that I care 🙂 , and hopefully they will come read me too!

Entire new sections have been added to my blog, the most noticeable one should be Sketch A Day, where I attempt to share a sketch I have done each day.  This gets even more complicated because I try to present the sketch I did the day before each time!  The other sections are Games/Technology, where I will share reviews and opinions on each, and Inspiration, where I hope to share inspiring bits I find on the net.

All of this is under the hood sort of work, stuff you may not notice unless I point it out.  So now comes time for the fun pieces!  Some of you probably noticed that I renamed the blog The Darker Side of Art, and I plan to being to re-skin it to reflect that new name.   For now though I leave you’ll at a cliffhanger!

More to come!

-TheGrav