Final Poster

I entered the Communication Arts Illustration Competition. The guidelines for this competition are you can enter any illustration from the year January 2013 to January 2014. There are categories such as advertising, books, editorial, for sale, institutional, motion/animation, self promotion, and unpublished. I put my piece in the unpublished category because it is a personal work of mine. Below is the link to the competition.

http://www.commarts.com/competitions/illustration.html?utm_source=graphiccompetitions.com&utm_medium=square&utm_campaign=GraphicComp-Illus2014

I decided to go with my girlfriend as my illustration for the competition. It's a different idea than what I initially had but I still enjoy it. It's originally made for 36x24. I drew out the sketch first, than went over it in Illustrator. This picture means a lot to me because it keeps my style but still captures the essence of my girlfriend (that is if you know her). I think it speaks for itself. Its is a graphic design illustration and it is part of a up coming collection. They say do what you love, and it doesn't get better than that.

Illustration competition

So I have two ideas on what I would like to do. One is a piece that is almost like an advertisment but not quite. It is of a drawing of a Timberland boot that is actually the trunk of a tree, and from the opening of the boot where your foot goes in, sprout a tree with many branches and vines. For those of you who don't know what the Timberland logo looks like, it is a tree with little branches. Like so,

My picture looks a little something like this, ( its a pretty terrible picutre, I just took it really fast)

Apparently, it looks huge in this post, so I am sorry if it is a little hard to read. But acutally the bigger it is the better detial you will be able to see.
My other idea is a picture of my girlfriend. I am doing a series of her, because they say do what you love and you wont have to work a day in your life. So I am doing a series of illustrations of her mixed with other factors. In this one, it is a drawing of half of her face, with some geometirc shapes, and on the other side, I think i want to incorporate water, or a waterfall of some sort. Sort of like japanese style. Here is part of the drawing,

So those are my ideas.
There really is no intended audience, its just for people who love illustrations.
I plan on using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to add in color and special effects with either or picutre.

Storyboard Screenshots

This isn't so much as a screenshot from my storyboard because I am still in major thinking mode of how to execute this project, but at the end will have both of my logos.

The red is my original company name ALLFOR___, and the purple is a derivative of that, pigeon intuitive. I am still deciding if I want one half of the video to be for ALLFOR___ and the other half for pi, or combine them both. But at the end of the animation, the flow of lines will morph into both or one of these logos to finish off the video.

Self Promotional Animation

So, I have had this idea to do an animation for self promotion on my website, but I was never able to because I had to withdraw from my flash class that was teaching me. So my dream went dim for a bit, but now with this final project is has been revived. I want to bas it around a song from Hybrid. My only problem is it's two minutes and four seconds. I know its long, but will that four seconds over overtime be ok? What do you guys think?

I don't want to just do this project for the sake of this module, it is something I have wanted to do for about 2 years now. This is the perfect opportunity and I am going to take it, four seconds over or not.

It is way more complicated than I would like, but I am going to work with what I have and make what I have dreamed of. It is an animation made completely of lines. You will see the lines being drawn out and creating visuals and walking through a journey of where I want to be and who I am. If all goes well, I will hit the nail on the head.

It is extremely hard to sketch out my sketches because everything that needs to be sketched is all moving. But I have attached my logo of my brand. Sometimes it is hard for me to put my ideas and sketches on paper because I work so well in my head. Its a strange way and a lot of people say it is good to write down and sketch your ideas, but unfortunately for me that's not how my brain works, and I am a very visual person so it gets frustrating.

Any ideas on how to help me put my sketches and ideas on paper?

Adobe is life

After watching the video on photographer Uli Staiger, I learned a lot about how he utilizes Photoshop with his photography. The fact that he acknowledged the use of Photoshop bringing him to where he wants to be with his art is pretty cool. I would love to learn Photoshop in the way that he uses it. I use mostly Adobe Illustrator in order to get my ideas in place, but there are other applications I use as well. I am recently designing some pieces that involve old school electronic devices, such as beepers, old cell phones and old school computers. It is going to be a series, which I haven’t decided what to call yet, but it will be featured on my website I am still working on. I start with a sketch and then bring it into Illustrator and put it into a vector. I work with mostly lines and few color, but it all comes together. I now am learning this new application from Adobe Cloud call Muse. It is almost like DreamWeaver but without the coding. It also has a lot of new feature and it is really easy to work with. I don’t like coding much, so this is perfect for me. I also use InDesign. One day, I would like to take a collection of my work, and put it into a book, or a local magazine and discuss art and life problems. InDesign is the perfect app because it has similar tools to Photoshop and Illustrator, minus the publishing aspect of course. I also use illustrator to make my tshirt designs, which I will be starting a business for. So all of Adobe’s apps pretty much mean the world to me because it is my livelihood. It has helped reach my creative goals since I discovered Adobe when I was 13.

Final Website

I have some screen shots of my website. It's an actual website made on www.wix.com, but in order to get the most out of it, everything you see on it was made in Photoshop or Illustrator. I plugged it into dreamweaver and I am still learning to make the final FINAL website. There is a lot to be done, and it looks a little different than my wireframes. I wanted to be very precise on creating this because it is my actual website. You can check it out here, and let me know some feedback!
http://www.redpentagon.com/

Remember, they're just screen shots, and there is a lot more to the published website. I am still working on the site to complete the whole thing, with DreamWeaver and the new application Muse on the cloud.

http://www.redpentagon.com/

Tools and videos

There are many tools I would like to deepen my understanding of between Photoshop and Illustrator. I am more efficient in Illustrator than I am Photoshop but the tools are almost identical, give or take a few. In Photoshop, I would like to learn ore about the pen tool and the brush tool to widen my horizons of digital painting. In Illustrator, I know a lot about the pen, but I don’t know it all. So that would be a tool I would love to learn all about. I also want to learn about live paint tool and the blob brush tool. All these tool in both programs are a serious essential to what I need in order to succeed in my choice of design industry. They will teach me too complete a piece and have finished colored works of art, with perfect lineage work. It’ll help me get the perfect product I want.

I’ve looked around the world wide web for some websites on my specific design industry and I’ve found a lot of cool things. One website I swear by is tv.adobe.com. I found a tutorial on how to make a tshirt design in illustrator, which s pretty much what I plan on doing for the rest of my life so this is very helpful. http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adobe-for-academics/creating-your-personal-brand-episode-creating-a-tshirt-design/

On a more broader subject, www.lynda.com/ in general is the greatest thing to happen to me. All the videos whether it’s from fundamentals of Photoshop to videos on business and how to manage or really anything you need, its there.

One more website that is of extreme use to  me is youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es6iwTjMLhQ is a video about actually screenprinting. Its from Ryonet, a screen printing company that has supplies and classes. All of this is so useful to me and makes me confident that I can be successful in what I need to do.