The Hainted Woods of Georgia

They say the woods here are hainted....

Quick digital Study in Photobooth & Photoshop

Wow - so time flies. The holidays and the new year came and went. We unfortunately hit and killed a deer that jumped out in front of our car just after Thanksgiving, and our daughter turned 1 at the end of 2007. There's been a lot going on since my last post, and obviously the blog has gotten the short end of the proverbial stick. My most sincere apologies to the Niblets.

So with that said, here's the inaugural post of 2008. After installing Mac OSX Leopard, I've discovered a fun program called Photobooth. It's a program that you can use with your iSight camera to take pictures of yourself or others a la the old photobooths at arcades, etc. There are a myriad of effects that you can add over the photo including different distortion filters. It's really a simple concept, and as you can see from the examples, the results can be hysterical and proves to be a good activity to do with your friends and family.

I started with a picture from Photobooth, took it into Photoshop, placed a red color overlay layer on it as an "underpainting," then started painting digitally on a separate layer. When I was done, I cropped it to a different proportion since the original photo was in the 4:3 ratio horizontally. I wanted this to have a more vertical portrait cropping. It was pretty quick, it only took me about 45 minutes from start to finish.

Featured on Standard Deluxe Site

The invitations I designed for our wedding in 2004, and a few tee shirts I designed are featured on the Standard Deluxe website. Check it out! Link here: Standard Deluxe.

2008 Cartoon Network Calendar Page Sneak Peek

This is from the annual CN calendar that our design group puts out. Our group developed this self-initiated/self-directed project back in 2000 I think and we've been doing one every year since. Unfortunately this never sees consumers, so only a select few outside Cartoon Network actually get them. The upshot, though is that we're our own client so we get to take liberties we normally wouldn't be afforded on other projects. We each get a month and get to interpret it more or less how we want. This is my contribution for June, it's for the upcoming show Secret Saturdays by Jay Stephens (of Tutenstein, Oddville & Jetcat, Chick and Dee, and Land of Nod fame). This was concepted by me and Clint Carruth our Sr. Writer, pencilled by Juan Ortiz, inked by Mark Prudeaux, and colored, typeset, layout and P'shop effects by me. I'm really thrilled with how it came out, Juan and Mark did a fantastic job. They made it incredibly easy, thanks guys!

Digital Monoprint #2 Eureka?

HUGE Thanks to Jon for sending some Monoprint Photoshop brush textures he found. This actually is a tremendous help towards getting a more realistic texture. I created this bg with the brushes, copied it into the gnome file and then used the Difference filter at an opacity of 60%. The result is kinda spooky... Then I tweaked the contrast/brightness of the original image and added some more highlights back in.

I'm trying to shoehorn it after the fact here, so I think if I were to start over with the new bg, more fun things would happen. I'll keep messing around and post the results.

Thanks, Jon!

In progress Digital Monoprint 2

Another whack at the digital monoprint, albeit less successful. I tried adding some textures on top, but it really messed with the contrast and midtones, so I opted to keep it as it was. I'm considering this still in process, so I'll keep refining and adding to it.

Real Monoprint

As mentioned in my last post, here's the real McCoy. It wouldn't all fit on the scanner bed, but you get the idea. Since the ink is oil based, there's a bit of viscosity so neat things can happen and it can hold the textures of objects. You can also ink over top of your original wipeouts and add more colors. I think this was a 3 color experiment. This was probably circa 2000-2002.