Archive for the 'Projects' Category
February
24
Stitch the Lids
I’ve been really interested in custom lettering for a long time now. I’ve just started producing work that I’m happy with. There’s something abotu custom lettering and fonts that appeals to both sides of my personality. It has the creative influence of finding out where each letter is going and how they’re interact with eachother. Then comes in the technical side of getting it into illustrator. But then my obsessive side takes over and I get lost trying to make everything exactly right. I think my work suffers here, I try to line everything up too much and it all ends up being too exact and looking a little stiff. But I’m working on it.
3 commentsJanuary
28
Before
After
This blog redesign is still a work in progress, my strategy has been to get something out there that is functional and then add onto it piece by piece until it’s perfect. I’d always noticed that the posts themselves were a little plain, but I just couldn’t find something that fit the style. I thought it would be cool to have a sort of Apple-ish calendar poking out of the top of every blog post…. so that’s what I made. Doing these little things is a good way to keep my design skills fresh in between actual paying design jobs. Which are few and far between.
On the code side it’s not that much of a change, just added a fee floated divs here and there and a couple lines to the CSS file. I’ve pushed this template so far that I’m begining to think I should make an actual theme out of it and submit it to Wordpress.
Maybe I’ll get there eventually, but it’s not perfect yet.
No commentsJanuary
15
The Bosetroopers
When I got the IPhone I stopped using the old Bose headphones. So I decided that I would paint them. The only problem with this is that I’ve never been able to paint anything that looked good for longer than a week. I set these aside until I almost forgot about them, I pulled them out last night to take a look at them. Turns out I used water based paint in the airbrush and it had already started flaking off. So instead of taking my time and finishing the design with perfection, I descided to whip out the extra-fine paint pen and just freehand it. I took a bunch of pictures because I’m sure that in a week or so these are gointg to look like crap and I’m going to have to do a lot of work to start over.
No commentsDecember
03
November
19
Sucky Suckerson
Stumpy
The Doorknocker of Chulthu
I’ve been kicking around this idea for a while and I was bored the other day so I thought I’d test some things out. Just like the skull I think that if you draw something enough you can sculpt it too. I’ve been drawing tentacles in my sketchbooks for years. I’ve always just liked them, they’re like the remote controls of the animal kingdom. One looks a little bit like an elephants trunk, but I think with some paint they’ll be awesome. I’ll say one thing, sketching is a lot different from working with clay.
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This pot is $49.99
But it is ALMOST there. I’ve been using the Amazon wish list for a long time now and I really like it. The addition of the Universal wish list was a great addition, I just have the universal wish list bookmark on the firefox toolbar to add things from other sites. So when it came time to register for the wedding I thought… hmm… I wonder if Amazon has a wedding registry. It does!
We started using it a couple weeks ago and we’ve found some shortcomings with it. First off, While I do like shopping online, there are somethings that I want to see in person. When it comes to choosing a good set of pots and pans I want to hold the handle in my hand and see the finish for myself. I had heard about the iphone app Redlaser which scans bar codes and looks up the prices online on Amazon and Google. So I went ahead and bought it. The first time I tried it out it was amazing… it just worked. I scanned in a set of pans, it looked them up on Amazon and found that they were $30 cheaper online. Great! Then I noticed that you
Laurel as Vanna
can add to the wish list directly from the iphone! Could life get any better? I submit that it could not! But then I noticed something, you can’t add something to the Wedding registry from the Mobile version of Amazon.com (glaring omission #1). So I thought I would just add them to my wish list then move them over later, until I found out later that you CANT DO THAT. (glaring omission #2) So you have to… find the item on the wish list, click on it, re-add it to the wedding registry, then remove it from your wish list.
So what could have been “historically awesome” was rendered “just pretty cool” by Amazon.
In Summary the good things about Redlaser and Amazon are…
- The Redlaser app is historically awesome.
- Amazon Registry works with the universal wish list button.
- The Registry separates the items into categories.
- unique URL for sending out to people.
Bad things…
- Universal wish list items are relegated the universal wish ghetto at the bottom of the page.
- You can’t move items from your regular wish lists to the registry.
- Cant put things on the wedding registry from Amazon mobile.
November
17
So a few weeks ago I published a photo of two skulls that I sold to a couple in Maryland. They had the order in for a long time, but I hadn’t finished them. For some reason I was having a horrible time deciding if they were cool enough yet. I think it’s because they were the first ones that I did in black with colors instead of a normal dark in the eyes kind of thing. Here are some pictures of it in progress. I really like the finished products, but I think there’s something to be said about the gloss black and gloss red. I just need to get it right and figure out how to use oil paints better.
Gloss black and red
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November
17
1989 Topps Back
Easy on the printer
The other day I saw this map that someone had created from a list of the top US craft breweries. I thought it was really well designed and looked great. But it was missing something… I was noticing how many of these breweries I recognized and had tried their beers. I thought, I want to check them off when I try their beers. Then I thought back to when I was a kid and collected baseball cards. So today I designed a checklist to be printed out and checked off. My inspiration was the 1989 Topps set, which I always considered my favorite. The first one is from the back of the cards, which might be a little hard to print out (but it is more accurate). The Second one is inspired by the front of the card and will be easier to read and print.
No commentsNovember
03
Carter Skull
Hamill Skull
I finally delivered these last Monday. I’d been working on them for a long time. I got an email from someone who had seen them at Artomatic and wanted one for a unique wedding gift for a friend and one for herself. She wanted them to be mostly black with these specific colors. I hadn’t done a one with black as the main color. I had a few false starts and paint mistakes, but in the end I think they came out awesome.
Things I learned from these.
- Gloss black is cool by itself, but hard to do color effects over.
- I hate oil paints.
- Airbrushing is both harder and easier than I thought.
- Plaster casts can be brittle.
- I need to pay attention to knocker length. (that’s what she said)
