Project Progress : Rad Poster, Will I ever finish this thing?

Art, Projects

I’m trying really hard to stay motivated on this project. I love the movie, but I’m running low on free time and all the new house stuff is taking up a lot of my time. I’ve pretty much got all the major moments of the film in some degree of completion in the poster. I’m struggling with a few layout issues, it’s harder than I thought to include all the major and some of the minor characters in a poster and still make the image flow and look coherent. I have a lot of respect for all poster artists now. It’s been about 2 months since the last update, so I have a couple more characters than usual, as always these aren’t the final versions. I’m still getting all the skintones and color palate correct. This is clearly going to be the biggest Illustrator project that I’ve ever attempted.

Like always it’s a challenge for me to keep scale in mind when it comes to detail for the project. Example, even if I print this out at 44×61 those two girls are probably going to be about 3 inches tall… they have way too much detail, but I got carried away.

Please forgive the crudity of this model, I didn’t have time to build it to scale.

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Paper Lantern Wedding Photobooth

Projects, Stuff and Things

If you’re going to build a photo booth, why not do it with some style?

I’m finally getting around to posting about some of the projects that we did for the wedding. Because, if I don’t do it now… it’s never going to happen.

Laurel and I knew that we wanted to have a photobooth at our wedding. We have some great pictures from early in our relationship that were taken at photobooths in Bethany, MD and  Manassas, VA. But when we picked the wedding location in Natural Bridge Va we realized that getting a photobooth all the way down ther was going to be pretty expensive. Over $1500 type of expensive. So I looked into building one of my own. I found a lot of great resources out there.  PhotoBoof being one. But they are charging $600 for their software, which is pretty awesome, but a little overkill for my needs.  If you want to use the photobooth professionally this may be the best option, but I can’t even sell door knockers and hoodies on Etsy, so I’m not getting into the photo booth business.

Read More inside and more pictures!

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Project Progress : The BAR

Beer, Projects, Stuff and Things


In the last post I posted a few pictures of the bar in progress. It’s a little farther on than in those pictures, but it still has a long way to go. Because I’m impatient and also still figuring out what I want to do with the whole setup, I decided to make a mock-up of the bar. I had this idea of using The Rasterbator to make a divided image and mount it in the IKEA frames that I still have from the bar at the Vienna house. But seeing it in action I’m not sure if it has the cool factor that I wanted, it may look different in real life… The front of the bar will be stained in 3 different shades of ‘ebony’ stain with 1x 1/2 wooden strips as dividers. I need to find a place to buy them or how to make them (without table saw swirl marks. I also need to do a test stain on some scrap wood to make sure I can get the effect that I want. Why can’t photoshop be in real life, I would get things done much quicker.

What Have I been doing?

Projects, Stuff and Things

Hey Internet,

It turns out that adding buying a new house and being a newlywed is tough to squeeze into an already tight schedule. One of the things that has been getting pushed aside is updating this blog, facebook, and most other computer related projects. This past weekend was presidents day so I was able to catch up on some projects and kind of keep my head above water on some others.

Overall the house is getting to feel more like a home, we have the living room/kitchen area pretty well set up as well and the bedroom completely set up.  Since those two rooms are pretty much the size of our entire previous house it’s pretty easy to forget the rest of the house even exists. The Office is in some kind of usable state, Kara (Laurel’s sister) is using one of the bedrooms and the other is filled with everything that doesn’t fit in the other rooms of the house.

It’s becoming a slower process to finish setting up all the other rooms. I’m hoping to have some time to get to some art projects in the coming weeks (door knockers, Rad Hoodies)

As if I needed another project… Enter, The Basement Bar.

We started building the bar in the basement, I’m hoping to have a full descriptive post sometime or at least some better pictures. It’s looking very smooth and thanks to Wade, Charlie, and Jesse much better than I would have built it myself.

I’ve also included a picture of the cabinets and workbench in the ‘laundry /Art project room’ Hopefully I’ll get to sit down there and finish some projects soon!

Project Progress : Rad Poster yet again

Art, Projects

This has been an unprecidented level of motivation for this project. It probably comes from knowing that other people are working on a goal of having the 25th aniversary screening of Rad in Cochrane, Canada and that would be the deadline for this project.  Check that out at TheMovieRad.com.

As this project goes along I’m somehow getting better and worse at illustrator at the same time.  When the source image is of low resolution its really important to know where to make the lines in order to convey the shape or shading that you want. But it’s also a lot more work and this is clearly the biggest project in terms of illustrated faces that I’ve taken on.  So I get a little fatigued in certain ones and I think it’s starting to show in the details. After putting a few of them together I realized that it’s really going to be important to stay consistent in style, level of detail, and skin tones. But, really of these four, the only one that I’m not extremely excited about is the Luke and Becky one… mostly just Becky’s neck… she looks like she has some kind of giant worm neck…  So these previews are really going to change in the final, or at least some of them will.

But not Mr. Timmer… that one is awesome.

He may get his own print.

Bart Racing

McDouche

McDouche

Mr. Timmer

Luke and Becky

I was raised by HBO

Entertainment, Movies


So I was thinking the other day that I know a lot of 80’s movies for someone who was born in 1981 and some of them are strange choices for someone who would have been under 10 years old until 1991.  When I was trying to figure out why it could be I started naming some of the weirder ones that I know I remember watching and it hit me. I’m pretty sure my parents had HBO when we lived in the house in Roswell, Georgia until 1991.  Most of the movies that I would consider ‘too old’ or just ‘not interesting to a 10 year old’ were released from 1986-1988 so they would have been on HBO during the time we had it.  When we moved to Virginia there was a video store that I could ride my bike to and my mom signed a release form that let me rent rated R movies without my parents having to be there.   So I watched a LOT of movies in my middle school and High School years, so this list might be a little influenced by that.  And by ‘a lot’ I mean almost every movie that came out on video and then I went into the back catalog, they were only about $1 for older movies, so I’d rent 6 at a time.  So what I’m going to try and do here is try to make a list of movies that I’m pretty sure I watched before I was 10 years old.  I’ll list the title, the year it came out, without looking at IMDB… what I think the plot was and what my most memorable moment was from that movie.

Examples after the break…

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