site launch: an artful journey

oh, by the way, (ha!), www.AnArtfulJourney.com is now live! it's been a bit, but woops, i forgot to post. i think it turned out lovely.

why i love photoshop

i've been working for the last few days on a new home page. this one is very different; what i envisioned was rather abstract and difficult to describe, and it's turned out quite beautifully, i think.

so why do i love photoshop? because it can take an abstract mental image, and these photos, and turn it into this:



it isn't quite perfected yet, but wow - whod've thunk you could get to this from where i started?

some of the techniques i used:

masking, masking, and masking, hue/saturation, brightness/contrast, paintbrush (including one for clouds), bevel & emboss, transparency, inner glow, color overlay, gradient overlay, fuzzy paintbrush (for some of the highlights & shadows), guassian blur, diffuse glow, pen tool, blur tool, and the text tool and line tool.

i first created, colored, and masked each layer separately in photoshop (hills, each tree or set of trees, the moon) and then placed them in the master file as smart objects, so that i could apply layer effects such as guassian blur and diffuse glow non-destructively. most of the green glow on the trees is applied using inner glow on a separate layer, and the pump-jack has been recolored, and highlights/shadows added with the paintbrush tool. once the background image was created, i brought that into the home page comp as another smart object, masked the edges (using pen tool and gaussian blur), and added the navigation, lines, and text.

(please note that ALL of these images are copyrighted, and cannot be used for any reason)

great advertising

the yearly superbowl is always a hayday for us advertisers. even if you couldn't dream of having the budget to make one of these commercials, for those in the know, the riveting show of masculine drama is really just a showcase for great advertising (sorry guys!).

this, surprise surprise, was by far my fav. the advertiser won't allow embedding through youtube, so watch the commercial here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m71m-LBqFQ

creativity + sense of humor = AWESOME

thanks to my friend AJ for finding this link. this animation company, based in paris, has clearly done some wonderful work (including a very cool music video for coldplay). this video is an interesting take on the age-old question:

http://www.passion-paris.com/flash.html#myreel=v790&page=d69&video=v790

there is something quite magical about an artist who doesn't take himself too seriously, no offense, van gogh!

adding to my idea library

what i do requires a pretty constant process of learning and idea generation, so i'm always on the lookout for anything to expand my realm of ideas. my latest additions:


why are half my books from rockport publishing? maybe because i often go to borders, and maybe because they rock. i've been doing a lot more logos lately, and these authors have some fantastic ideas about both the design process and the messages behind branding, business naming, and logos.

never hurts to stay grounded in the basics (who knows what i'm missing anyway?), and their case studies are well-grounded in the modern world.

oh, and one for me!