Aphro Sheen

Another stab at the Aphrodite drawing.

Rapt Attention

I doodled up a dinosaur to do a quick Photoshop coloring demo for my EFA class.

May the 4th... you know....

Like Jedi Mike Tyson says, "May the Fourth be with you!"

Pucker Up

Attendance was really low today (it's hard for school to compete with a sunny Friday) so with fewer things I had to take care of I decided to Photoshop up my pencil drawing from the other day with some mid tone and highlights type monochromatic values. Since that's what we're working on in my EFA class I'll use it as an example.

Flying Leap

Another example for that EFA project.

Model Sheet

For my EFA class we did an assignment where they came up with a character, created a model sheet for the character, then swapped and drew each other's characters. It was pretty fun.
This was the example I made just in case we wound up with an odd number for pairing off. It's a revised version of a character from the comic strip I had in my college's newspaper as an undergrad.

Hands Up Don't Shoot

The gesture that the protesters in Ferguson adopted of marching forward with hands raised reminded a little bit too much of the menacing dehumanizing posture of a lumbering Frankenstein's monster as he terrorizes villagers. Basically the antithesis of what I think they intended.
I thought it was kind of a funny visual, or at the very least a provocative one, and also one that basically you could read any way you wanted based on your feelings about the shooting and protests. Supporters could see it as a criticism of the testimony that compared Michael Brown as a monster. Opponents could see it as a criticism of the protesters' simplified message of a complex issue. Basically something for everyone to agree with or rail against.
So I whipped this up in Photoshop, posted it to Imgur, and waited for the fireworks to start.
Nothing.
Apparently I'm not very good at trolling social media.

Mean Cuisine

We did a color theory assignment in class examining the way marketing and advertising uses color to manipulate consumers and cater to specific demographics. The idea was to take a product targeted to one demographic, for example women, and alter its color scheme to appeal to another demographic, for example men.
For my example I tried to give Lean Cuisine a makeover to sell it to dudes, complete with douchy Ed Hardy tribal designs to replace the cutesy curly q vectors.

As close as a star to the moon

More from ArtWorks and more from me doing examples to hash things out as far as figuring out timetable, potential challenges, fixes, ect, this time with the trifold mailer layout. 

It also gave me the opportunity to take elements we didn't go with as a group and see what they would have been like taken to conclusion.

In Brightest Day, In Darkest Night

Making examples for class fulfills a number of purposes. It let's me know how much time the project could take, it let's me know what sort of challenges students might run into and how to fix them, it let's me know if what I'm asking is even reasonable to expect, and it let's me get some of the urge to control the process and the results out of my system. I don't need for their work to be my work because I already did my work, so their creations can be different and with pleasant surprises.

One of those pleasant surprises was the background to this image.

One of the students wanted to make something resembling the 2012 ArtPrize lantern launch. I helped her put together some of the elements and I think she had a very creative idea which turned out pretty awesome. Unfortunately it wasn't the direction the rest of the group wanted to go, opting instead for a more painterly approach. I still really liked it and hated to see it become a dead end, so I used it as the starting point for my examples.

Below is a version formatted for mass e-mail using one of the example logos I whipped up.

What they drew at work today

Typically this blog is what I drew at work today (hence the name), but today, it's what they drew at work today. My students that is. Or former students I should say as they received their completion certificates today. 

Today was the last day of the ArtWorks Program at UICA and this is the final product they created.

It's a trifold pamphlet for The Green Light Project, an awareness campaign for youth homelessness and runaways. 

We had a real client who chose to participate with a bunch of high school students rather than going with their usual design firm. We went through multiple pitches, multiple critiques, numerous variations, and a slew of final tweaks until we arrived at a final product the students and the client were pleased with. 

Not all the creative choices were ones I would have made, but that's kind of the point and I couldn't be prouder of the group or the work they did.

So instead of my work, here's theirs.

Click Bait

So, if you read this blog from time to time, you know I'm a bit nerdy and a few days ago I posted this.

I thought that 15 year old painting would get some nice attention if I posted it to the Star Wars Google+ Community.
What did I get?
Nothing.
One solitary +1 from a community of  over 115,000 users. One lousy click.
And it's not like other posts weren't getting attention. Other posts, lousy ones, were easily getting dozens of clicks.

So I decided I needed to game the system. I needed to come up with something those geeks would click. So why not Darth Maul? Dorks love Darth Maul. Even the ones who hate Phantom Menace still love Darth Maul.
It was sure to get clicks.

It topped out at 83 +1's.

Meanwhile a half naked lady in an Ewok t-shirt got over 250.
I think maybe I should just stop trying to impress dorks.

Pixel Chix

I have this mosaic/pixel assignment I do with class where we draw something on graph paper then translate it into something 8-bit looking with the grid and some markers. It's fun.

I took this picture and did it, then for some extra fun I scanned it into Photoshop and played with some layers to give it the pukey green tint of a Gameboy screen.

Ironic, right, using paper and pencil to get a mechanical look, only to scan it into a computer program that could have translated the original image that way with a few mouse clicks? 

Listen Bud, He's Got Radioactive Blood

I thought "Amazing Spider-Man 2" was pretty much not amazing and in fact actually terrible, but Spider-Man is still a cool looking character who's fun to draw, so there you go.

It's a pencil drawing on grey paper with a bit of white Prismacolor that I then scanned and colored up in Photoshop.

Oscar '014

The invitation for Oscar Party 2014.

Ideate Create Manipulate

A promo for a class I'm scheduled to teach next year. I took an old drawing and fiddled with it in Photoshop.

See the original version here.

Who's your daddy?

Take two with the Copic markers, this time with something more nerdy.
I managed not to get a big splotch of mistake on it this time and added a dab of Prismacolor for some darker darks and a smidge of Photoshop to blur to the background to finish it out.

May the Fourth of July Be With You

A Star Wars drawing I made, which thanks to the freedom of expression we enjoy here in America I was able to make. Although it may violate the copyright laws we enjoy here in America...

Happy Independence Day!

2187

More dorkiness....

TK421

Further dorkiness...