I could care less about most of the core abilities of the iPhone. Maps. Address book. Calender. The ability to use twitter for 20 hours a day. Couldn’t care less. There are a few applications that I’d absolutely love, giving me the feeling that I live in the future and the Jetson’s have nothing on me. Twitter’s a great application when at large conferences such as SXSW or Comicon – where at any point you know where the flash mob is. Otherwise, it’s dead to me.
Yesterday I was eating at Fresh in the Box when a song came on in the background that Sebastion wanted to know. He asked Michi, the woman who runs the place, and she didn’t have a clue. One guy at the table next to us overheard, turned on his iphone, and after ten seconds told us its name and who sings it. That’s amazing. The ability to take a snapshot of a font and get what it is, get better prices after grabbing a pic of a UPC, or have a lousy gps on hand at all times amaze me. There are other apps, but those are what jump out.
I know the moment I get a smart phone I’ll never be able to turn back and have no idea how I lived without it.
Anyhow, Mike Warren (who I now work with), Bret Doveman (who I roomed with Freshman year), Steven Lynch (who’s an incredible illustrator), and some other guy, all from Syracuse, created an app that reads comic books. I checked Panelfly out and it’s really well done. It still needs a great deal of content added, but it only got released two days ago, so that comes next.
Right now I’m putting the finishing touches on the script for this. Pictured above is a rough proof of concept for the style. The plan is to start work on the book this week. After posting I’ll do some revisions, refine parts of the story, and then start on the layout. Once layout is figured out I’ll start photographing, following by copious amounts of drawing. This is all being done in conjunction with the Black Eye Dog line of Stranger Comics. They’re excited about the comic and have been very supportive. I’m thrilled to finally have an excuse to draw for 8+ hours a day for what I know is an excellent project. The background of all this happening is I showed them some art and they liked it. Then they showed me a script that wasn’t completely finished that I wasn’t thrilled with, so four days later I wrote my own. Last Sunday I put some finishing touches on it and showed them a more refined version on Monday. Now it’s up to me to actually get everything finished. As I said, I’m excited.
Yesterday my California license came in the mail, and it only took two and a half years to get around to doing it. Tried to find the ID from when I was 16 and had spiky hair, but alas to no avail.
Funniest (Scariest?) thing I found when cleaning out the car. From the days when my Grandparents owned it ever so briefly.
And now off to get a bracket for the front plate. The story of last night- dead batteries, useless cops, an unknown ditz, and the gathering of half a dozen friends while waiting for AAA will have to wait for another time.
I saw the raven shadow out of taxidermied raven parts a life time ago at the Guggenheim. What made it so great was I didn’t realize the shadow being projected came from a variety of unrelated parts until I got pretty close to the sculpture. The fact that there’s a multitude of artists that have used this technique makes me all the happier. These specific images were taken from Millzyville. Click on the artists’ respective links for more.
Wizard of Oz is one of the most fantastic sources of inspiration for so many artists, right up there with Alice in Wonderland as far as modern day mythologies and fables go. The Design Inspiration has a collection of artists’ take on Oz which I love.
For more story influenced inspiration check out Terrible Yellow Eyes, a place where some brilliant illustrators throw their hand at Maurice Sendak fan art.
Or just go straight to Rackham, the greatest artist to ever to take on Alice in Wonderland and so many other fables.
Some pics, in no particular order from Comic Con. I’m still sorting out all the craziness that happened these last couple days. One thing I know, I could have taken far more pictures.
Tamar choosing between Red or Blue hat-some choices are impossibly hard.
Giant Robots!
Stranger Comics drawing a crowd. (The company that works out of the Filmworks Office, of whom I’m friends with all around)
Ray guns. Backgrounds. Damsel in distress. ’nuff said. I’m m’f'professional, y’all LARP. Oh my. And these are simply the limited costumes I did take pictures of. The LARP warranted a few pics. That scary guy, from that movie….you know-that movie. And me. And Panina. Booth Babes. What I bought (all in the last 10 minutes of Con when it was on Stupid Discount.) Me and Golem statue at WETA.
In the future I’ll just post these on Facebook, but figured I planned on a number of Comic Con posts, so might as well start with the fun on the floor.
In order to get good in photoshop, you need to experiment in ways never done before. You need to step outside of the computer and use something other then that awesome grunge brush with that killer 3d effects combined with that wild font. Photoshop boils down to good art, nice photography, and a modicum of technical skills. The technical side is not the challenge, and it’s upsetting how much focus people have on learning all the tricks of photoshop when they could be dedicating their time to improving their design, photography, and drawing skills.
Everything you need to learn in photoshop you can learn in a day. That’s no empty statement. I made a full time living for nearly a year teaching a one day intensive course where I did exactly that – taught complete newbs the program in a day. It was a tiring day, but by the end they knew it. The technical side needs to stop being obsessed over.
With that said, this is a photoshop tutorial in the sense that this is exactly the variety of experimenting needed to make any image in photoshop work. You probably won’t work with cloud chambers, but it’s applying this same technique to ink splatters, fun textures, and anything and everything else.
I’m pretty sure the term for what I played around with is cloud chamber. I’ll leave it to someone else to do the research. Instead, I’ll spend my time sharing the fun I had making these photos with you.
When painting, I cleaned off an ink brush by dipping it inside of a clear bin of water. I watched it go, fascinated, and decided I needed to do something with this image. I tried photographing it, only to realize it happened too fast, and better lights were needed. I took out my bed reading lamp and another similar spotlight I own. Experimenting, I used different lights and moved from a glass tomato jar to a plastic laffy taffy jug to a perfect glass vase. There was only about 20 seconds after dropping the ink in before it was no longer interesting, so I had to fill up the water and drop in the ink again and again. Before going into the step by step of what I did-here’s a video showing the progression of tries. It’s 38 seconds, but 13 megs, so I suggest letting it load while you read the rest. 38 Seconds of Brilliance:
Download Ink Drops (By far the greatest part of this tutorial. I promise you’ll love it.)
Photographing the Sucker:
In order to the focus the camera, I had to put something where the ink would be, because once the ink started coming out I had 20 seconds to shoot so it was too late to mess with focusing. I put my hand in the water to focus in before each take. Later I used a pen, when I got sick of getting my hand wet.
The first pass I deleted. The second pass (in a tomato jar) I got this blurry mess. For every pass I’d drop a drop or two of ink into the water. The ink is from a standard Higgins Black India Ink that you can find at any art store. I normally use it for drawing with a nib.
So I moved to the Laffy Taffy container (a large clear plastic tub) and got this:
This was better, but the plastic blurred everything too much.
I remembered I had a glass vase, which short of a fishbowl, is exactly what I needed. I propped the two lights in a primary and secondary light fashion, put a white board behind the vase, fixed the focus, and got this, by far the best one yet:
Also, I realized after the ink fills the water it’s still floating around and if the light’s shifted exactly right some fun cave-like effects can be seen. To get these, the exposure was left at over a second. I rested the camera on the table so no camera shake happened.
Here’s another go, this time lit with only a single light. I realized two lights were muddling the image.
Clearly a successful run, leaving with a lot of fun images to play with. Below is the cave like stage of the ink moving.
All of these photographs were taken with longer exposures. Trying it with a flash is an exercise in failure as demonstrated with this image:
Here’s a take with an exposure so long, it’s picking up things that were completely black to the human eye:
In another take I set it up with white in the background. These are fun in their own way:
To get the white background I set my pillow sans case behind it and lit accordingly.
The last step involved taking them into Photoshop, cropping them, messing ever so slightly with the colors, sharpening them, and adding in the text.
For those curious, I sharpened by way of duplicating the layer, setting the duplicated layer on ‘Overlay,’ applying the ‘High Pass’ filter found in Filter>Other>High Pass, and erasing out parts of the top layer that I didn’t want with an eraser with a soft edge.
The font is Bauhaus 93.
The Experiment picture involved taking multiple versions of the falling ink, setting them on top of each other, and setting the layer mode to ‘Difference.’ I’d put the full breakdown, but I doubt there’s much of a demand for that. (Correct me in comments if I’m wrong)
The point of this tutorial isn’t to show the cloud chamber technique, or even the images themselves-it’s to push the idea of getting outside of the computer when creating images in Photoshop, even when they’re abstract.
Total time taken:3 nights. One for the first shoot. One for the second shoot with a borrowed SLR camera and editing all the images. One to write this tutorial. I plan to experiment with this technique more (multicolor inks? Better lighting? Larger Water Basin? Directed ink shot? Better idea for finished images? Experimenting with intended output of video rather then still? Who knows.) For now, I’m happy with this start in playing with this.
I should play more with photography. I’ve wanted to experiment with dropping ink into a glass bowl of water for a while, and seeing what results. These are some fun studies I did. I’d still like to play more with the technique, as I feel I’m only scratching the surface. I’m sure I’ll post a tutorial of how I did these in a little bit.
