Dusting Off The Archives

I've got artwork floating around on various sites around cyberspace, so this is a good place to pull them all together, either linking to them or reposting them for your benefit.

You'll notice I've added a DeviantShare widget, which you can see scrolling away on the left of the page. This has samples from the college work I've posted on my DeviantArt portfolio. Click on the widget's link and you'll be able to see the rest. It's a great showcase of the different styles I can create and I've added quite detailed descriptions of my working methods. You can also buy many of the images printed onto canvas, mugs, mousemats and other products.

I also have some personal projects archived on my cobwebby old MySpace page, so I'm bringing the best of them across here. A group of them are T-shirt designs, which I'll keep for their own post. Here are the "bits and bobs", personal projects and one-offs.

WATERGLADE

Photo restoration - personal project

Adobe PhotoShop & Nova Art Explosion clip art, 2003

I was lent this postcard by my auntie in 2003, who had been quoted a small fortune to get it restored professionally.

It shows an allotment by a local pub called The Waterglade and is dated 1911. The woman and the man on the right are my mum's parents, and the baby is another one of my many aunties.

Tatty, torn, faded and stained by old Sellotape, the only way to rescue it was to hack it to pieces using PhotoShop (I think I was running version 5 at the time) and recreate it in the spirit of the original. The sky, path and bush on the left hand side were taken from clip art and blended in.

The postcard was a black and white photo hand-coloured in a limited palette. Therefore I had to reduce the image to greyscale, brighten it up and colour it all in again. The colours had to be a flat wash of one shade, matching the original palette as closely as possible.

Minor creases were easily ironed out using the Clone tool and the text was recreated over the original.

The final piece was printed on good quality photo paper, framed and hung with love on my auntie's wall. :)

415

Illustration - online art project

PhotoShop & Bryce, 2008

In April 2008, a guy named Adam Box launched The Count High Project, with the aim of making a film. It was to consist of illustrations of numbers, running sequentially from 1 up to however many submissions he could collect in exactly 12 months.

Anyone was welcome to have a go. All you had to do was Email Adam and he would send you your number (issued in strict first-come-first-served order). You could then illustrate it any way you wanted - drawing, painting, modelling, photography or just scribbling it on a piece of paper. Talent wasn't the important thing, he just wanted to see the variety of ideas and people (from professional designers to schoolkids) his wacky project would attract.

The target was 100,000 but I don't believe he received anywhere near that. Indeed the website disappeared before the 12 month deadline expired. I still like my contribution though, so here it is.

I was assigned 415 which, when I researched it, turned out to be a very boring number! The most interesting thing I could find out was it's the telephone area code for San Francisco. So somehow that led to this earthquake-inspired illustration.

I created the ground and sky in the Bryce 3D landscape generating software. I'm not an experienced user though and I couldn't find my manual. I'd forgotten how to import a greyscale image and turn it into a landscape, so instead I did the 415-shaped holes in PhotoShop. Adding graduated browns and a grain effect gave a convincing 3D appearance.

HUNGARIAN PULI - A BEGINNER'S GUIDE

Personal bit of daftness

PhotoShop, 2007

Finally for now, something I did in one of my silly moods! I'm a bit obsessed with Hungarian Pulis and I found this amazing photo on Wikipedia. I thought people might like a bit of help working out what it was!