Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Peony

One of my students told me about how you can load user-created brushes into Photoshop and that got me thinking about the brushes that I use in Illustrator.

I'm a big fan of the pencil brush, but after brief internet research including looking at the link he sent me, I realized I could create my own brush and I did.

I made an art brush of a peony petal and used it to help me draw this peony bud. The sepals are the work of a simple pen drawing, but I used a brush for each of the peony petals and rotated when needed.

This is just the first thing that I tested out today ( I love flowers can you tell?) and I may get the chance to do some more work to it, but I am really supposed to try very hard to do some lesson planning as my real job starts Monday, when I will be teaching FIVE different business classes at a local high school for pretty much the rest of the school year. Needless to say, I really should focus my creativity on trying to make my lessons more interesting and exciting, but drawing and designing keeps creeping into my mind.

BUT I will be channeling some of this creativity into at least one of my classes (yay for Marketing!) as they are "marketing" the summer reading book fair with a theme of "Alice in Wonderland" and I am going to attempt to make them a special Alice themed dessert. Given my latest excursions with sugar cookies and icing, you see where this all stemmed from. So stay posted for some more culinary creativity in the future.



P.S. Leave some comments, folks- don't be shy! Give me some inspiration, challenges of things to create! Thanks for reading to all my regular visitors, you know who you are!

P.P.S. With regard to my sister's jewelry store graphics that I created for the Spring 2009 season and the colors that I researched, they have been in all the magazines I have received as the new color combination. One mag even included a bright blue with the combo which I can appreciate, I might have to use it some how- colors are sometimes inspiring all on their own!

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

New background!

You may have noticed by new background! Yes, I am so excited I figured it out today. What I did was create my own block in illustrator using the orchids I had drawn before for a pattern for the background which by itself looks like this, uploaded it to Photobucket and then used Dreamweaver to figure out the appropriate code and spot to slip into the html editing section of the blog. Yay! I just love how my black and white orchids float on the background now. So, if you ever want help creating your own custom background, I'm your girl! I'm still learning how to use Dreamweaver, though, and I have a feeling its going to take some time before I could launch anything real, but you know what they say, baby steps-- yay for backgrounds!



P.S. Orchids are my one of my favorite types of flowers!

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

For Christine...3

Spoke with Christine, said she wanted to go ahead with the new color scheme, she hasn't rolled out the updated look just yet, that's all. So, I took the same stickers, changed the colors and added more variants. Also, I made a "sticker sheet" with a background for ease of viewing (green would not be printed). I kind of like these as poker chips, wouldn't that be a fun girly kind of thing... Hmm...

STICKER SHEET


For Christine...2

My latest commission (as of two hours ago) was to create round stickers for Christine's jewelry business, to use as price tags and what not. I decided to go back to the original color set, not the new season color set I had used in her most recent banner. I'm still on the fence about it. Alas, new stickers. This first one doesn't look good on a white background but since I prefer not to draw unnecessary lines (much better when it comes to printing) it will stay looking a little funny. The second option has more color though. I'll have to wait and see what Christine says.

STICKER
STICKER

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Photoshop Lessons

During my internship (year or so ago), I got to design and implement a few Photoshop lessons. I showed the students how to use lassos, colorize, combine photographs, create photo masks, use the cloning tool and probably a few more things. Below are the materials from one lesson. The first photo is a an original picture that I took on a family camping trip. I then scoured the internet and borrowed someone else's picture of a butterfly (sorry, can't site, don't remember, but thanks for it!). Then using the above tools I showed the students how to make the third picture. Neat, huh?

PHOTOGRAPH


+borrowed photograph

=COMPOSITE!

This next lesson was more about masking and creating objects in Photoshop. Again, first is a borrowed photograph of a beautiful horse running on a beach. I chose horses because a few of my nieces love them. Keep in mind, for the following creation I used the same exact photograph I just masked, rotated, and enlarge. The whole point of the mask is that I never cropped the photograph, leaving it in its original state should I need to easily fix it. This lesson also makes use of a textured background, multiple shape objects, and dropping shadows to create the polaroid frame.

borrowed photograph + lots of work

COMPOSITE!

Hmm... I think I might do something more with these polaroid frames, they are kind of trendy right now....

Monday, February 2, 2009

For Kimberly...

My sister Kimberly has a website as well. She is in the dog breeding business currently, but pretty much knows anything there is to do with animals. So, a while back when I started pretending to be a graphic designer, I made her a banner [unsolicited] and sent it to her. She is kind enough to actually use it as an intro for her site where she sells her miniature schnauzer puppies.

BANNER

See my little bouncy ball and how one little doggy has slightly tilted its head that is oh-so-cute? Ooh, and the tagline was me too. I decided on boxy dogs for one real reason and that is because pen tool was not entirely my friend at that time and would not give me nice doggy curves, so I just consider it a style. Of course, pen tool has slowly become my friend as you see with my orchids on the blog's banner.