Hallowe'en 2011

Morning all.

So after some debacle with dressing up for Hallowe'en or not, Carla ended up needing to dress up every day for work, which got me helping her, which means I naturally got creative about it. So here are the general results...

Carla's been playing a lot of Fallout 3 lately, and her costume for the big party Saturday night was going to be a post-apocalyptic wasteland wanderer. She was all about basing a costume around a gas mask she had from japan, so we assembled some clothes, some accessories, and did this:

Not bad, considering we were going for something like this:

So then in the same vein of video game nerdiness, I rather enjoy this:

So I got to work collecting up some clothing, buying supplies, etc...

And we ended up with this :)

Thanks for reading!

Hallowe'en Flash (I hope this works)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hope everyone had a good weekend. I know I ate far too much but had a great time. Spent this one with the fiancee's family, so I owe my own family a little "me" time.

Now for something completely different!

I think last time I mentioned that I was going to work on a Left4Dead board game. I want this to still be in the works, but subsequently I was at a house warming party and got talking to the new homeowner. He told me his idea for his own board game and I was hooked. Now I'm going to make this the focus of my side projects and see if we can hammer something neat out!

School is going well. A classmate of mine asked me to be her tutor in DreamWeaver. I'm going to accept I think, I'm not having any difficulty in this class. Fireworks is what it is... I feel it's a lot of the functionality taken from Photoshop and ImageReady put into a new program, so at least I have some steady footing with that one. Flash however, not so much. I'm stuck trying to reproduce what the book is telling me concerning masked animations, and I'm not getting a lot of help from the instructor. Let's see where this goes.

I'll try to post pictures and such of the Flash project, along with anything relevant concerning the board game project.

Thanks for reading!

Left 4 Ideas...

I've been busy lately, not a lot of designing going on.
Between helping a buddy of mine refinish his basement and sorting out things at school / taking classes there, I haven't had a chance to sit down and come up with anything new.

Classes! Yes! So far I've taken some Dreamweaver, some Fireworks, and will be starting Flash soon enough. That's the tricky one to me. I was a little concerned about Fireworks, as I hadn't really used it at all, but it seems to be a collection of elements from other programs I am very familiar with, so that's cool.

What I have been kicking around is an idea to make a Left4Dead board game. I want yo use cards, but I'm trying to lean away from using an actual board. I hear WOW released something along those lines, I'm doing some research.

Thanks for reading!

Not Paying Attention In Class

That is to say I AM paying attention in class, but due to not a lot of people here having knowledge of DreamWeaver, the teacher is sort of starting off at ground zero.

Class? What are you talking about, Rob?

Well I'm glad you asked! As of about 2pm today I am now enrolled in the Conestoga College Digital Media class! So far I'm down to take the current DreamWeaver class, a class in Flash and a class in Fireworks. I'm hoping that my previous classes at Georgian College plus my 4+ years of experience in the field will allow me to opt out of the actually design related classes. We'll find out soon I hope, the college strike that just ended delayed me a bit (I actually missed my first Fireworks class on Monday without even realizing!) Oh well...

That's all for me, I should start paying attention. Thanks for reading!

Let's see how many of these blog posts I can get away with without having to post any kind of title!

I had a job interview on Friday for a company in Elmira. Wish me luck!
No current ideas for any new artistic projects... wonder if I should create a Facebook specific to my graphic design life. Would this really be any different than my website? That was what we call a shameless plug...

I'm still working on the script for my webcomic. That's sort of what's on my plate right now, that and trying to hear back about some leather. More on that later.

Thanks for reading!

Project - Skelanimals Birthday Card

In case I haven't mentioned, a lot of my projects are the combination of two needs - my need to create something kinda fun and unique, and someone else's need to have something kinda fun and unique made for them! Everyone loves this, this individual piece that is theirs alone: something that even if they don't hold on to forever, they can still know that they owned that and nobody else did. That's why I created the Skelanimal birthday card for a friend of mine. As I said before, I love working with greeting cards, so when I told her "give me a theme and if I have time I'll make you a fancy card", this is the result!

I started off by looking around for something I could create as a papercraft, but hadn't worked before. At the time I was still working on the Hot Fuzz Birthday Card and had sort of exhausted my need for pop-ups. After a few Google searches for things like "creative card" or "fun papercraft" I came across this. It looked amazing and I gave it a try right away.

I started by printing a cheaper smaller version of it to be able to map out the proper areas where images would be created when put together:

As it turns out, there is a double spread in the design that worked perfectly to have a nice splash message. From there, I designed some Skelanimal themed images and broke them down into squares to be inserted into the overall template.

Once I was happy with the mock-up, I went out and chose a nice 12pt card stock paper and had it professionally printed. From there I took the sheets home, cut them out and taped the whole thing together and was really happy with the final output:

That's all for this project. Thanks for reading!