Adventures in Aerospace

So, uh, not sure how many of you know this, but I am currently enrolled in the Aerospace Engineering program at Mississippi State University now, and I have become a member of the local AIAA (American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics) chapter here. They needed a new t-shirt design to sale and raise money for the chapter, so I jumped onboard and made this.

This is a work-in-progress. I got the idea one day while sketching in one of my classes. Still playing around with it, though.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

My Postcard

 Here's my finished postcard project...

Front.

Back.

Compared with the concept composition:

My Three Comps

This was the first design I started working on, thinking I would like it best. The robot's face and chest are screens featuring my art, and the box it is reaching for also has art on its side.

My next idea was to have an outreached hand with my art escaping its grasp on wings. I liked the idea, but I'm not entirely satisfied with the overall concept now that I've drawn it out a bit.

This third composition is actually now my favorite, which I was not expecting as I considered it to be a bland idea at first. It features an astronaut inside of a particular illustration of mine which serves as the background, and the Tator Cat is inside of the astronaut's helmet with another art piece pinned on the astronaut's chest. I like this one most because it was simply the most fun to put together. I hope it'd actually make a good final product.

Ghosts of Photoshop (Tutorial)

Photoshop Ghosting Effect

This is the tutorial I chose to focus on. I like it because it really elaborates on the usefulness of layers and their interaction to create the overall image composition. 

It also explains some of the finer adjustments one can make with various filters and the effects they have.

You can take an image like this:

And turn her into a ghost!

Isn't that cool?

I actually tried this tutorial out about a year ago. Here was the result (finally found it backed up on my external hard drive, yay):

I didn't really like how blurry they made the image in the tutorial, so I lessened the motion blur layer slightly on mine. I also added some eerie "eyes" in the background with a simple white paintbrush tool to make it look like I was being chased by some ethereal creature. In hindsight, the added blur would have probably helped a little bit with the image, since I'm supposed to be running in this picture. Ah well.

Anyways, click the link above, read the steps. It's simpler than it may look. The instructions are pretty straight-forward and although it's not in video format, it has a lot of useful screenshots to show what everything looks like.

Guitar Magazines

As I described in class last week, I was drawn to this particular Guitar Aficionado magazine for whatever reason. I believe it was due to the distinct contrast this magazine has against the other surrounding magazines. Notice how the Guitar Aficionado magazine is dark with a figure dressed partially in white while the surrounding magazines are generally lighter. Something so simple really made this cover pop for me. However, I believe that if this magazine were placed further back on the shelf or mixed with other black-background magazines, it wouldn't have had the same effect. So contrast plus lucky positioning on the part of the magazine is what drew my attention.

Bedpost Spotlight

Here's a follow-up illustration to "Grave Bedpost." We see this bizarre villain has escaped his grave and is staggering through the darkness, right into a spotlight, possibly being shown from a helicopter overhead.

Yes, I am fully aware of how silly this character is. Yes, that is a frilly collar. Yes, he's wearing sunglasses. Yes, he has a John Leno chin. And of course, that's his bedpost for an arm. My friend Franky and I came up with this maniacal villain back in high school, and he has remained one of my favorite most ridiculous characters ever.

I've always thought that a beam of light shining through fog or smoke looks really cool, so that's what I focused on for this illustration. I just used a broad digital airbrush tool and used sweeping gestures to get the light to draft in from the source, lighting up the fog around the character. For a little extra detail, I added a brick wall off to the right in the background.

I really wanted Bedpost Esta (yes, that is his name; I didn't name him) to look like he had dug his way out of his grave, so I made a point to add lots of brown and green to his coat, darkening it and using another airbrush tool to grunge it up a bit. I'm so used to drawing sleek, clean objects and textures that it was actually refreshing to draw something covered in mud and grass stains.

Grave Bedpost

Even homemade comic book villains with bedposts for arms deserve their day of infamy. 

"Grave Bedpost" is what I call this one. Back story? It's every bit as ridiculous as one could imagine given the caption, but I prefer to leave it as somewhat of a mystery for now. It's funnier to me that way.

I used some basic watercolor tools and digital airbrushing to do most of this. I was aiming for an eerie fog to mask most of the background and am pleased with the result. It took me a while to get the right color and lighting to give it that reflective glow in the darkness. I was also debating on whether or not I should add in blades of grass, but now that I've done it, I'm happy that I did, as it really makes the ground look less flat and murky.

I usually don't focus on backgrounds so much (as you've probably noticed in my previous blogs) but for this one, I started out with just the background first and added the grave afterwards. The final touch was the fog. It was all done in one layer, with the exception of the text on the grave, which I converted to an image and dropped onto the main canvas layer so I could "age" it a bit on the stone.