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.