 Radio
Free-Furry was just a little joke illustration I made to amuse a friend.
The radio and the flower and type were all made or set in Illustrator,
and saved as an AI file. The flower is an interesting little design,
but was very simple to make. Basically it's a pentagon, copied, coloured
differently, with one copy having the "bloat" filter used on it and the
other "punk". Opened in Photoshop and spruced up a little, colours
resaturated, I added the backdrop shot of Islington (for want of anything
better to put there) and added the Eye Candy drop shadow. I think
it's a neat little effect. It seems very "1930s" to me. Something
about Illustrator and clean, crisp, flat images it makes just gives me
that impression. |
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| Using Illustrator, it was an easy thing to make the cluster
of five stars central to these designs. It was also an easy thing
to "punk" the stars out in the space patch designs, and then lean them
back in perspective. Much harder was setting the curving type inside
the paths; it had to be done manually by editing their positions relative
to their own baselines. The black background of the first, and the
fiery background and drop shadow of the third, were elements introduced
in Photoshop. The fire was made by making a gradient fill from upper
left to bottom right, running the wave filter on it, colourizing it, and
then shifting the colours based on their tones, till I got the effect you
see here. |
  
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These illustrations were all made in Bryce2, the first three using the
same landscape. The center two views show the same place on different
days, in different seasons. The fourth view shows a polar out-station.
The views were fairly easy to make, and most of what was left to creativity
was deciding what to put where, and what mood to convey. |
 A
very very long time ago I made a map of a fictional world in a war simulation
program on my Atari 520ST called Empire. The map generator produced
this half-randomly, and I saved the map in nine chunks as IMG files.
Luckily, all these years later, I was able to use Graphic Workshop to convert
them to BMP files, which I stitched together in Photoshop, where I also
blurred the squared edges, and coloured the water and land masses, and
added the clouds. Using the PSD file as a map in Bryce2, I was able
to wrap the picture to a sphere and thus produce the globes and space views
you see below. I waited seven years to be able to do this.
I'm glad I saved those IMGs.
|
 This
one's small enough as a thumbnail you'll really HAVE to click on it to
get a good look at it. I made this in Photoshop, mainly. A
lot of labour was involved in this one. First, the pencil was photographed
with my Kodak D40, and the image exported to the computer. I set
the text (the font is called Lefty-Casual, and looks like handwriting),
and then folded it back in perspective, and added a shadow to the pencils.
Two layers of blue gradient fills (foreground to transparent) make the
upper right border. Eye Candy filters made the beveled red title
block and raised yellow title. Another third-party filter made the
background, made more subtle by an overlaying black layer set 50% transparent.
Stars made with the airbrush tool, connected by lines to make a constellation,
give the department listings a feeling of unity. The hand with the
toony (two dollar coin here in Canada; a one dollar coin is a "loony" after
the loon on the back -- nice how that works out, hmm?) and the hand coming
out of the envelope are shots from the D40; the envelope was a scan.
The type effects around the hands were set in Illustrator and extruded
in Type Twister. Although you can't experience it here, I mapped
out the areas I wanted to link to places in my page with Map It!, and hope
to be installing this as a sidebar in a set of frames soon, when I overhaul
this website. Isn't all that amazing. :) |
 Another
convoluted piece. "My Own Broken Record" is type set in Illustrator.
Two copies of it were made, and "punked" and "bloated", then overlayed
and merged. The path was very intricate after that, and I saved the
file as an AI. Opening the file in Type Twister, I extruded it forty
pixels... the path was so convoluted, even with 64M of RAM, this still
took over 3 minutes. I exported the result as an AI also, and opened
it in Photoshop. Behind it, I made two backgrounds, working from
single-colour layers with noise added to provide the basis for filters
to start their work, and built up a sort of painting-like background at
the left, and a stucco-like background at right. I used masks to
unify them, and then merged the layers, and then did a hue-shift to make
the rainbow effect out of them. The loop, and the repeating swirls,
were third-party filters applied to the text itself. I applied a
drop shadow to the text, and created a white vignette around the whole
thing, and flattened it out. As a JPG, it's a surprisingly small
file... |
| ...unless, of course, you have the right tools, in which case you can
make it HUGE! Ported into Bryce2, and given an interesting background
and some complementing objects. Wouldn't want to pay for this as
a real billboard. :) |
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Radio
Free-Furry was just a little joke illustration I made to amuse a friend.
The radio and the flower and type were all made or set in Illustrator,
and saved as an AI file. The flower is an interesting little design,
but was very simple to make. Basically it's a pentagon, copied, coloured
differently, with one copy having the "bloat" filter used on it and the
other "punk". Opened in Photoshop and spruced up a little, colours
resaturated, I added the backdrop shot of Islington (for want of anything
better to put there) and added the Eye Candy drop shadow. I think
it's a neat little effect. It seems very "1930s" to me. Something
about Illustrator and clean, crisp, flat images it makes just gives me
that impression.
A
very very long time ago I made a map of a fictional world in a war simulation
program on my Atari 520ST called Empire. The map generator produced
this half-randomly, and I saved the map in nine chunks as IMG files.
Luckily, all these years later, I was able to use Graphic Workshop to convert
them to BMP files, which I stitched together in Photoshop, where I also
blurred the squared edges, and coloured the water and land masses, and
added the clouds. Using the PSD file as a map in Bryce2, I was able
to wrap the picture to a sphere and thus produce the globes and space views
you see below. I waited seven years to be able to do this.
I'm glad I saved those IMGs.
This
one's small enough as a thumbnail you'll really HAVE to click on it to
get a good look at it. I made this in Photoshop, mainly. A
lot of labour was involved in this one. First, the pencil was photographed
with my Kodak D40, and the image exported to the computer. I set
the text (the font is called Lefty-Casual, and looks like handwriting),
and then folded it back in perspective, and added a shadow to the pencils.
Two layers of blue gradient fills (foreground to transparent) make the
upper right border. Eye Candy filters made the beveled red title
block and raised yellow title. Another third-party filter made the
background, made more subtle by an overlaying black layer set 50% transparent.
Stars made with the airbrush tool, connected by lines to make a constellation,
give the department listings a feeling of unity. The hand with the
toony (two dollar coin here in Canada; a one dollar coin is a "loony" after
the loon on the back -- nice how that works out, hmm?) and the hand coming
out of the envelope are shots from the D40; the envelope was a scan.
The type effects around the hands were set in Illustrator and extruded
in Type Twister. Although you can't experience it here, I mapped
out the areas I wanted to link to places in my page with Map It!, and hope
to be installing this as a sidebar in a set of frames soon, when I overhaul
this website. Isn't all that amazing. :)
