"Life has a way of opening up..."

This week i've been working on a very quick project with a three day deadline for a new client by the name of Monks Secrets. A site offering various tools, advice and knowledge on how to meditate properly and most beneficially.

The project involved the creation of appropriately themed graphics to be used for logos, banners/banner ads and an e-book cover. We went through various types of fonts to get to the one decided on in the end that both gave an impression of where teh techniques draw their inspiration and knowledge from whilst also implying a sense of mystery or secrecy. Two fonts were used to serve this purpose, to form a distinction between the two.

The colours used are purposely meant to be calming, variants with high contrasts in the sunset contradicted this intent however, often giving the impression that an explosion or mushroom cloud was erupting in the background.
However the sunset background lends itself perfectly for the purpose of putting the foreground elements into shillouettes. Again the advantage of this is to invoke a sense of mystery whilst simultaneusly not drawing any attention away from the text.

The design process threw up several concepts, here are some fo the tidier/tidied up ones;

And the final images that made the cut.

To check out their products their website can be found here.

Photograph of the Week #0022

"When not scribbling away in a sketch book or dabbling on a Wacom tablet i'm invariably fiddling around with exposure settings on my Nikon D90 trying to capture moments in aesthetically pleasing ways.
So here we have "Photograph of the week" a (mostly) weekly feature showcasing my favourite photo of the week."

A very random shot of my back garden. I was trying to shoot the pond(which never gets enough light) as it's full of frogspawn at the minute but didn't get anything I was happy with.
Whilst I was laying on the ground though getting mud and grass stains on my otherwise clean clothes I decided to shoot a few other things from where I was and ended up with a shot of mostly grass with the bench in the background.(A bit over saturated maybe)
I'll give the frogspawn another go on a less overcast day I think.

Photograph of the week #021

"When not scribbling away in a sketch book or dabbling on a Wacom tablet i'm invariably fiddling around with exposure settings on my Nikon D90 trying to capture moments in aesthetically pleasing ways.
So here we have "Photograph of the week" a (mostly) weekly feature showcasing my favourite photo of the week."

A photograph of one of my son's toys that was sitting on the floor in our lounge as the late afternoon sun beamed down through the garden window. It's quite fun to photograph toys laying around, they're often very colourfull and make for interesting shots, depending on the composition ofcourse.

I think my depth of field was probably a tad too shallow for this image but still.

Here there be dragons....

I've semi-recently been working on a project that requires a lot of fantasy based graphics.

All of the usual things Elves, Human, Orcs, Dwarves, etc. I'm trying to go for a lot of detail where possible and as you can see all of these images are in very early stages of development, some a lot more than others. A couple are very much at the "Sketching" phase really but that's what this website is all about, my "Works in progress"

The most complete image so far is the Female Elf mage(above right) it still has more work to be done at this stage but it certainly has the most developed background so far.

The current plan is to cover the main four races, with two basic classes, fighter and spell caster and a male and female version of each. For each race there will be one background which will set a theme and I'm trying to impress a fairly different them or tone with each race.

As of yet I haven't started on dwarves, I've got some pretty solid ideas but they're a pretty tough bunch to represent well.

Photograph of the week #020

"When not scribbling away in a sketch book or dabbling on a Wacom tablet i'm invariably fiddling around with exposure settings on my Nikon D90 trying to capture moments in aesthetically pleasing ways.
So here we have "Photograph of the week" a (mostly) weekly feature showcasing my favourite photo of the week."

My choice shot from todays photography session down by the river.

Down by the river...

This afternoon I went for a quick trip down to the river Stour near where I live. One side of the river is a lot more accessable than the other so I went to the quieter side, it's late winter at the moment so whilst the sun wasn't setting, as such, it was pretty low in the sky, dragging out shadows and giving some nice orangey tones to the scenery depending on whether a cloud slipped in the way or not.

It wasn't a terribly warm day and it was a little windy. All the plants were mostly dead and withered but the sky was fairly dramatic, the river was partly flooded and there was great textures, shapes and colours to try and photograph. I also wanted to make sure i captured a bit of winter before spring starts and I try my hand at getting blossom and all those springtime things which I usually don't get round to.

Smoke on the water

So tonight I tried my hand at photographing "ink" in water. (I say ink but what I actually used was food colouring as I believed it would more or less serve the same purpose.)

My plan was simple... but elegant... well maybe not elegant but it was definately simple!
The plan was to grab a fish tank, fill it with water, drop some inky substances into the water and photograph the results so I might get some smokey/inky type images for use as stock images and such.

On attempting to buy a fishtank I quickly found they were either too big, too expensive or out of stock. It couldn't be too big as I knew I'd need to clean the water regularly otherwise the ink or so would murk the water up too much for subsequent shots, additionally I knew I'd want flat, clear and undistorting glass.
In the end I had no choice but to get a rectangular vase, the glass was not quite flat and distorted a little but I felt it would suffice for the sake of experimentation at least.

I quickly learned two things whilst setting up. If I used cold water the glass would get covered in condensation on the oustide and/or mist up on the inside whilst using hot water caused little bubbles to appear in the shots.

You can see the bubbles in some of the shots below.

In the end i'm not very happy with the results but feel I've learnt a thing or two. I didn't manage very even lighting, the vase is all together too small, it was hard to find a suitable angle that didn't distort the image or where a chunkier part of the vase wasn't in frame that reflected the light.

I think next time I attempt this I will try to use a proper fish tank and a larger one, I think the images would be better if the fish tank were large enough that it was only half full and I could take a picture that includes the water line.