"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.

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.

"I put you in that darkness, and i shut that door"

Two years or so back I started work on a project for the cover of a book called Claire's Ghost. The book was not yet completed at that time but it was clear what some of the highlights of the story would be, which was more than enough for me to start work on the cover design.

The cover design is a very simple composite of various photographs I went out and shot of obvious locations with additional editing here and there to tidy the images up. I worked entirely in CMYK and at a resolution of 300 dpi as this is a project intended for print, with that much detail there isn't much room for error. Among other things the image has had work done on it to add emphasis on certain features, give a more dramatic mood and sky, remove tourists and traffic, boats etc.
The novel has now come out and is available to buy, so pick up a copy and have a read.

Author's website: talia-blakely.co.uk
Amazon link:        http://www.amazon.co.uk/Claires-Ghost-Talia-Blakely/dp/1780030525

Of autumnal leaves and the scent of mystical doings...

Up next is a piece of work from one of a couple of projects i'm working on currently. It's very much a work-in-progress so befitting the title of this blog.
I don't want to talk too much about the project at this early point too much as it's still in it's early stages but the project will involve a lot of "fantasy" artwork. Very much with a dungeons and dragons theme in so far as there will be races such as Elves and Dwarves and monsters and classes such as Warriors and Mages, all of which need illustrating in one way or the other.

So below is my, current, cooncept for an Elf mage in what I consider an apropriate setting. It's still fairly early in it's design, the character itself might actually be completely removed and is mostly there for reference at the minute. Her lines need cleaning up significantly and i'd like to play more with her shading/lighting on completion, not to mention her left hand is a little gnarly, I'm not currently getting the right feeling from her trousers either so I might change that up aswell.

Then the background itself which is taking me a significant amount of time but should be cleaned up in the next few days, I was going for a slightly different take on a wood elf sort of theme, it's not a terribly new concept though but a lot of elf artwork will tend to wards a lot of greens and browns and I thought there could be some advantage for going for more dynamic colour schemes such as the autumnal ones i've gone for below. Currently i've just blocked out where I want different colours to be down the right hand side and bottom of the image whilst the left handside is probably nearly there.



As this project develops there should be a fair number of images to post up here and a recent history of concept artwork as well that might be posted in the near future to show my development process.

"Here a moo! There a Moo! Everywhere a Moo Moo!"

Yet more All Animal Rescue work.

This time I was required to make them a fairly simple A4 poster with relevant details on with a similar design to the previously succesful Banners.

I made two in the end, one with a specific message, (Advertising two animals in need) as a proof of concept and then another design as a more general purpose poster.

Both designs have now been put to use.

"Talk to meee! Tell me pleeeease!"

Had a whole lot of all-sorts and sundries on my plate as of late but i've got several Brother Grimmer pokers in the fire at the minute which I need to get finished up to pass along to the guys.

For now though here is a little concept piece I've thrown together recently, trying out some ideas.

Do check these guys out;
http://brothersgrimmer.co.uk/
http://www.facebook.com/brothersgrimmer

'Cold Contagious'

I was hoping to make a slightly different post today as I was meant to be doing a photography shoot for the talent Brothers Grimmer this afternoon. Disapointingly a sickness has taken me and my family and so the shoot has not come to pass. Hopefully I'll catch up with the band later in the week or so.

Not wanting to waste my time feeling sorry for myself however I wrapped myself up in a blanket, grabbed a hot water bottle, a pile of medicine and suitable supplies of tissues for blowing my nose with and decided to catch up on some work requested by All Animal Rescue to design the wraparound graphics for their collection tins.

I went with a couple of fairly basic concepts, layout and content is still to be discussed but these are my two intial concepts(before criticism and change requests.)

In response to these designs a further request for a banner design was made based on the second design from above.

Skull Logo Design Phase 3

Final design finished, this one was a little bit more ambitious than the last few, the feathers took a massive amount of time and it wasn't untill i'd finished delicately painting in the buffalo fur that it's not actually traditional on a normal indian headress. I was working from memory of a head dress i'd seen once.

I'm pretty happy with it however and the entire series of hats has been a fun run of concepts, there may be more in the future.

Skull Logo Design Phase 2

A scribble of the week should be following in the next coupkld of days. (A few weeks late)

In the mean time however is a further four more variants of the same skull logo design from my last update. There are still a few more variants i'm considering toying with before drawing a line under the series but i'm enjoying it so far.

Skull Logo Design - Phase 1

A little bit more time than i'd've liked has past since my last update. Work has been most demanding of my time as of late.
For this weeks scribbles I shall be posting three variants of the same piece of work i've been working on. Essentially these designs are being made with a plan to have them printed on t-shirts. Though it's likely I will reduce them down to far far simpler graphics before then.

The work itself is an exercise in developing further the techniques I used with the recent portrait "painting". There are to be several more variants of this design by the time I've finished, some of which are already sketched out and waiting to be coloured/toned/etc.

Portrait painting

The past week has been spent practicing my photoshop skills and painting one portrait everynight for the week. With every portrait I think i noticed an improvement in my technique but there are a few mistakes here and there that i'd fix up if I were to finish these images up but I'm happy with them currently as a working experiment.

... And I keep time inside of my head...

I've just started a part-photographic part-digital project with an up-and-coming indie band called Constallation. The Goat and I have been out scouting for good locations for a photo shoot.

In the meantime I have played around a little on my computer and created some related band name banners... In retrospect they're a bit too "electro" for the band in my mind, would rather add a dash more "indie" to the mix... also the font could be a bit better.

Click either image to go to the band's current myspace page and check out their music.

I'd rather be with an animal,

As of recently I have been giving some graphic based assistance to an animal adoption outfit known as All Animal Rescue.
Their website is now live, with some slight changes to the original brief, by the end of the project the design brief had altered slightly due to certain restrictions but my designs altered with said restrictions as time went on.

Below are some of the potential graphics, and proposed concepts leading to the final product.

Initial designs:

Graphic/Logo design when colour scheme was established:

Potential concept web design:

Final colour scheme and website banner: