You can read the whole bit here, where he goes in depth about how he made the coin and the processes and inspiration for the coin.

Paper Cut Illustrations

With all the work I have been doin with paper latly this was a great find on stumbleupon. Yes they really are all paper you can see her full portfolio here.

50 Creative Portfolio Designs

I’m starting to do research and beginning designs for the next version of upsidedowncity which will be a portfolio site with a blog attached. Smashing Magazine always comes up whenever I’m doing research and it always is smashing. This article features some amazing portfolios and is no exception.

29 Texture Packs

Textures I never can seem to find a use for a growing collection. But here are 29 more I’m looking at downloading.

Abduzeebos Daily Insperation #38

Abduzeebos daily inspiration series is getting better.

Effektive Design Studio

Effektive Design Studio

60 Free Vector Graphics for Digital Art Pros

Vectortuts just launched an awesome freebies post.

Guide to creating a minimalist website.

Create a minimalist website.

Look for a new brush set early next week and and some more design related posts to come in the next few weeks.

One of the project I recently finished up was the poster for the Civil War Lan. This poster had originally been designed as a spin-off of the emu lan 3.0 poster. However the design ended up not working out so well. Lee asked me to look into doing a kind of “capture the flag” themed poster.

Someone had been looking into the capture the flag theme to and found an awesome Unreal Tournament fansite kit with some nice hi-res character photos. After several hours of painting some grungy watercolor flag and slapping the character and some text over it I came up with this.

1st Draft

2nd Draft

At this point the general design was working out well and the flags were looking betting the more I added to them but the whole poster felt stale with the grungy battle scared flags and then the clean computer render and text so I began looking up some ways to add to the design.

3rd Draft Smoke Added

4th Draft Smoke and Bars Added

At this point the rest of the office started to chime in on the poster. Everyone liked where it was going until made the point that the character was a copyrighted image and this would be going out to Corvallis for the OSU part of the event so the character had to be scraped. The poles also needed more grunge as Paul also pointed out to match the same battle scarred appearance of the flags.

5th Draft No Character

With out the character to anchor the whole design it started to unravel a bit as I messed around with the proportions and text placement.

6th Draft Different Text Placement

The text placement in this version is close to where it ends up in the final poster. But the proportion and size of the flags still isn’t working out.

7th Draft Smoke Flags Changed

8th Draft Flags and Text Different

This draft also includes the flags attaching to the poles differently (as you can see in the drawings at the top) and moving Civil War Lan back to the bottom to try and anchor the flags.

9th Draft Bars Reappear Some stuff is removed to redo

Trying to add some weight to the poster mean I bring back the black bars from the start. I’m also reworking how the flags attach to the poles after overdoing it the first time around.

But the design still isn’t working so Lee asks me to look at stock robots we could use. What I come up with enthuses no one.

10th Draft Version A Stock Character

10th Draft Version B

Neither of these robots work at this point Paul wanted this to work as much as I do and offers to do a character illustration for me to drop in.

11th Draft Pauls Character

This looks promising but the coloring doesn’t work out on the character and then Lee comes to the rescue with the computer graveyard idea that ends up on the final poster. An hour or so of searching IStock gives me the this mock-up.

12th Draft Stock Photomockup

This gives me a good feeling and Lee agrees so net is the first mockup with the stock photos edited and placed.

13th Draft Hi-Res Stock Added

This is what the final poster ended up being. I just went in and added the smoke back in.

14th Draft Final Image

And there it is in all its glory. Notice the misspelling of “Oregon State University” which someone catches right before we go to press and which remained misspelled throughout 14 drafts and almost 30 print outs.

The final file wieghs in at several hundered megabytes over 50 layers and half a dozen smart objects each containing an additional 10 layers. The 32×57.5 version that will be outside the Fish Bowl soon weights in at almost a gig.

4 Color Silkscreen Howto

4 Color Silkscreen Process

Back when I was getting into silk screening more I found this article on making silkscreen halftones to use with silkscreen process inks. It seems like a neat trick if you need to produce things for mass production which I was looking at for The Machine Project.

Stern Metal Typeface

Stern Metel Typeface

This is want I want for Christmas. But at a 2 month wait and 80$ I don’t think I’ll get it.

It’s not Its

it's not its

One of the downsides of being an art major is that you never get to copyright and the it’s vs its has always stumped me forever. Now I know better thanks to this great and informative website.

byroglyphics

byroglyphics

byroglyphics is the website of designer Russ Mills. Its always inspiring to see how he integrates splats and real artistic elements into his designs and with such a limited and subtle color pallet they are absolute master pieces.

bittbox has really outdone himself this time with his community created font “Conglomerfont” all characters were hand drawn and sent to bittbox for inclusion even one by a six year old girl. You can read the post here.

I know I found textorizer a long time ago I recently rediscovered it on stumbleupon. It takes images that you uplaod and creates text outlines of that image using words that you specify.

Art of the title if one of my new favorite blogs. it archives movie title posting the fill content of either the starting or ending sequences. Some of my favorites are, Catch Me If You Can, Casino Royale and Iron Man.

So far my digital arts education actually has taught that color is relative but it managed to do so without such a striking example but such an example would have expedited the process greatly. “Here look see color is relative. Got it. Good”. End of story.

My Girlfriend actually found this one and emailed it to me very simple but it makes you laugh and feel a little better and is an over all fun project. Sadly Netropolis Design seems to have gone out of business or at least their web site doesn’t work.

Just when I needed some inspiration to pick me up Spoon Graphics delivers with over 220 great inspiring graphics.

Another great inspirational post from the gang at VECTORTUTS. These are some great quality vector posters for inspiration.

Ok so I have yet to try these out but they look pretty rad just from the examples on Go Media. Might even try to make a few of my own and post over the weekend and test out the premade ones. I’ll post the results.

Snapvillage is having a contest for a Wacom Cintiq. You can enter everyday from now until September 5th so get moving these things are expensive.

The tuts sites run by Envato are great sits I’ve learned loads from the talented authors and writers over there. This is one of the best random vector noise has always been an elusive thing for me this cleared it all up and looks great to boot.

This tool is to nifty not to share. All it does is show acceptable ranges of contrast for text and the background of the text. Just set two colors and the check-box says yes or no and the banding changes to show the range of colors you should or shouldn’t pick.

Measure it is destined to become one of those tools I use everyday to check web designs. it integrates with Firebug and lets y measure elements of websites check alignment and things you always wished you could do. Like I said I’m going to start using this everyday.

I have a secret love affair with We Feel Fine there is something about all the swirling colors and the reminder that we all feel human i found this a long time ago but re-discovered it recently. Written by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar and checks things like MySpace Google, and Technorati for the phrases “I feel” and “I feel fine” and then projects the links and images. Simply Wonderful.

Twistori is the We Feel Fine of the twitter are expecting the same concept but slightly different in execution. Pulling from twitter it searches for the things that match “I Love”, “I Hate” ect. and gives you a wonderful visualization of them. Also comes as a screen saver.

That’s it for this week I’ll be starting to keep this blog up more and more hopfully and I’ll have more stuff next week.

The robot is 22 feet tall and is made out of Styrofoam packing material which he scavenges from the science building that borders the art school on campus.

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