Futuristic Boom Box

Since my brief jaunt into the world of tutorials, I've learned many useful things, especially about creating realism on Photoshop. So I decided to work on this while being incredibly bored at my math tutor's, staring at her radio. And so I ended up with my first rough sketch, which I moved onto a finished line drawing in my sketchbook, which I moved into Illustrator, and added the finishing touches on Photoshop.

Design Process

This is my final line drawing, ready to be moved into Illustrator.

In Illustrator, I traced out all the outlines and shapes, which ended up as this...

... which I finally moved into Photoshop for the finishing touches and effects.

Here is my final result:

And elaborated further still, I made black and white versions.

I hope you enjoyed this piece of work!

(Sorry for posting this blog post a bit late... it was made before I started procastinating, then I procastinated on posting this... oh the irony.)

Stagnation

I know I haven't posted in nearly 3 weeks, but since I started on my BioWater project (among other things), I haven't seem to have been able to bring myself to finish it, nor my other projects and sketches that are now filling up my sketchbook. Not to mention my science notes. Or the hundreds of photos I've taken of various subjects in different locations, and I have yet to sift through and organise. But back on the main topic, this post will not be about a finished work, but instead, a progress check on many different pieces of work that I may have finished some parts and not others. I promise that all of these will get finished, except maybe the last one. There will be  a lot to come in the next couple of weeks, if I ever get around this procastination problem and manage to post everything.

Here are the beginnings of my previously mentioned BioWater concept...

... which expanded to this...

...and that's all I have so far.

Over here is a vehicle design concept which I just started on today.

And here... well, let's just say sometimes you get really bored at the library.

Hopefully, I'll get all these done soon, if nothing comes up, and maybe I'll try "painting" that Cthulhu drawing I have there.

Logo Concept - Sync

I drew up a logo concept for "Sync" in December last year, but I never got around to making it. So here I am, bored over the summer break, and hey, why not work on all those logo concepts lying around in my sketchbook? Here's my second one I've worked on during the summer break, which has been a lot more busier than I've expected.

The Design Process
Let's start with the small thumbnail sketch a jotted down. It wasn't much to work with, being a bit more than 4 cm across, but it was sufficient enough to scan into my computer and to work from there.

After scanning it into my computer, I made the logo shapes on Illustrator, and the text font in Flash. I then transferred both into Photoshop. Not being able to decide on a good colour palette, I consulted Kuler and my own experimentations with colour styles in the past. What I ended up with was a multitude of different versions, shown below here.

After talking with my friends and having them look over it, I finalized the colour palettes down to these two:

With further experimentation, and a friend who pointed out that sleek designs with plenty of curves looked good on the cooler end of the spectrum, I chose the lower one out of my finalized two. I did so somewhat reluctantly, as I felt that I've made too many logos with a cooler palette of colours than I have made warm, but looking back, I've made logos with all different sorts of colours, just that my main Notitia logo seemed to have the biggest influence on my thoughts. My doubts assuaged, I continued onto the next step, which was just a small makeover to pretty up my logo design, which, as fine as it looked, was still pretty simple. After 45 minutes or so with tinkering around on Photoshop I ended up with what you see below.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it!

Discrepancies with Ford
Now I understand that many of you are aware that Ford has included a Sync system software in all their new cars, in cooperation with Microsoft. However, I'd like to point out that I made my logo and name completely separately without the knowledge of the fact that Ford had already patented official software under the same name. It was not until I was looking for colour palettes that I realized this flaw. This is merely a disclaimer showing the fact that I did not intend to copy their trademark.

Psdtuts

Lately, I've been incredibly bored, so after searching the web for things to do, I rekindled my old Photoshop self and decided to mess around. And then I walked into a wall. Like, a good kind of wall, that didn't really stop you, the kind that allowed you to walk up it and achieve a higher meaning. I know that doesn't really make a lot of sense to you, it doesn't make much sense to me either.

Anyways, the wall we're talking about is Psdtuts. For those who don't know, this isn't some horribly misspelled wording of "pyramids" and "Tutankhamun", Psdtuts in fact makes a lot of sense to people who are familiar with Photoshop. "Psd" is the standard universal file format for Photoshop (.psd), and "tuts", is, well, most people will have the good fortune of guessing "tutorials", which of course is, correct.

I chanced upon this cool "Futuristic Button" tutorial, and I tried it out, with a slightly different result than the actual tutorial, since I never like following tutorials word by word and ending up with the same result. I feel cheated and I have the feeling I just copied somebody. But in the end, I ended up with this:

I wasn't completely satisfied with that result though, so I decided to make another, more organic-looking one from scratch by myself, which resulted in this:

And today, I decided to learn more about designing realistic interfaces and buttons/objects, which I consulted another Psdtuts tutorial. I once again changed my end result, somewhat more dramatically than what I did with my first first button. My end result was this:

Now I'm no professional site reviewer, but if you have Photoshop, and you're interested in learning more about what you can truly do with in, visit Psdtuts, here at: http://psd.tutsplus.com/. You won't regret it.

Creature Concept - Textured

Following along the lines of the technique used by Neo Ramjet in his Making of Snaiad page (http://www.nemoramjet.com/sndmakingof.html), I used a texture (below) of what is supposedly elephant hide on Google Images, the closest thing that I thought would fit my creature.

I slowly layered this texture with Photoshop over my line drawing of my creature, which I posted a while ago in May (http://notitiaproductions.blogspot.com/2010/05/creature-concept.html).

All this layering and warping to create a believable and realistic skin texture and a seamless appearance took a lot of layers to perfect, which eventually amassed to 36 layers that I had to navigate around with. Although I guess that isn't as bad as some of the collages I made for Junior High's Grade 7 year (for me) Yearbook, which in some files reached 72 layers.

I might plan to fully add in a background with a sky and everything, depicting what it is like on its virtual planet, but that's for a later post.

Computer Camp

My mother signed me up for a computer camp, for the first two weeks of July. Although I already know some of the stuff they teach there, I still enjoy my time spent there with the counselors and other campers. I do like the review of the knowledge I already have and to further strengthen and add onto my own experiences, so I think I'm learning a great deal there.

That was a small assignment to teach us how to make reflections and the other basics of Photoshop. Today though, I had my first experience with HTML coding, and I liked it. I actually find it fun, in fact. I made a small experimental webpage on notepad, which I have a few screenshots of it here:

Well, HTML sure seems fun. And I've got to get around to learning ActionScript. Maybe I'll borrow some "For Dummies" books from the library. Can't be too late to learn something new, right?

Marketing Campaign

My teacher had given my group and I an assignment 2 weeks before, an assignment where we need to think of a marketing campaign for a selected product and then create actual advertisements for it. Each member of my group had to choose a specific form of media for our ads, and I chose a magazine ad. The other thing about the whole marketing campaign was that we also had to calculate the prices associated with said ads. I found out a full-page magazine ad costs around $300,000. Given that I was planning on running this ad for 2 months, for magazines that have an issue once a month, I would put it in both of the magazines, but for magazines who have issues every week, I would only keep it in for four weeks. Here is my ad below:

After tinkering around with my ad for a bit, I realized that without anything else, the Photoshop icon and the wisps surrounding it would look really cool by itself, so I came up with this as well:

Perhaps Adobe will thank me for my ads. Who knows?

Flash and Photoshop Drawing Experiments

Landscape Drawing

Penguin Drawing

Reptile Eye

These were a few drawings I've done in mid-2009. Feel free to rate and comment!