Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Poster!

So for our final Type II project we had to create a promo poster of our "favorite" band and it had to represent a collage and/or montage aspect. We were supposed to highlight an album and include tour dates and what not (although this aspect was fairly lax), and we were supposed to represent who the band was and what they liked/stood for, etc... We *technically* only had two class periods to work on our designs, so this was a lighting fast project. However, that being said, this was my most favorite project and the one that I feel I did the best on.
The band I chose was The Gaslight Anthem (if you haven't heard of them you should definitely check them out! They are amazing - and while not my favorite favorite band, they are a band that I really like!) and I decided to highlight their "sink or swim" album (however, I would highly recommend their "'59 sound" album!). I saw this band about a year and a half ago at the Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, NC and just loved them - they have this old-timey feel to them, where they kind of come off as "greasers" from the 50's or 60's with tattoos covering them. Their songs are very much about relationships and life and it just makes you feel like you are hearing about the noir time period.

ANYWAY, like I said I highlighted their sink or swim album and I wanted to make the poster a collage of traditional tattoo flash with a nautical theme. So, what I did, was hand draw each element of the poster on paper, then scan it in to the computer and manipulated it then in Photoshop. I had a lot of fun with it. If I had a little more time I would have liked to connect the rope (in both the band name and the anchor) altogether and to the ship in the top left corner. Otherwise, I am completely content with how this turned out.
Again, like all my other projects, I will probably tweak some things here and there in the future, but otherwise I love it.

-Erika

Final Calendar Design


Here is the outcome of my calendar design - and let me say this was probably my least favorite project. I was a little overly ambitious and it really came around to bite me in the butt. I used that stylized type that I created out of brushes I made in Illustrator. Well, since I wanted to highlight the northern and southern hemisphere that really made it double duty on myself and I thought it would easy but as I added more and more months, the file size got larger and larger, which made it difficult to work in indesign as the program slowed WAY down because I had to keep the vector images sharp so I could see what I was doing, but anyway - I could rant about that for a long time... When I look at it though, I just feel like it's lacking a bit all around. (I am my own worst critic if you couldn't tell). Even though I did finish the project, I do feel like I should go back and work on it eventually. I wish I had highlighted numbers a little bit better as this was for the "numeric institute" but what I decided to do was make it as though the "numeric institute" was featuring their artists series where designers created their own calendars and the "numeric institute" was selling them for the artists.
Anyway this is a long post - the first calendar being the northern hemisphere and the second being the southern hemisphere so enjoy!





























-Erika

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

PSD tut quatro? (four)

So I took this PSD tut on changing color of this car and it was a really long tutorial that really had more detail then I was looking for, so I just stopped when I changed the color. I even changed the color again to something other than what I was told to do just to get a feel for it. I must say I was a little lax on using my pen tool around the car too, but I really didn't want to spend TOO much time on it, if I could just get the concept down.
Here's the link for it:
http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/photo-effects-tutorials/give-a-yellow-lamborghini-a-paint-job-in-photoshop/
Here's the before:



Here's my 1st one (as instructed)


Here's my 2nd one (my choice of color)