Here we are again with another round of scans from my Moleskine. Not much to say about these other than I was just having some fun drawing skulls and things. I was using just a regular ball point pen, which to my surprise, works great in these books. I think I’ll do so more often.

Details

So the last time we posted some of my sketches, fellow Cleveland designer Geoff May ask for some close-ups. So, these are for you Geoff! By the way, he has some of his own sketches to feast your eyes on.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about lucid dreaming, keeping a dream journal, watching Waking Life, and generally trying everything I can to take control of my dreams. The first thing I’m going to do in a dream - FLY! Us ground dwelling humans seem to be pretty consumed by the idea of taking flight - there’s just something immortal about it. So, there’s no wonder that wings are a perennial favorite design element.

Good news is that there’s lots of resources out there to help you incorporate some wingage into your designs. I’ve divided the resources up into three categories: Photoshop Brushes, Vector, and Texture / Reference Images. Most are free, but be sure to read each resource’s usage blurb before you use them on the next cult hit tee.

Photoshop Brushes

Here’s a nice set of Sumi-e style wings from wab-sabi-ways

Falln-Brushes on Deviant Art has a great collection of Brushes, and features Wings in quite a few. Here are few winged highlights. Just click the previews to go to the download page.

Pretty Brush and punksafteypin also have some very nice winged brushes. Click the image to download.

Here’s a few more deviant art winged brush sets to feast on if you’re still hungry.
Wings Photoshop Brushes by Debi Chiru
Wing Brushes 2
Wing Brushes 3

While Brusheezy is an awesome collection of Photoshop brushes, it could definitely use a few more wings. Here are the only wings on the site,some cool bat wings:

myPhotoshopBrushes.com mixes grunge and wings in a messy set of Splatter Brushes.

Vector Wings

Vector Wings are even harder to come by than Photoshop brushes, and harder to make. They’re also a lot more useful! Vector wings have more detail and enjoy all kinds of vectory goodness like subtracting, intersecting, etc. Here are some of the juiciest vector wings we could round up on the web.

Well hey, this is Go Media’s blog, so we’ve got to include our very own vector wings. While not free, we think you’ll agree that the quality is way beyond what you’ll find out there free of charge. Go Media has two wing packs from Set 1 and Set 2. There’s also a really badass wing included in Ornate from Set 7.

Unfortunately you can’t really see all the detail in these wings from the previews. Check out the mad detail by trying out our sample pack, which happens to have 4 pretty sweet wings.

Ok, ok, on to the free stuff. Jimiyo posted some nice free vector wings on his blog last month:

Chemist2dio Labs made some simple but very usable wings. There are four different wings, two solid silhouettes, and two with outlines.

I Heart Vector has some cool wings and a few birds (which are close enough) for free.

Again, trusty Vecteezy needs more wings! Ben Blogged has the only good wings on Vecteezy with the Wings - Coat of Arms with a ton of downloads.

Textures & Reference Images

Here are some references images that could be used as textures. When you get brave enough to fire up that pen tool or wacom and start making some of your own vector wings, these photos will come in handy! Also, if you want to use these images as low-res brushes you can make your own brushes in Photoshop. Just go to Edit > Define Brush Preset with the image loaded.

Share

Well that rounds out this collection of winged design goodness. Share your best spots for finding wings in the comments. I look forward to revising this list with your suggestions. Take care!

http://whalebonemakesart.com

Orlando, FL, April 16, 2008 – Go Media Inc., won the Best Midwest Feature Design crown in Create Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Awards. Go Media conquered tens of other candidates to earn the title and was selected based on their innovative design and eye for detail. The award-winning work, a regional feature design titled “Webtechnologic,” dazzled the world in the Jan+Feb 2007 Midwest issue.

“Go Media was a true pleasure to collaborate with on this project,” said Create Magazine Art Director Kristen Schaeffer-Santoni. “Passionately taking the creative challenge to heart, the end result was a wonderful expression of their vision and skill. The design stands out on its own as well as complements the style of the magazine as a whole.”

Create Magazine has seen some fantastic creativity grace its pages in the last year. From advertising to design, writing to gadgets, the Create Team has singled out the best of the best in a showcase for the May+June 2008 issue. With fun quirky categories like “Most Likely to Make you LOL,” the Editor’s Choice Awards provide recognition based on a different set of criteria.

The May+June issue of Create Magazine will be on newsstands on May 12, 2008. Create is also available online at www.createmagazine.com for Create Magazine subscribers and Create Network members.

About Create Magazine
Create Magazine’s mission is to inform, connect, inspire and educate creative professionals. First published in 2001, Create Magazine is an award-winning, bimonthly creative industry magazine published for those who produce or use creative services and products. As a networking resource, Create Magazine provides an insider’s perspective on the people, news, trends and events that influence both local and national advertising and creative production industries. Each issue features articles by industry leaders and insiders who are the trusted source for information and commentary on the Advertising, Design, Printing, Photography, Film and Video, Animation and New Media industries. To find out more, visit Create Magazine online at createmagazine.com.

Well here we are. As Jeff mentioned before, we took some of the popular suggestions and created the set with them in mind. And if that’s not enough, I’ve whipped up this tutorial as well.


TAKE NOTE GUYS: There are things that are not covered in this tutorial that we’ve already covered in previous ones. An intermediate level of knowledge is recommended in Illustrator and Photoshop to fully catch what I’ll be explaining here.

Today we’re gonna be focusing on using many vector pack elements to comprise an entire illustrated piece. On top of that – we’ll be touching on a lot of my coloring process (a fun but rather unorthodox method to say the least) that I use throughout a lot of my illustrations. Now without further adieu… I present the Set X Celebratory Tutorial! …Because I really have no idea what else to call it.

So below I have on display the supplies that I’ll be using throughout the tutorial. Set 10’s “Nautical” pack, my trusty Wacom Tablet, Illustrator and Photoshop CS3, and a computer – sans kittie.

Now I’ve opened up the Nautical pack in Illustrator. I took the old school diver helmet and the tentacles because I thought, “Hmmm… an Octopus living inside of a diver helmet… pretty cool”. They are shown below.

Now after some adding and subtracting of objects, knocking out some of the black that overlaps some of the other objects with white, I’m left with this focal piece:

Now I’ve opened Photoshop and created a 4” x 6” file @ 300 dpi, kept the color mode at RGB because I like the layer blending effects in that color mode better.

Here is where we set the background color to medium blue. This will come in handy because I’ll be able to see the colors better when coloring the focal piece.

Here I’ve copied and pasted the Octopus Diver into my Photoshop file. I placed it where I wanted, and because there was some white in the transfer – I switched the layer mode to “Multiply” that way the darkest colors are the only ones showing. In this case – the black.

So now I’ve taken my magic wand, selected all the negative space in my focal piece, inverted it by holding Shift+Ctrl+I, contracted the selection by 1 pixel (so my colors don’t crowd the black), created a new layer beneath the inked piece, and filled it in with some funky green color.

Now I’ve split this layer’s contents to two layers – one for the tentacles and one for the helmet. You can do this a number of ways. I pressed Ctrl as I clicked the particular layer’s box to select all of it’s contents and used the polygonal lasso tool cut the top from the bottom and paste it into another layer. I removed the remaining part by pressing delete so I wouldn’t have anything unnecessary left over. These two layers are crucial because they set your guidelines for coloring inside of the lines for each half. Once these are seperated, pick a portion (I’m going with the helmet), fill it in with a nice golden/brass type of color.

Time to start coloring. Get that Wacom handy. A mouse will do just fine. I use a Wacom out of comfortability and better control – if you don’t have one – I recommend you scoop one up. Once you get used to it, you won’t regret it. A little bit of preparation is needed before we go bat-shit crazy on coloring.

Create a new layer, use the eye dropper tool to select the color of the helmet, take your airbrush tool (with 100% opacity and flow) and make a little square with it to the side. This is your palette. Repeat this like I did with your lighter and darker colors.

I use the airbrush tool and keep the diameter relative small but still large enough to cover broad areas. In this case I kept it in between 60 to 120 pixels. I only go smaller when I’m fiddling with the itty bitty details and highlights. This, however, is all a matter of preference. I set the opacity down to the 30-ish neighborhood and the flow in the late teens to early 20 percentile. This allows me to keep layering the color on without making it look too deliberate.

And now I just hop back and forth between colors and sizes until I have a result that I’m proud of. If you’re inexperienced with coloring pseudo-realistically, Google some comic book illustrations that are all dolled up and jazzy. They follow the same principles… it might help you out a little.

After this is done, I ctrl+click the helmet shape layer (while making sure the layer that you just colored is still selected) to make my selection of the helmet itself. I invert the selection so I get everything that’s over-sprayed onto the sides, palette included, and delete it. I’m left now with a clean and colored helmet. I merge the color of the helmet, and its color tones together to one layer.

I repeat this process with the tentacles in the following photos.

Now I’m gonna add some detail to this piece here by creating a layer on top of the inked layer, selecting a dark teal green color, and going to town similarly but significantly less on the black areas of the tentacles with that color. Don’t go overboard because they don’t need too much.

Now I decrease the size of my brush, select a far lighter version of that teal green color and dabble some highlights on top of the teal green. It’s a small but very fun detail to implement because it gives life to the tentacles.

I select both the helmet and tentacle shape layers (ctrl+click and shift+ctrl+click each additional layer to add to the selection) and inverse it, then delete the over spray. There it is.

I repeat this process similarly to the glass window of the helmet… but the look I’m trying to achieve here is that of glare streaks in the glass.

I make a bunch of speckles and such with medium blues all the way to white on a new layer above the black circular area on the center of the helmet at 100% opacity and flow with the airbrush tool. I then apply a motion blur with the settings in the following pictures (filter > blur > motion blur).

I duplicate the streaks and merge the layer. I then take the circular selection tool and select a perfect circle (by holding shift as you drag) over the glass area almost but not flush to the edge. I feather the selection by 5 pixels (select > feather) and inverse it to delete the excess. There’s the glass effect we’ve been looking for. Select all the layers that make up the OctoDiver and group them together (as desired layers are highlighted – press ctrl+g).

Now I’m ready for the background. So here’s where things can go a lot of different ways. Because I’m not sure how this will look once the layering effects and textures that will go into this take place… I’m pretty much improvising and playing around until something looks good. I know I want to go for an underwater feel… so I start by airbrushing the background like so.

Now that looks kinda cool. I’m pretty sure that whatever texture I place over it is gonna darken it, so the loud colors don’t bother me so much. I sift through some of the stock textures from The Arsenal and find one that looks pretty interesting in the “Oddshots” pack.

I place it one layer on top my background and transform it (ctrl+t) to fit into the document but not reveal the edges. I want the arched dirty lines to set the motion for the background so the goal is to get that much of the photo in view.

Now I think the texture needs some random chaos thrown into it. Maybe if I distort it some, it could work well with the flow of everything. I applied the wave filter (filers > distort > wave) and chose randomize as you see here below.

I transform it to fit into the composition a little better…

I choose the “Overlay” layer mode on the texture, knocked the opacity down to 80% and it’s starting to looking more like how I envisioned.

So I sit and stare at it for a while and start to realize that the water might look more dramatic if I made it look slightly brackish. So I pressed Ctrl+U and opened up the Hue/Saturation options. I fiddle around till I see a combo that works really well. Here are the values I used below.

I’m content with the overall background. Now I have to tackle scenery. So I venture back into the nautical pack and look for some stuff that would work well. I also revisited an older pack to find something that would be suitable for the seabed.

This first thing to head over is the floor I made from the “Edges” pack from Set 5. I make sure it’s in proper layer order above the texture. It looks bland standing alone so I decided to apply a subtle glow around it. The settings used and final result are below.

Now after some trial and error, the only pieces I could use comfortably were the long finned fishes and the shark. I played with the layer modes some – mostly “Overlay” with supped layers set to “Multiply” with the opacity toned down to about 20% but this is another thing that’s left to depend on personal preference. Here’s what I came up with.

So I’m almost to the finish line. I need to add some more subtle chaos to the background. I’m a big fan of watercolors and I grabbed one from one of our Texture Packs.

I chose this because it fits well in the composition. It can’t be all these crazy colors though, so I colorized it (ctrl+u) with the settings below.

Now it gets thrown into the background, right above the texture layer and right below the sea floor. I change the layer mode to “Multiply” and the opacity of the layer down to 30% and it does the trick just right.

I add a few bubbles that I made in Illustrator with some knocked-out circles, faint the opacity some, and I think it’s safe to say that I’m done.

I hope you guys learned something from this and recieved some encouragement to use the stock vectors for more than just slap-it-on, grunge it up, send it on it’s way graphics. They can be used for so much awesome stuff to implement into your designs. And combined with techniques that you might think are weird combinations – you might be surprised with what you can come up with.

Well that’s all for now, Take care folks.

-Dave

This is a new shirt design that I did for some merch for a fairly popular screamy post-hardcore band. It was accepted and the design might actually see the cotton threads of a comfy shirt one day. Let’s hope that the printer is able to print it as it is in the mockup and not just crop it and center it on the shirt.

By the way, you can “love” or “comment” on this design if you want over at emptees.com - which by the way the community is really expanding lots of great designers post there. Rob Dobi, Horsebites, ATK Studios, Chris Rushing, etc. Lots of em. So if you’re a t-shirt designer or just a fan of this stuff in general, join and participate. Make the community even better!

This is the poster I was talking about in the post below. Just sit back and admire the beauty.

Some random artwork I created for a poster that we never finished. It was the worst looking poster you can imagine! Just thought I’d post this.

Edit: This artwork is modified from the original poster. The “worst poster you could imagine” came from the idea that everyone in the office create something cool and then all those elements would be assembled into one big piece of art. I created a 3D “rebuild” text and Oliver created the word “aesthetic” out of fruit, and Bill had some vectored lady faces, and Dave had to take those elements and make them work together. Needless to say it didn’t work out the way we had planned! I took my render of the 3D “rebuild” and made it it’s own little piece of art and posted it above. I think it looks neat by itself.

Here’s a shirt design I’m working on for the band Mastodon courtesy of Warner Bros. Records. They are great because they allow our designers to be really creative and have fun.