What's stopping you?

I ran across a cool blog post from Seth Godin (a marketing guru). I really liked it so I made a quick mini poster that I will hang in my class. The text is a little hard to read in the numbers so i may have to go back and rework that ... well maybe :)

The beauty of a '57 Chevy Bel Air

Text Effect (primarily a gradient overlay, stroke set to the opposite gradient, a bevel and emboss and an inner shadow). The drop shadow was created using an expanded version of the original text layer. The glossy outer stroke was an expanded version of the original text with a Ring bevel and emboss style. Drop a vignette, a scripted text font, and a flare and glowing line on the CLASSIC and call it done.

Soft Focus Still Life

After Before

Inspirational Typography Poster

Barney G is Money!

I'm experimenting with displacement maps  and bitmap halftones in an attempt to replicate the portraiture style found on our currency. Not too shabby but it would worked better with a lighter face (human).

I love Bacon!

I toyed with creating a Lomo effect action. After trying it out on several images, I found the bacon struck a cord with me. The action consists of a rough lasso selection with a 90pt feather, invert select and make a new layer mask. Fill new layer with black then crank up the middle levels change blending mode to hue and lower opacity to 40. Change Mode to LAB, select Lightness channel, apply unsharp mask then change back to RGB mode.




Here is the before image

Grunge Text

Tweaking with new grunge brushes, a San Diego skyline and a "hidden" conquistador :)

Plantscape Text

Simple tutorial (nothing more than a few clipped paths and a texture). The Planet Kosmos font is one that I use in yearbook for some signage. I used a photo from the Hubble telescope. I dropped a high pass filter on the background image and then a light vignette. I added a light outer glow to the text and set it to Overlay.

Emma Frost Vector Effects

I used Illustrator and Photoshop to create a blend of vector and photo materials. Lots of blending modes, brush adjustments and layer styles. In the end I'm not overly excited by the final results. Ah well :)

Long Island Mike's New Menu

Here is the redesigned menu for Long Island Mike's Pizza. (Did I mention before how good the food is? :)

Logo Fix

I donated some time and redrew the low resolution version of their existing logo for a local pizza shop (Long Island Mike's). The pizza is fantastic and the owner is a really nice guy. We had our end of the year Yearbook party there and he took good care of us. I also gave him a couple of experimental versions.

Here are the various color tweaks he asked for:

Retro Super Hero: Batman

Retro Super Hero: Green Lantern

Next in line in the DC Universe Figure... Green Lantern.

Retro Super Hero: Superman

First in a series of figures :)

Tutorial Link

Pin Up Effect

Using one of my favorite characters on TV (Joan from MadMen) I created a vintage pin up style effect from the following image:

Here is the after (Check out her hair and dress for the smoothed out, painted effect):

Tutorial Link