Going beyond "just pics"

I'm on a mission to move beyond just pictures and traditional media, so continuing to build my photoshop skills and excited to see others have an interest in commissioning my work.

Worlds!

Yesterday, my daughter's hip hop team accepted their bid to the Hip Hop World Dance competition in Disney World, so I made this to commemorate it.

Giving Bri a little "Edge"

This was just a little photoshop experiment to jazz up a quick picture of Brianna in her skates on the front porch. Even she likes the embellished picture better.

Simple space scene

I used to enjoy astronomy and space so decided to spend some time learning how to create a space scene from scratch.  This came from a combination of two tutorials and took about 30 minutes so gave me a chance to break away from my other works in progress.

Jolie - WIP #2

Here's an update...

Ok, so I didn't provide more vacation updates here.  I just found it much simpler on Facebook and twitter.  Note my Twitter feeds in the right margin of this blog.

Here's the latest update of my Angelina Jolie portrait (WIP #1 here).  I have all the key features blocked in so hopefully just a lot more shading to complete and then it will be a finished product.

Once I'm confident in using the tablet and Photoshop to do this, I'll return to Alexa's half finished portrait.

Another experiment at my daughter's expense

I apologize in advance but since Alexa and Brianna got a kick out of this, I just had to share.

This comes from a technique shared on Worth1000.com where they describe how to stylize a portrait in Manga form.  If you aren't familiar with Manga, it's characterized by big eyes, narrow chins and atypical hair colors.  I'll leave it at that.

As you can see, we had some fun with this one.

Girls on Rubik's Cube

Ok, now this was definitely an experiment.  I saw an idea in a photoshop tutorial and wanted to do something like this for my profile picture on Facebook.  

Once I realized I needed two images, I just decided to drop the kids into the cube.  

There's probably quite a bit more I can do with this.  If you have any ideas, please comment below.

Learning Photoshop

Ok, I took a break from drawing again but this time it was to learn Photoshop.  Must be the A.D.D. again.  

In any case, here's an example of how it's fairly simple to add an image inside of text for some pretty cool effects.  It basically involves creating some text, bringing in the image, making the image transparent, dragging it into the original image that contains the text and converting it to a clipping group.

What's nice about this technique is that you can then change the background, manipulate the text, edit the text and add more images to the text very easily.

Clearly I've got more to learn but this is a good start.