Photo Restoration

Hey y’all,

 

Here is what I have been working on since the summer began in between my shifts at The Lady and Sons. This is a photo of my grandmother’s junior high class of 1948. My mom likes to scrapbook and she found this old photo while putting together a book about my grandmother. Unfortunately the quality of the image was severely deteriorated and if this was going to be put in a book expected to last a little while it needed some help. So that’s where I came in. I offered to fix it up a bit so that she could reprint it for the book and I finally finished it today!

Here’s the before image,

Before

And here is the after image,

After

I had a fun time with this and would love to do some more restoration work like this, perhaps a job opportunity? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Brighter Day Natural Market re-brand

This quarter (my final quarter) I decided to take a graphic design course to brush up on my photoshop skills so I would be better prepared to attempt the Adobe Certification Exam sometime in June. Our project 3 assignment was to choose a local business and re-brand their logo with a completely new look. I decided to choose Brighter Day Market, a natural foods store about a block from my house.

Brighter Day Current Logo

As you can see their logo is really rather boring and the colors are not necessarily visually appealing. I wanted to update their look to bring it into the 21st century and also give it a theme that would better represent what the store’s core values were.

Brighter Day is a market place dedicated to a holistic approach to better living. Much of their products are vegan, vegetarian, or natural/organic. My goal was to make a logo that stuck to those values. After making up an idea tree I decided to look into more things related to Art Nouveau. I wanted the logo to feel organic and environmentally friendly. I wanted it to represent the basic image of life and the cycle that life takes. The Art Nouveau style uses a lot of earthy colours in muted tones, nothing should be stand out and over the top to distract from the form.

Art Nouveau Staircase

Art Nouveau Inspiration

As you can see the forms are very organic and ornate but in general, the colours very muted. With this in mind I began to investigate images that would represent life in it’s most basic form. My first idea was to go with an egg, as you can see here I was beginning to come up with something.

Brighter Day Attempt I

I was trying to portray an image of an egg while still staying true to their original logo involving the sun. For the style that I was shooting for this was just too rigid and didn’t have the same organic flow that “Art Nouveau” should. I continued to play around with this design imploring a design common in Art Nouveau of an arch with holes punched all the way around.

Brighter Day Attempt II

Still not getting what I wanted, I decided to get away from the design in the center and redesign something more organic. With my third attempt I decided to keep the solid ellipse as a way of encasing an icon. I painted a leafy bean sprout in photoshop and brought it into illustrator to trace it and connect it to the circle “seed”. I felt like the sprout was a better choice because the products are on the vegetarian side, so going with something that grows from the earth might be a better way to approach that audience. The plant image is also something that I feel represents a “brighter day” with people trying to become more “green” and grow things from the earth in a renewable fashion this would bring the art nouveau theme into a modern setting.

Brighter Day Attempt III

As you can see I also began to explore colour options. I really liked the stroke outline on the coloured version as it stuck with something I saw frequently in Art Nouveau pieces. Unfortunately The project guidelines required that we have no stroke effects on the logo.

Brighter Day Attempt IV

This version was probably my personal favorite I really liked this text. I felt the design was very simple but had an interesting balance. My professor suggested making the center circle more organic in form and to say away from the perfect circle. He also said that he felt the text was too ornate and really over powered the logo.

Brighter Day Attempt V

This was my fifth and final attempt at the logo. My professor suggested turning the ellipse around to better ground the icon and give it more weight to the bottom, thereby drawing attention to the center. I think by shrinking down the ellipse andsquishing it so the plant intersected the top really gives the image a sense of movement and growth. I was able to stretch and manipulate the circle into more of a bean shape which only emphasized my theme of planting and going “green”. I ended up being more pleased with this text than the last one because it really reads a lot better and still has an organic feel to it, the bend at the top allows for the icon to sit and rest nicely. Overall I’m pretty pleased with this project, it’s really my first semi-professional attempt at a logo re-design and I had fun with it, too bad I have only 20 days left of school!

higher res

So here is the higher resolution image. As you can see I found new maps for land, night, and clouds. This is probably as high as I am going to be able to get the resolution though without having to make the planet smaller. I have also added a secondary, lower opacity layer of clouds this time in order to increase that sense of depth. check it out at the jump.

Higher Res Earth

More Deck Techs!

So finally had time to sit down and crank out Planet earth for my ever patient supervisor on Deck Techs. Here’s what it’s looking like so far. I sent him this proof and he wants me to see if I can create a higher resolution image since at full res the maps start to breakdown. I’m going to see what I can do, Increasing the overall resolution of the image without compromising the size may prove to be a challenge. I’m up for it!

Check this out!

Deck Techs Matte Painting

I found some inspiration last night

I really got in the mood for painting last night, and I got farther than I would have expected on the painting that I am working on. Not only that, but I am also very pleased with the direction it is taking.

I got the cliffs looking more massive by adding objects for scale. it’s really incredible how much something as simple as a couple of birds will change the scale of the objects in a painting.

As you can see I am adding in a cliff-side village and it is really important for scale of the landscape. At first I had the buildings much bigger than they are now, but the grandeur of the cliffs just wasn’t what I wanted it to be. One would think I could just shrink the village down as small as I want but I found that there is a threshold when resizing it as too small will make the believability of the image lose credibility. My colors may also be still to light, but I am running into difficulties with that with this diffused lighting. One thing that I have found in my painting is that I never seem to be aggressive enough when pushing values to their extremes (darker darks, and lighter lights). It is this contrast that will really draw the eye into the image and make the composition that much more believable. I am happy with the direction this is going and I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it for a while. My roommates and in house critics David Wardell and D. Schuyler Burks were able to give me new insight to the composition. They saw the landscape and threw some ideas my way, my favorite being a pirate ship.

So in the next update I will hopefully have that pirate ship ready to go and show you.

At this point I’m not really sure what the final image will look like, meaning, will I stay in this stylized form or will I push the image into photo-realism? I really like how the stylized image is looking, and it will already be a good piece for my concept art portfolio, but I have very little photo-real work in my portfolio. I suppose only time will tell.

Until then, I leave you with something that has been making me laugh non-stop for three days, here.

Before bed inspiration

Here’s a little something I started up before going to bed, I like the direction it’s taking and I’m going to continue to explore it over the next couple of days.

More to come with this tomorrow night.

Minor painting per day

This weekend I challenged myself to a minor matte painting per day. Tomorrow I might have some difficulty with it as I will be working on my website for a majority of  the day, but anyway, here is today’s work…

Cleaned up plate for the painting

Where I ended up…

What the plate doesn’t show is the unsightly Asian man that I removed from the foreground, though he would have been amusing, I had to take him out. More tomorrow…

I got a leaf that he liked!

Yeah so I’m not completely pleased with it, but if it’s what the director wants, it’s what he’ll get. I might clean it up a little bit for my reel, and offer him the clean one, but as for now, the leaf texture is done.There it is! Now I will be moving on to the trunk when I get the proper UV, and I drew up a rough texture for the coconut last night, see that after the jump

The problem with this is, I forgot to tile it!

Yes, in my haste I forgot to tile the texture so that when it wrapped around the sphere it would blend nicely no matter what edges were touching each other. We through it on the model and sure enough, there was a nice visible seam down one side and a spiral pattern at the top. Gotta go back in and fix that today.

Sorry for the delay

I apologize for updating this page so few times in the last couple of weeks, but the last couple of weeks have been quite busy for me. Anyway I have a few things I have been working on. I have finished the Sun image that I was working on for Deck Techs and handed it over to the director, you can check out the image after the jump.

 

I am pretty happy with how it turned out, I ended up using the textures from some NASA photography to get the sun just the way I wanted. I have yet to meet up with the director again, but I have the earth to get started on now. As soon as we have our meeting I will be able to more confidently grasp exactly what he wants to portray in that scene. In the meantime I have been working on my roommate’s senior animation Soup a da Day. He has me doing texture painting for the Island, and palm tree in the scene.

So the images above are a sort of timeline of my first take on the leaves. The director prefers that the darker color be the oustide color, and the veins weren’t working the way that he envisioned them. So I go back to the drawing board.

I switched out the colors and you can see my next take on it was much better than the last. I started experimenting with yellow outlines to see how it would appear on the leaves, and I couldn’t seem to get the ratio of opacity and subtle-ness that I wanted, so I scratched the yellow. David, my director actually really likes my first attempt for take 2 as it created a certain faux paint texture that he wants to now use for the entire film. I will have to do some back-tracking on the leaf now as I have really started pushing it towards the realistic, out of habit.

That is the start of my work on the tree trunk. unfortunately we found when the texture was placed on the model that the UV that I had was not the current model, but a previous model that had been updated since I had gotten my UVs. it shouldn’t be too difficult for me to back-track and re-paint this to fit the newer UV, I’ll let you know how it goes in the coming days.

I still have to paint the island, and a rock on the island but we’ll get there in due time. There has been talk about me possibly painting the main character as well, but I have not heard a final decision on that as of today. I am really enjoying this project and it is definitely opening up a new light to me, that maybe I would be more interested working on animated, stylized films than live action. I will definitely look more closely at the animation studios on my short list and send them work when I have a polished, final reel.

Work in Progress

As you can see from the image of my “sun” from the previous post. It still looks very much like a fiery planet. I need to make it look more gaseous so that it doesn’t appear to have a core like the earth. I also need to ignore what I have been taught about form and space and not put shading on the object because the sun in itself is a light source.

After I complete this shot I will begin work on the earth. The shot I have been assigned is from the inside of the space station OTS shot of the actors through a window. Because the station is slowly spinning the earth will float past the window into view.

I’m not tossing out my original idea either. In the interest of beefing up my reel I am still going to be working on the oil rig shot. Yes it will be put on the backburner for the two (possibly three) senior films I will be working on, but I still want to set a deadline for that project

This is the reference image I will be working from. I want to work this image into a 2.5D motion shot by the end of the quarter.