it's finally winter

7 wonders of the world

The first of several advertisement/flyer/business card ideas for my pen business.

marla painting attempt; just a lot of blur and smudge tools. like all marla paintings it looks like crap up close.

Enhanced drawing; the original scan was way too light so I messed around with the levels, vibrance and saturation. Then I used the blur tool over the whole thing to really pop all the colors out.

Kaleidoscopes

All kaleidoscope images were made from this one graffiti image

8 part kaleidoscope

Negative Space

My first attempt at negative space imaging, the original picture is of Aaron Biittner
( http://cdn2.static.mporatrons.com/site/whitelines/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/thumbnail.jpg )
I filled the foreground with a snowflake pattern and the background with black marble. The type
was done on a path set around the edge of the background layer.

My silhouette filled with a random nature scene in front of a dusky
Guatemala City.

filtered fun

word play

My first word play image

My best wordplay picture. The moose was selected and made into a new layer,
then I used a color overlay to make it browner, finally I used the plastic wrap filter
to give it a chocolaty feel. The hunter was slowly was originally right handed and
facing the other direction but I decided he fit the image better flipped over, he was
then erased to fit in with the trees.

Smudge tool

One of my favorite tools when doing artsy, creative images is the smudge tool. It is basically a blur tool on steroids that drags the pixels around. It can be used to made some really cool effects like fire.

retouching 2

Original

Final

 This was my second attempt at retouching portraits. The hardest part of this one was fixing his right canine tooth, I wanted to lighten his teeth a little but then I noticed that it over hung his lip a little and decided to fix it. It didn't come out very well because getting all the complexities of the texture of lips is really hard with only the paintbrush. The tooth isn't very noticeable in a smaller image like this  but when blown up it didn't look very good (my new tooth doesn't look very good either).
In this picture I also corrected the color, lightened some wrinkles and shadows, and clipped some white hairs in his mustache. The most important correction besides warming the image up was removing some of the deep shadows on the left side of the image in his ear and especially under his chin.

portrait retouching 1

 I wanted to learn more "applicable" techniques such as retouching, color corrections, and simple edits. After watching several lynda.com videos on portrait retouching I decided to try it out.

Here is my first try at retouching, I chose this image because it was simple, of good quality, and very large.

Below on the left I highlighted what i thought needed correction. First I corrected the color with the curves tool, lightening the overall image and then color correcting the skin. Then I lightly painted over the shiny parts of his forehead, nose, and cheek with a low opacity skin tone. After that I clipped a couple stray hairs and used the healing brush on several little scars, dimples, etc. Then I lightened a couple of shadows and wrinkles. Finally I removed the crease in his shirt next to his tie, I'm not sure if I should have done this or not because the content-aware fill made it look a little wrinkled.  

                                

 Highlighted here is what is what I chose to work on

Final Image