Photoshop Composite Dragons

Here's a composite I did a few years ago and more recently had printed and made into buttons. It's composed of seven images taken on my old Canon Powershot A540. It was fun to make and gives an idea of how creative one can be with photo compositing in Photoshop. Click image to view in full size.

I love doing this stuff as a hobby and even after doing it for a living for a few years it still doesn't get old. My background includes CMYK colour matching and photo manipulation for print. The radio in my previous post is a great example of the level of quality and complexity of projects I have done. The radio project had a deadline of a week's time and this small 8-ball was done in only 15 minutes at the most.

Digital Radio

A while ago I learned how to create anything photo realistically from scratch in Photoshop. Simple things like gradients and drop shadows on shape selections can prove amazingly similar to the real thing. As you can see from the layers pallet in this radio example I made there are many complex layers, even for each dial and element. The mesh speaker alone is comprised of 8 including adjustment layers.



I no longer have the reference used though it wasn't an exact duplicate and still looks very much like the real thing at a glance nonetheless.

SCA Award Show / Digital Media Arts Graduation

I graduated in April from Digital Media Arts program at Seneca College. Now having a bit more time on my hands and need to share my work, I'll be posting some of the things I've worked on that are portfolio worthy and deserve attention.

The last motion graphics piece I produced was for the SCA Media Award Show intro sequence.



I designed the look after being given a general idea of a Roman and Coliseum theme and idea of camera trucking through a Roman city. The archways were drawn fully by me and the surrounding buildings were made to match the style of the drawings. I made textures for the ground and drawn buildings and composed the animation in combustion. Music is a clip from Mozart 7th Symphony. The rest of the animation and stills made for the show other than the logo already produced was matched to the look of my clip as well. I kept thinking while making it, "Rome wasn't built in a day...it was a week!" I managed to meet the tight deadline and was able to assist others in meeting theirs as well after my part was finished.



My segment as you see here was later stitched together with a logo segment before it and a clip after it entering the Coliseum to a main still frame from other animators and presented on a large screen PowerPoint spider system of 2240x768 pixel size.



I was glad to work on and attend the show and all of the people on the team did a great job. Most of them I would gladly work with again.



Full size animation can be viewed here for those patient enough to wait for the QuickTime to load: http://digitalseahorse.ca/video/smallSCAcity.mov

A smaller example of in class work that the intro was based off of may be viewed here:
http://digitalseahorse.com/SCA/Pepin_Danielle_Room3D.mov

Mp3 Player

At the end of semester two we did mp3 players in Flash CS3. This is the one I came up with. I had trouble with getting the mask to work at first. It was a fun little project after I figured that bit out. I placed a silhouette of my DigitalSeahorse logo on it.

Does your doctor prescribble?

A while ago, after spending enough time at Grandma's listening to her tell about her troubles getting her prescriptions filled, I was inspired enough to submit a new word to the urban dictionary. Here's the link to prescribble and it's definition: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=prescribble

Toy design and finished skate deck

My finished deck design ended up having two versions cause I wasn't sure how the different darker shades of gray and the black would show when printed. It's a good thing I thought of making a gray version cause I ended up printing after 7pm yesterday and the levels still needed adjusting at that point. I lightened the background and they let me adjust the levels in the print program at the print place. I think the keys turned out pretty well...must have been about 8 vector objects for a single finished black key. I just realized after cutting it out that the dials on the left don't show up well on the gray version. This is good so I'll know to make a test print before I submit something like this to a client. I should have gone even lighter with the background gray.

My tatoo design on people's arms:


My toy design is now sculpted and design work handed in. I thought of some versions of packaging that could be implemented too.

(Click on any images to view full size.)


That brings me to the end of my first semester in DMA. Having been here last year you'd think I'd have become used to getting up early. I'm looking forward to a few weeks of getting the right amount of sleep and catching up on life outside of schoolwork.