Christmas 2011 (parody cover, and other COOL STUFF!)

Parody cover I designed as a gag gift for my wife.

(c) Copyrighted characters pictures,and logos belong to their respective owners.

Before people start labeling me as as a.....*shivers* Twilight lover... Pay attention to the gravestones in the foreground. Setting that formality aside, I made this cover as a joke.

My wife wanted the newest LEGO harry potter game and I am never one to go the direct route... Since my wife and I are not fans of Twilight, I thought it would be a fun joke to make a cover for a fictitious (but believable) Twilight LEGO game, buy the game she wanted and then replace the actual cover with mine.

I built and painted the main illustration from a sketch up. Everything else (but the main illustration) on the wraparound were elements I researched and gathered from the internet (including the final wii template). After printing the completed wraparound, I replaced the Harry potter LEGO one with it. Visiting the nearest used game store, they wrapped it up in cellophane as a favor, so that it looked BRAND NEW. Before heading home I packaged it up in a used Amazon box, brought it home, announced my gift for her had just come, and immediately wrapped it with gift-wrap so that upon opening she would never suspect it had been tampered with.

How did it end out? My hard work paid off. When my wife opened her gift she was so convinced the game was real (just from the front cover) that she didn't even bother looking at the back, handed it to me and said, "You're going to have to send it back." I had a hard time keeping a straight face and not laughing. I asked her, "you mean you don't want to play it?" haha. "As IF," she replied, "besides we wont be able to return it!" For about 10 minutes I had her going and finally pulled the cover to Harry Potter LEGO out and had her open the cellophane on LEGO "Twilight" and we had a good, long laugh after that.

Blake Family portrait. (Watercolor and colored pencil.)

If Christmas break wasn't busy enough (between my normal job and finishing the Twilight cover) I ended up making 8 postcard sized illustrations and an 8x10 portrait of my parents and siblings IN LESS THAN ONE WEEK! Starting on monday last week I completed 2 postcard illustrations everyday except for friday and saturday, which was when I completed the family portrait. Honestly despite the stress to get them all done it was alot of fun to go back to traditional illustration. I might even go back to traditional for a little in order to develop a simpler portfolio.

I included a couple of my postcards below. I will probably post the rest on my Deviantart account. Each of my brothers and sisters, and their counterparts had to fight over them in the white elephant gift exchange we did this year. It was alot of fun!

As a final note my generous wife purchased several things for me, including THE ART OF Peter De Seve (Sketchy past). I sat down for HOURS and just basked in his amazing glory (and stressed about how inadequate I am in comparison to him 0_O haha )

Long overdue post~ Scary house, portrait, and colorpicker!

I could paint old scary/cool houses like this all day!

This was painted using my NEW colorpicker! (see bottom of post)

This is what I did for my Plein Air FINAL (Unlike my 23 other paintings for the class, the painting portion was done digitally and off location.) I tried to utilize everything I learned over the semester in this painting, and feel I did a good job.

I did this for my final in my BFA degree capstone (ICAP) class.

I love filling my sketchbook with portraits of people from around me, so I decided to make it part of my final for ICAP. The point of this portrait was to take something normal (a class member...which happened to be a fellow illustrator, EVA) and make it (her) special/extraordinary (Watch out! We're delving deep into Art Theory here... haha). I really enjoyed how the drawing turned out.

Finally, a couple weeks ago I decided to venture out and participate in a Japanese PaintChat. Though their program was over-simplified, I discovered something, like an extra arm that I didn't know I had, that I now absolutely NEED! Basically they had a colorpicker that remained available simultaneously as I PAINTED. I found it very natural, easy to adjust COLORS and find them again... Oh my GOSH! where have you BEEN?! Once I fell in love, I HAD to find a similar action in Photoshop!

For me in Photoshop: 1.the HSB Sliders were too halting. 2.Constantly having to open and close the ColorPicker box (only available from the color swatch icon) was such I pain. 3.And the color swatches gave a good/solid range, but did not allow the full/creative control I wanted. (I've personally been using swatches for years, but until now I didn't see a need to change. )

As I dug deeper on this quest I discovered that, until CS5, the color picker could NOT be put on a shortcut key, and you could NOT have it open and work on your document at the same time in PHOTOSHOP. I own CS4, so that is where Anastasiy http://anastasiy.com/colorwheel comes into play. Basically some GENIUS decided to bank on Adobe's serious lack of ingenuity. It is an extra plugin that you, or anyone, PC, or MAC, can add to any version of photoshop (CS3 and above):

Example of me using the Anastasiy Colorpicker while painting.

It makes picking and reacting to colors a THOSANDS times easier.

Honestly after researching CS5's solution, I like this plug-in EVEN MORE ( since it stays continuously open, instead of being connected to a complex keyboard shortcut). Right now I am still using the "Trial" version, and for $14.00 I am going to have to buy the "Full" version, but until the 15 days run out, even the trial/limited version does EXACTLY what I want. With this tool I can NOW do ANYTHING with photoshop!

Having said that, the only quirky thing I've ran into so far, is that when I use eyedropper, from Photoshop's tools, the color does not register on the colorpicker plugin. But since color selection is SO easy, its not that big of a deal. Thank you Anastasiy!

Once again here is the link to Anastasiy : http://anastasiy.com/colorwheel

[Edit 14 December 2011: I bought the official/FULL version today for $11. The full version syncs with the photoshop eyedropper. Repeat the full version of the colorpicker sync's with photoshop's eyedropper.]