Library Logo

I was asked by our school's librarian to help out with some bookmarks and as I haven't had a lot of creative work outside of my normal day to day, and the yearbook, it was fun to put my brain into another gear.

The school mascot is the Viking and all the direction I was given was "a viking reading", and so my first idea was to simply look around some cool stock photo sites and see what they had, which was not a lot... But a few of the vector ideas were cool and got my wheels spinning. I thought it might be nice to show you my thought and work process here.

So here is the original inspiration logo I had seen on iStock. A pegasus in a book... not sure how it got onto my viking search, but something about the pegasus shape reminded me of a boat and the scrolls reminded me of waves...

Before I knew it I had sketched out an idea for a logo for the library. This is not what they asked for, but I figured I could use it on the bookmarks in any case, if I liked it. You can see I was messing with the sail shape in pencil, but the inked over strongly the final shapes I did like. Then I simply snapped a picture with my phone and emailed it to myself.

Photoshop one color selection

Took my sketch into Photoshop and used color select on the blue to make a new, rough, one color image that I could take into Illustrator.

Illustrator expanded trace

In Illustrator used the Image Trace function, set to Black and White logo, to get a vector drawing I could start messing with. Of course it came out really messy, so the first step was to use the Path tool to Simplify the shape and remove a bunch of extra points that I didn't need. Then I went back and took out even more points by hand so I could start getting clean simple curves and shapes.

 

I worked on it in three sections, the book/waves, the boat itself and finally the sail. The shapes around the shields on the side of the boat and the sail both ended up changing from my sketch. And I spent a good amount of time getting the left side of the water/book area right and then simply copied and flipped it to make the book be a perfect symmetrical image.

After tweaking the boat to where I liked it, I took the circle shape from our school logo and changed the bottom text to Library. Then I added my new library stuff to the center.

Finishing touch was to add the school shield to the sail of the boat and tweak the blue color to be more of the correct color for the school (even though we do not have a set Pantone blue which would be a big help...).

Well the librarian loved the logo and we are still working on a few ideas for the bookmarks themselves, but this was a pretty fun little tangent for my brain to take.

Note: The first and third are using stock images from Shutterstock along with my new logo. The middle has a quote from my favorite book on it, get it on Audible if you love yourself.

Difficulty: Intermediate
Time to complete: 4-6 hours

Freelance Design

I was looking back through my folders and realized I actually do quite a bit of random freelance design. Whether it is family, friends or work acquaintances, it is a broad category. Since it is always something new, it really keeps me growing and thinking. Thought I would use this post to share a few.

Inspirational Gift: Teachers need gifts that are both meaningful and cost effective. A personal poem that you share with your class is a great way to do it. With a little creativity, the line you love, is art.

Wedding Invites: I was asked to mock up some designs for a county themed wedding. Figured I would just share the bare bones, but you can see that these were pretty cool.

Dinner Party Invites: My brother and his girlfriend love to have dinner parties. Since they both work for country clubs, these are legit parties complete with formal invites and menus.

Webcomic Logo: A friend started a comic and asked for help designing the logo for the comic as well as general art and blog tips. Unfortunately, life got in the way of his comic continuing, but it was fun.

T Shirt Logos: These were for a support group on a t-shirt. Simple two-color baseball design for the group Line Drives for Lilly.

There are quite a few more, but I think you get the idea. I like turning people ideas into more polished versions of themselves. This concludes the design posts for now. Hope you enjoyed seeing a little of what else I can do.

Show choir 2014-2015

You might remember that I helped out with making a logo for the show choir for the high school my husband works at in both 2012 and 2013. Even just between the two there is a progression I think. Well, I was asked to help out again this year.

The shirts would be white and I went with a simple two color blue scheme of the school royal blue and a teal to help it pop. It had to be good for male and female students to wear. I submitted a few design ideas for the front for them to choose from with their slogan for this year: "Here comes treble."

The back was to have the names of the students in a frame. I had the teacher collect signatures and then took them into Illustrator to clean up and organize. The frame I drew to resemble sheet music and added a music note font over to complete the look. Personally, I had thought of trying to make it actually be the notes for our school song, but in the end decided that would be a detail no one would get and would take a lot of time to do right.

In the end it came down between two front options.
The final design chosen was the one I liked best.

I hear the shirts were a big hit too. Always happy to hear good feedback.

My Personal Logo Design

For the next few posts, I am going to talk a little bit about some of my more recent design work, then I have no doubt I will get back into crochet.

I realized my personal design and logo has changed a bit since my last post on it way back in 2007.

I like to think that it is a good representation of where I was to where I am now, especially skill wise. 

I've been using what I call my "fish mark" since college when I needed a quick and easy way to sign my work in ceramics and printmaking. I'd been studying Albrecht Duerer, particularly his wood cut prints, and liked his signature a lot. It's that AD thing at the top under the date.

For a very short time I tried to replicate Duerers, but with my initials. It was too much of a rip off though, so I worked on it and realized that turning it on its side I could make it look like a fish! That's where I got the first one in the old post. That first one was a scanned drawing that I tried to clean up in photoshop.

Since then I've done a lot of work in the field of graphic design. The current logo is constructed in Illustrator. The AS of the fish was made from a font I liked, can't remember which anymore, that I heavily modified to get the shapes of the letters where I wanted them. When the logo is large like this, it is also easy to see that the lines around making up the pentagon shape are actually tools that represent my skills. Specifically these are: a pencil, brush, tablet stylus, crochet hook, and a black marker for my site name.

These tools are also represented in the argyle background on this site, with an emphasis on the little black marker, for my sites namesake, but that's next week's post.

It is really nice to have a good logo to represent myself. And like all logos, it might change again in the future, but for now it's a great way to see my past. Been thinking about getting a decal for my car... could be cool.

Kaiju Groupie

Bear with me as today's needs a little backstory...

I take melatonin before bed to help with my insomnia and general lack of ability to fall asleep. Lately I have been feeling like it has not worked so well... the bottle does say that you can develop a tolerance to it. So I have stopped taking it for two days now. The difference is easy to see, to me anyway. With melatonin I have a 10-15 min fall asleep time, without is 45-1hr asleep time.

In that extra time I lie awake playing out whole conversations for upcoming events that make me nervous or anxious, which only serves to make me more so at the time of the actual event. I try breathing meditation and counting. Most of the time there are also a few lines of a song on a loop in my head. And I also think about upcoming things farther away than next week... like Halloween.

Night one of no melatonin, I forced myself to stop playing out a scene and think of something else. I thought about crochet and my new Otachi and how cute she is. And thought about a few posts from tumblr of a neat jacket and dress design based on her design. And how cool it would be to cosplay, and how I wish I knew how to pattern and sew. Which lead to thoughts of more simple outfits for conventions.

Thinking about Otachi and the movie, Pacific Rim in general the words "Kaiju groupie" start floating around in my head. I pulled out my phone and saw there are actually quite a few shirts and things with the phrase on it for sale online. Then as I was thinking about it all this image (insert angel chorus hallelujah!) popped into my mind, almost fully formed, for a t-shirt design. Since an uppercase "G" and an "e" can look mirrored and similar and they have rounded tops and the word kaiju has so many vertical elements... my typography and logo designing brain had it all worked out.

Of course thats when I fell asleep and forgot about it.

Night Two of no melatonin, I was laying there and suddenly remembered it again. Of course I went to sleep before sketching it out, but the second remembering forced it into my awake brain and today I went and put it to paper.

sketches

I haven't sketched in a while and it was really nice to do. Got out the graph paper, to help space and size the art, and a 5B pencil. I traced the rough sketch on to tracing paper. Then I scanned it as best I could.

I then took the scan into Illustrator. Made vector art out of it with the pen tool which took forever (about 2 hours). So now I am going to send this off to Zazzle and get one printed on a navy shirt.

Watermarked for internet safety.

If you want one, I have put the design up for sale on t-shirts and stickers on Zazzle as it is free to do.
Get one by clicking here!

I super duper love it and on the navy color the eyes are nice dark slits. The little decoration at the bottom is Otachi's nostrils, but also just looks cute...

2014 Business Cards

I was out and about the other night when an old teacher of mine asked me what I was up to and mentioned that they would love to see some recent art.

Recent Art? I really do not think of myself as an artist anymore. Designer, sure. Creative crocheter? Yeah. Artist, nah.

Sure I've doodled a bit recently. And I am working on some fan art for AC:NL. But nothing frame-able. I feel lately like calling myself that would take away something from the other artists out there who continually work to improve themselves and their art.

That aside, once again I realized that I should have some personal business cards. Or at the very least carry around this custom stamp I had made with my logo and website on it... So I looked up the old art for the business cards I made up in 2010. I never had them printed and it's time for an update anyway.

The old old business card was boring and disjointed I felt. The playing card idea I still like a bit more since it at least looks cohesive on both sides. Sure, I'm not a card dealer, but I do consider the crafty things I do to be play. I am an ace (ha!) at what I do. I also like the limited color scheme of playing cards.

I updated the contact info and my name... since I've gotten married since I made these last. I tried to make it look a little like the box for cards with the patterns and dots and large symbol. I then took a few hours and reworked the playing card art to be a little more relevant and thoughtful.

I shortened my hair, colored it blue, updated my glasses shape. I also changed the outfit a bit. Before I was referencing the strange cloak-like clothes the card characters wear; now it is a layered kimono. I collect them, and love asian culture. The kimono itself has leaves (for the gardening I do) and chibi-totoros, for the obvious reason that I love them and flowers, just cause they are often on kimonos. I changed the waist sash into an obi (not too much of a stretch there). I left the lotus in my hair. I also left the bluebonnets since they are the flower of Texas. I added a wedding ring to my left hand and added a crochet hook to my array of implements in that hand. In case you can't tell those items are: a crochet hook, an art pen/marker, a pencil and a brush.

Making these cards allows me to show off my range of skills. I get to draw the design on paper, and then bring it into Illustrator to get vector lines, then into Photoshop for coloring. I also get to show off my design skills since everything is brought together in inDesign and text and embellishments are added.

So yeah, I'm thinking I will get these printed on glossy cardstock. And if it isn't too much extra, maybe I will have them die cut with rounded corners like real cards instead of the drop shadow effect. :)

UPDATE: Picture of the finished cards. I did get them die cut.

2013-2014 Show Choir Logo

So as you might remember, last year I worked up a quick logo for the Nolan Catholic HS Show Choir. Well once again I was asked to do this years. I was given a sketch to go from and the information that they would like to have all 20 kids names included.

With my old file at hand and the sketch done by one of the students in hand I set out to try to replicated it in a way that would look nice.

The front was simple enough. The shirts would have an updated Show Choir logo as well as the dates, in a normal placement on the breast. Clean and simple.

The back however was a different matter. Since it would have the names of the students it needed to be larger and incorporate the sketch that I was given.

Sketch by Student Mandi O'Neal

Step one was to take the sketch and try to recreate it in Illustrator so it could be clean and I could easily change up the colors to see what looked best. It also needed to be scaled to the larger size that the back design needed to be legible. I sent in this to make sure that even though I changed it up a bit they still liked it and felt it was close to the original intent. At this point the shirt color had not been decided as it was up to a vote.

The original thought for the student's names was to have them in the cloud of sound coming out of the phonograph, but with the text of the Show Choir logo overtop the text of the names it might have been a bit too busy. I presented a different option of using a record sleeve. At this point they had voted on a navy colored shirt and we threw out the idea of using white and gold printing.

I tried to make the design tight and self contained so that it would look nice centered on the back of a shirt. I also played with the colors of the lines and the fills. I also soon realized that black on navy is almost illegible. Those black outlines were not really cutting it. You can also see that in one, I removed the ornamental flowers since they seemed to get lost and distract the eye. I also added in a record sleeve as my idea for how to incorporate the names of the students. There was a few rounds of going back and forth on just printing in gold and white and no black, but none were really as sharp as it needed to be.

I then got the suggestion to make the navy shirt be the outlines and text, and just have the areas around filled with the gold and white printing. It took a little work, but once I started working it was clear that it was much better. I also realized that with the record sleeve in perspective that I would have to make some names smaller than others, and I did not want that to be the case, so I changed it as well.

I sent it in and we all agreed that it was done.

Final Back Design

Cant wait to see what it looks like in real life!

Logo Opinions

Logos are important. They need to say a lot visually without saying much more than the name.
That is why a good logo is priceless and why people who design them can charge quite a tidy sum if they are any good.

I'm personally not all that good at them yet, but I can tell a good one from a boring one.
Yahoo's new logo is boring.

I do love this article page where they show all kinds of ideas and rehashing of the logo idea. But the new font, from the thin straight lines and the identical nature of the two o's read "bank" or something else equally obsessed with order. Now the fact that the o's are two different sizes seems conflicting with the formality of the font itself. Sure the little tiny scoops at the top of each stroke of the letters is interesting, but it is rapidly lost as the logo is made smaller, to the point where I did not even see them on first glance at the new logo on their search page.

Obviously a lot of thought has go into their logo blueprint. The angle at which the ! is tilted, the exact size difference between the o's, etc. However whereas before I read Yahoo with that same sing song kind of phrase that they used in commercials... YaaahhoooOO000ooo! to now reading it like ya-hoo. Or to use it in a sentence: "That kid in the hoodie over there looks like a real yahoo."

I guess it is not as bad as it could be. Some of them also struck me as for different products. For example Day 2 looks like Yahoo is a feminine product or a yogurt or brand of yoga pants. Day 6 could be a toy manufacturer or something. Day 11 reads "dairy" to me.

My favorites from their list are Day 25 with the hidden smile, Day 23 where it looks like a bit of a funnel like its coming to a point, which is the goal of a search engine... to find the one thing you want, and Day 5, which just feels friendly and relaxed to me without the capitol letters.

Of course everything is subjective and as long as you have pleased the client and gotten paid, at the end of the day, the graphic designer's job is done.

Which one was your favorite?

Sugar Rush

Wreck-it Ralph was really good. Kinda wish it had been more video game references, characters and locations, and less CandyLand/Candy Kingdom, but still really good. The reason I don't mark it down for having so much candy stuff is because it is too gosh darn fun and lovable.

From the trailers I really thought I was going to hate Vanellope Von Schweetz as a character but I ended up liking her more and more. Also, I really want to own a copy of Sugar Rush now.

So since a lot of the people I have in my google reader were making their own racers, I thought I would give it a whirl.

Tried to think about my favorite candies... Not sure why I forgot about my favorite, Mallomars, but I was stuck thinking about what is in my house right now... Mounds. Dark Chocolate, coconut and coconut flakes. Thought about the textures and the way the chocolate kind of ripples on the top. Also thought about what I wear in the winter, since all the racers have a winter wardrobe.

I gave her coconut flake cake ball earmuffs, kept my blue hair, pale skin and my freckles. She is dressed in a coconut husk-esque scarf, a coconut cream tunic long sleeve sweater, a short pleated skirt seemed manditory for the girl racers so I gave her one peeking out under the sweater. I made it blue to tie into my hair, but also because almond joy has a blue wrapper, and maybe she can like almonds even though I don't. She has dark chocolate colored leggings inside her chocolate ripple patterned boots. I also gave her fingerless gloves because I like them, in orange, cause I like it too.

Got to figure a name... kind of leaning toward: Almonella Cocowhipple.

Update: Made a mallomar version since it was a good idea and Almonella's first outfis isnt screaming CANDY. Dark Chocolate Beanie, Racing goggles, a marshmallow whip coat, chocolate skirt, graham cracker leggings and chocolate boots.

Update 2: Created three more racers at the request of a certain person, Phil, on facebook.
First up is my hubby. He is based on root beer floats. Has a root beer float hat, a vest and bow tie, pants and shoes. I added the bow tie to make him feel more "Malt Shop".

Next is Phil since he asked for them. I thought Atomic Fire Ball! So he got a firey shirt with an atomic bomb shirt underneath, jeans and an atomic fire ball beanie. Thought his shoes should be converse sneakers or something. And can throw puffs of spicy cinnamon air... I guess.

And I thought to round out the couples with his girlfriend. Not sure what candy she likes, but she is sweet and fresh and I thought candy canes for some reason. So she has a candy cane hair clip and pendant. A lacy candy shrug, a red drop-waist dress with a licorice belt. Candy cane striped leggings and red sneakers.

Show Choir Logo

My husband is a teacher. I might have mentioned that. One of his co-workers asked me to clean up a logo idea they wanted to use for a t-shirt. I received this sketch:

I did a search for musical note fonts, took one into illustrator and altered the shapes a bit to get the letters. I kept the idea of the music notes as letters. I rounded off the ends of the letters to match the music notes a little better. I also took the curly-que from the bottom of the S letter to add to the C to make them look like they were from the same font. I used a different, more simple, font to keep the NCHS as a separate item visually. 

I like it. Not too busy I think. And they really liked it, so job well done! Yeah!

The Skees'

My husband really liked the last doodle from this post. So much so that he spun a whole story off it when talking to me about it and then asked if I could make a comic out of it for his birthday. Well, that was last month, but our anniversary was yesterday and I thought I would finish it in time.

I thumb-nailed the comic first. Then drew out each scene in pencil. We took some photographs for reference too. Then inked it when I was happy. Then scanned in all the inked panel sketches separately. Then took them into Illustrator to get vector line art. Then laid out the frames, vector art and text in InDesign. Then saved the file as an eps to keep the transparency. Took that eps into Photoshop. Colored the panels as if in full daylight. Then added a few filter layers to get the color right for a darker evening and the lighting. Added one more layer and tried to paint some backgrounds in for context.

Khyarete Cat

So following the ideas from last post, I spent a little time coloring the doodle that I ended up with.

First Step: Trace the image that I orignially drew and line shaded so that Illustrator can render me some clean outlines.

Doodle-trace on a sticky note.

Step Two: Photograph trace and take into Photoshop. Use healing brush to get rid of the smudges, then an adjustment layer to balance out the shadow. Then I always adjust the layers to get as much dark and light as possible.

Photoshopped: Not always nicer.

Step Three: Bring adjusted image into Illustrator and use Live Trace tool to get some rough outlines that I can then take BACK into photoshop.

Line art at this point looks like a messy ink drawing. But it's vector!

Step Four: Open a new canvas at the size I want. In this case avatars are square so I just picked a 5"x5" canvas to use. Drop in the line art from Illustrator.

Following this I give the line art its own layer, rasterize it, erase the messy bits and thicken with a black round brush. Color blocking and palette choice is next where I paint some round blobs out together to see how they look. Then I color in the largest sections in their primary tone.

Create a new layer for shadows and larger details, like fixing the eyebrows and cheek dots. Shading the fur and kimono goes on this layer as well.

New layer for eyes is next. I always do them separate since I never usually like them and then can move them around the eyeball as I like if I don't like where I initially drew them.

New layer for the Kimono pattern. They are white chibi totoros. I put this on its own later after making a ton of layers and merging them for each totoro shape. Then I decreased the opacity to get it to look like it was on the fabric.

Then I made two layers for the background dot pattern thing. This part was hard. I just picked two colors to make two layers and then erased dots out of one to put over the other. I then gave the top color a Hue Saturation adjustment layer so that I could mess with the tones without having to recolor the whole thing. Still not sure I like the background colors, but they will do for now.

I decided at that point that the cat was blending into the background and she needed a shadow. Easiest way is to duplicate the line art layer and fill it in with black creating a black shape of the cat itself. Then enlarge it just a bit and lower the transparency on that layer and offset it from the cat to create a drop shadow.

I then had to add my signature mark which I have already in a vector format for this purpose. It gets it's own layer as well.

So you can see the layers...

 Done... for now.

Rice Boy Fan Art

Rice Boy by Evan Dahm

Rice Boy is actually a story unto itself, but is also the name of the website. Evan Dahm has created an entire complex world compete with histories, races and fantastic environments. All of his stories take place in this world, called Overside. He is also the second half of the blog, The Exquisite Beast, I mentioned before.

When I started reading this comic, it was with Rice Boy. It follows Rice Boy who is suspected to fulfill of a prophecy. Then I got caught up in the Order of Tales. Order follows the last of a race of storytellers. And now I religiously follow Vattu. I have also devoured everything in the short stories section.

It is hard to classify these comics... I guess the best way to describe them are as "epics".  Most follow a single main character through their experiences, but rapidly bloom into a much larger scale conflict that this one character is caught up in the middle of. There are reoccurring races and characters which help to give every story depth, once you have read them all.

If I had to pick a favorite character, it would be T-O-E (The One Elecronic). He is super cool... carries himself kind of like yoda, dracula, and the lone gunman. I kind of relate him to Roland from the Dark Tower series...

Anyway, I am really enjoying Vattu so far and since it is the latest, I wanted to doodle her. I like Vattu's city a lot and while I started sketching her sneaking off to a sword practice with the War-man, I started giving her a companion. So here again is that Kenku kid from before.

This Kenku is actually a character I created for a DnD campaign that never went anywhere. But I spent a lot of time thinking about a back story and purpose and goals and things like that. So Chrypi is a girl kenku (which is hard to tell, similar to Vattu) and she grows up on the streets of Sharn in Ebberon. That city in the DnD lore, is gigantic and full of tons of races and hierarchy and lords and all kind of stuff. I felt like Sharn is a little like the city that Vattu is in since they are both full of all kinds of races. Chrypi one day finds a Bard mentor who teaches her to sing and make a little money storytelling. I had the idea for her to have a custom scimitar that had a harp built into the curve of the blade, a harpitar. Never sure where she learned to use a scimitar, so maybe some lessons from a friend might be fun.

My Little Sailor Moon

This idea has been stewing in my sketchbook for a while, so I thought I would actually give it a go. I like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I also like Sailor Moon. Similar to the Adventure Time/Avatar the Last Airbender mashup I did before I felt this was kind of obvious. I have a feeling that someone has already done this better somewhere, but I had a lot of fun picking colors and merging styles.

Each pony is colored on a separate layer, the line art is one vector image from illustrator that sits on top. I added another layer for a shadow. And the background is from this link, set behind everything with a gaussian blur on it.

Original Sketch...

Nedroid Picture Diary Fan Art

Nedroid Picture Diary by Anthony Clark

Favorites: Mosquitos, Bartholomew, Tacos, Pizza, pretty much all of them...

Follows Reginald and Beartato (rhymes with potato) and their life, adventures and friends. If you looked at my favorites you can tell that it is quite silly. Anthony is a joy to follow on twitter and tumblr because we get to see all the other cool stuff that he works on. His coloring skills are amazing! You cant really tell from these comics but he does some amazing things with light in photoshop. I also love to see all the cool wizards he draws.

Ok here is the doodle:

Fun times... drew in graphite, inked with a black marker, scanned into illustrator, converted to line art, pulled into photoshop, layers of color and panels beneath the lines, saved to jpg. Fact: I had three different comics all thought out... this one is different than the rest.. perhaps I will draw Reginald and Beartato in the Halloween costumes I picked out for them (of a Pizza Slice and Hamburger (respectively)) at some time in the future.