I created 2x3ft print posters for two key players of the HBU Huskies Women’s Basketball 2011-2012 team; Devyn Weymouth and Shanice Steenholdt.

I’m tinkering around with an interesting personal project.

I’ve released the Dead Space 3 image I’ve made for use as an iPhone lock-screen background. Enjoy!

Click the preview image to download the background. [960×640 pixels]

I’ve completed the visual design and some mock marketing materials for Dead Space 3. You can see the full project here: http://www.behance.net/gallery/Dead-Space-3/2687235

I’ve had the urge to hop back into the Dead Space universe recently. So much so that I’m working on some fan art for the inevitable Dead Space 3.

Here’s a snapshot of our group playing Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 last Sunday. Good times!

Nicholas Spurrier is a professional pianist, private piano instructor, accompanist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, producer, lyricist, and all around musical enthusiast. He is also the co-founder/co-leader of the rock band Lindby, and pianist for Lindby’s jazz combo.

You can see the project here: http://www.behance.net/gallery/SpurrierMusiccom/2649227

I wrote a little something on my exciting experience with Dark Souls on the PlayStation 3. You can read it over on The Nerdemic.

Just posting a quick preview of what I’ve been working on recently; some promotional material for the Chinese Basketball Association.

See the project here: http://www.behance.net/gallery/CBA-Chinese-Basketball/2344338

I wrote an article over on The Nerdemic about my time with Dead Island. Check it out!

I recently created some artwork for the Walter Kaitz Foundation Dinner. The advertisement is for One World Sports and was quite fun to create. I used a technique that I recently took for a trial run with the BWF Badminton promotion and continued to play around with the abstract nature of a personally-created custom brush to draw on photographs.

I decided to write up another overview on how I went about working up this piece.

I started off with a gradient to rid myself of the dreaded blank canvas. I tend to initiate my work with black, white, and shades of gray; adding color later to match the rest of my imagery. This was a simple linear gradient.

Next, I found a nice texture from the stock.xchng and layered it into my file. I’m a huge sucker for textures; I love adding them, in some degree, to every one of my pieces.

Here are my source images. Makoto Hasebe of the AFC Asian Cup, Ma Lin of the International Table Tennis Federation, and Li Chao of the OneAsia Golf Tour. My boss provided me with these high-resolution photographs from our affiliates to use in the advertisement of our sports channel.

After masking the players out of their respective backgrounds, I took some time and tried various ways of placing the figures in an illustrative effort. I wanted them to be grouped together as one entity; eventually decided on the left-hand side of the file.

I then brushed in some simple shading to each figure to add a little more depth to the overall aesthetic of the image.

By adding in a spotlight effect, I was able to direct the flow of light even more; furthering the immersion of the various elements together. To create a light source like the one below, create a new layer in Photoshop, fill the layer in with white, then select Filter > Render > Lighting Effects, and from there you can play around with the intensity and direction of the light. Once you’re satisfied, hit OK, then set the layer’s blending mode to something like Overlay or Soft Light.

If your using Mac OSX and your version of Photoshop is missing the ‘Lighting Effects’ selection in the Filter’s list, set the program to run in 32-bit mode.

Alright, now I wanted to add some more lights and effects to the image. I brushed in some slight fog behind the spot where the figures are placed and then crafted some nifty light streaks. Basically, I used the shape tool and created a rectangle. Then, I ran Filter > Blur > Motion Blur and heightened the intensity. After that, I used the Polygonal Lasso tool and cut off half the selection to create that sharp edge on one side.

I repeated that process several times and at several different weight values.

I turned back on our figure’s folder group to see how they stand against my freshly made effects. Looking good, eh?

I wanted even more effects, though. Something a little crazier! I opened up the Brushed window (Window > Brush) and tinkered around to make an interested custom brush. Something textured that I could have fun with.

I then proceeded to use my Wacom Intuos tablet and draw in some sharp lines. Basically, I just paraded around my file and went nuts with whatever I felt looked unique enough to paint off of.

I mainly focused on white lines to contrast the dark background, however I also enjoyed using the different colors of the figure’s as a base.

The image below simply shows further contrast and brightness effects to add more depth.

I then went to work on coloring in the background with brushes and gradients.

Finally, I added in the body copy I was provided and the company logo. You view the project here: http://www.behance.net/gallery/Walter-Kaitz-OWS-Advert/2129748

The ‘Make Your Ideas Art’ blog interviewed me and embedded my Aubreyon design process. You can read it here.

I’ve had a few people email me and ask how I created the art piece for the Aubreyon album cover. I decided to take a little time and write out a brief overview of how I went about making it. Hit the jump below to read on and check out the image-by-image.

The most essential part of starting a new art piece is making sure you get rid of that blank white canvas immediately. It’s a killer and will suck the creativity out of your soul faster than you can decide where to save the file in your hard drive. In all seriousness, though, I have found that getting rid of the blank page right off the bat allows me to get over that initial hurdle – especially when I only have a slight idea of the direction I’m moving in.

Think of it like an essay back in high school or college. What was the hardest part of those things? If you said, “Starting off-” or some variation of that, then you’re my winner for today. A great English professor told me that you just need to start writing and not care what you’re exactly saying just yet. Simply start babbling off words and sentences down on the paper that generally relate to your topic. After you’ve started, you’ll find it’s much easier to pick up from there and move on.

Next, I started just messing around with brushes and colors using my Wacom tablet. Nothing too fancy or crazy, just simple defaults and sporadically-picked colors. I played around with different strokes, sizes, colors, and other variations for a while until I settled on something rather simple. Quick tip: Opacity setting and Layer Styles are your friends when playing with Photoshop brushes.

After toying around with those for a while I decided to throw in the photograph I would manipulate. This woman’s facial structure – her cheek bones, eyes, and chin – really intrigued me. When I saw the photo, it just stuck out.

Time for some fancy pants Photoshop tricks to rip this hottie from her background. Actually, for this piece, I went the old-fashioned route and simply masked out the background by tracing her with my tablet. I find that the Selections, Wands, Channels, and Ants are all well and good, however sometimes I really like having full control over every pixel and just honing on to extract my subject.

So I masked out her background. I felt her stance had a naturally soft “V” shape to it (compare my cut to the previous full photo to see what I mean) so I decided to flow along that. After cutting her out I manipulated my brushes from earlier to slightly form around her new figure.

After positioning her, it felt like a good time to start ‘sploding her sides and add a level of chaos to her clean cut composition. I plugged in the ol’ external HD and dug through my resource collection. (Quick tip: Nothing beats having a diverse and well-categorized personal resource collection of stock images, brushes, actions, gradients, and more. Sure, I didn’t make them all – hell or almost any of them – but I utilize the royalty-free ones I can snag from the vast stretches of the ‘net to my advantage.) So I used some splatters I had to clone stamp her jacket into the splatter’s selection on a new layer. Thus, forming her little rips and explosive tearing.

Since the original photograph was black and white (one of my favorite styles, by the way) I decided to give her some sexy rep lipstick. Why? Because I enjoy beautiful women wearing sexy red lipstick, that’s why. I also gave it a little paint around her lips, and brushed in some additional colors around her head.

The flowing fabric on the bottom left is actually a bride’s wedding veil blowing in the wing. The soft lighting against the material gave a nice feeling to the piece and gave our sultry model some added body as it swam out from her mid-section. Here I also added additional brush strokes and destructive paints to give her body a continuing sense of construction.

The composition of this piece needed further contrast. Using an Adjustment Layer, I played around with the file’s Curves to darken the blacks and brighten the whites. I also found a fabulous photo of a broken window to give our sexy star a distorted halo-of-sorts. I darkened her right eye and gave it a “Phantom of the Opera” sort of feel. Additionally, I used the Burn and Dodge tools on her left eye to add further contrast and then brushed her eye with some blue and set the Layer Style to Overlay – duplicating that layer again to intensify the effect.

To give her face more depth and oddity, I found a great old mask image. I moved and contorted its proportions to match those of our model and destroyed the mask’s background with some textures and brushes in its Layer Mask. Then, I set the layer’s style to Multiply. I also added some additional brush strokes and little details here and there.

Finally, here we are! To top off this piece, I used an Instagram Action. This really distorted and molded the colors and general feel to my liking. From there I also used the Burn and Dodge tools a little more in areas where I felt additional contrast was necessary.

And that’s it! Granted, this wasn’t an in-depth, step-by-step rundown of my entire process; though I hope it gave you a nice overview of how I went about creating it. Feel free to email me, or leave a comment below, with any questions you have and I’ll get back to you!

Thanks for reading.

Advertising posters for a stage production of King Henry the 6th. You can see the full project here: http://www.behance.net/gallery/KING-HENRY-VI/2022723

I did something interesting the other day at work, I threw down some type in both Korean and Japanese! I designed the print ad, my boss gave me the body copy, I provided the translators with the image and they sent back the translated text. I then coordinated with them to make sure the placement of the copy made sense in each respective language.