Yet more

Here are yet some more design works:

Some cartoon art

galaxy explosion kind of thing

gel/glass/liquid button graphics. Can contain any text or icon really.

1024x768 wallpaper for my computer.

all of the above taken from tutorials to learn more about designs. The last took most time, but also was more actual drawing to do. The last has a very interesting, unintentional detail, which is the base of the tree. I sculpted the tree out of an actual picture and then noticed the trunk looks like a foot.

So, probably I'm going to read up a bit more on design theory from here on. Things like logo construction, colors and those kind of theories.

I actually tried some cartoon characters for drawing, but that didn't end up in much yet ;).

More design work

These are two more designs I created with Wacom and some standard functionalities.
This is a modification of a fractal. I basically heavily embossed it and layered the result on top of the original. Then grayscaled part of the picture for a concrete effect and layered other images over it for a sort of glass like effect. As you can see, I don't master glass yet, which is why I started with the following image, one of an orb over a newspaper. That one looks much better.

This orb is produced solely under photoshop. It started with a simple sphere in a flat color, than I added an inner shadow effect to create some white at the bottom right (it should have more in the final image). Then another gradient in the middle, which was masked by a radial gradient. A hotspot in white at the top and then a selection of the initial orb that had a fill of black and transparency, which was scaled down to about 40% in height, slightly blurred and slightly moved to the right. The glasses and newspaper are from a photo. And the problem I run into obviously is not paying attention to the existing shadows in the picture :).

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Wacom tablet

I just bought a Wacom tablet to also pay attention to a different kind of creativity. I never really drew anything in my life basically, but the computer helps a lot with imagery in many cases. This one is called "beauty", but then in Japanese :).

Well, as with all things, the first try isn't much of anything, but here you go. I have an incredible lot to learn about the art, graphics, how to use applications and so on.

One of the things I did start out with is a way to create fonts. I managed to create 5 characters and got them working, but then I dropped it because I didn't see much need further.

Other things in design that sound very interesting and that I will try out, probably in the order given:

• Logo's
• Image manipulation
• Create paintings based on photo's
• Actual drawing from scratch

So far, I have used "inkscape", "gimp" and "fontforge" as the tools of choice. InkScape is really cool and quite different from Gimp. It's dealing a lot with shapes where the Gimp deals more with pixels and photo manipulation.

I can recommend getting one of those drawing tablets. It's a lot of fun and the navigation on the computer feels totally different.

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