Gruver Football

Wow! I haven't posted in quite some time. To be honest it has been a combination of being busy with my new "day job", freelancing and comic strip work. First up, below is the most recent freelance design I have created. The project had a really fast turn around time and was pretty straight forward. I wanted to post this up to kick off the football season, high school and professional.

The school I created this for wanted something that was inspirational as well as visually pleasing. They supplied the slogan and I worked the art around it. Of course I had to stay with two colors, which is pretty standard for high schools these days. All in all I think it gets the point across and makes a visual impact at the same time.



Aside from this design a lot of freelancing as of late has been pretty much technical set up and recreation work. A lot of school organizations wanting thier ideas made reality and what not, everyone knows the game :) It's been steady and good work so I won't complain.

On the "day job" front, I recently began working in the t.v. broadcasting industry as well. I made this move to expand my knowledge base of where the internet and graphic design in general seems to be heading in the near future. So far it has been a very rewarding learning experience. So from time to time do not be surprised if I begin posting about motion graphics and video along with my traditional posts on the print graphic work and industry I thrive in as well.

On a final note, for the past few months I have been creating a webcomic strip called Robot Friday. It's the third project in my life that is keeping me busy and I will begin updating it more frequently soon. So, keep checking back on this blog for posts at least 2 or 3 times a week, keep up with my Twitter feed or check out my comic site to see what I am up to.

Purchase Artwork

One final post before I set off on a much needed vacation. I have been working on filling up my account on iStockphoto.com with original illustration pieces that you can buy directly from that site and download in vector format. So, if you like my work but don't have an immediate need for a full scale layout or are a designer yourself in need of easy to use, great looking illustration please feel free to check out my space at iStockphoto.

Bookmark that site as well as this blog too because I plan to get much more illustration posted up in the coming weeks. Thanks and have a great weekend.

Leal's Mexican Food

This piece was created for a promotional products client that was servicing the Leal's account in Amarillo, Texas. My client was pitching a series of new customer cards - sort of like gift cards, but with a few more functions - and needed artwork that showcased some of the Leal's menu items. Ultimately the final cards were never produced due to lack of interest that the restaurant had received from customers presented with the idea. Never-the-less I still like the striking image of the Mexican Sundae and the little play-on-words of the copy in this piece.

Background created along with image composite in Adobe Photoshop with final text and logo elements added in Adobe Illustrator.

We set prices for a reason

I found the following video via a webcomic cartoonist and fellow graphic designer when he posted it to his blog as well. I really haven't come across anything else, written or otherwise, in a very long time that highlights how absurd it is for clients to try and haggle designers down or legitimize reasons for not wanting to pay prices that designers ask for.

I can understand if you clearly do not feel like you are getting your money's worth. Do not reward bad design with more work because you can haggle down the pricing, first of all. Secondly, just because lesser designers are willing to haggle does not mean the good designers, when you have the privilege of working with one, deserve to be insulted by you wanting to save a buck or two.

All I ask is the next time you need design work think about this video. And if you are a designer with this problem, post this to your blog or site as well and just direct clients accordingly :)

Robo Logo

It's been some time since I posted last, but it's been super busy this summer and to top that off I began a new webcomic called Robot Friday that posts daily so my time management has been a little squirrly as of late.

At any rate I wanted to post up a recent coloring job that I did on the Robot Friday logo. As you may recall I created the logo a few years back for a project I wanted to develop at that time. Sadly, that project never got off the ground and I was able to salvage the logo with the webcomic - trust me, the relevance of the name will become apparent in later comic strips.

Until this past weekend I had not had the time to put color to the logo and, to be honest, I wasn't really sure how I wanted to approach it anyway. As you will be able to follow in the recorded "tutorial" that I created, I finally settled on a steampunk approach to the color. Since the logo already had a "grinding gears" feel to it I thought that steampunking it out would be nice. Another reason I decided on the steampunk feel was that I REALLY have fallen in love with the new gradient tool in Adobe Illustrator CS4. The new tool takes a little bit to adjust to, especially if you are used to the earlier Illustrator versions of it, but once you get it to work for you MAN it's great! I also added in a texture to the coloring as well to experiment a little bit. I haven't worked with textures like this very much in my past work, but have always admired designers that could pull it off. I feel like it worked out pretty well in conveying what I was going for. You can get the textures I used and many more at Artbackwash.com.



To sum it all up, if you check out the desktop wallpaper above and the recorded tutorial you can see that it came out pretty nicely. I will be doing more coloring in Illustrator in the near future, advancing the skills that I already have. So I'll keep the posts coming as I get future projects done :)

Road Hog from HELL

I just finished up the final illustration project I began (along with two others) about a month or so ago. I love to be able to do a lot of illustration with my freelancing, but I almost bit off a bit more than I could chew when I took on three illustration jobs at the same time that needed to be completed about the same time as well (or roughly around there). What was good about these projects was to prove to myself what I was capable of doing and in what amount of time. So far all projects came out very well and the customers have liked them all.

The shirt design below is the most current one. The design is created for a semi-local Harley Motorcycle rally held every year in the small town of Lefors, Texas. It's basically a rally with a Harley poker run that ends with the raffling off of a Harely bike. The proceeds from the rally and the run and the shirts go to thier local volunteer fire department.

The customer had already decided that they wanted a Ghost Rider image on the shirt. I hand drew (with my wacom pen and tablet) the Ghost Rider image into the computer in Adobe Illustrator using the brush tool mostly. I used a few comic book image references to get a dynamic angle of the bike, tire and rider for the final drawing. Finally I added in the flames in the back and the typography over everything to get the final proof below.



Again, I feel it came out pretty well. I like the feel it has popping off the shirt and the sense of movement as well. The design will print on about four or five different colors, but I dig it mostly on black.