T-Shirt stencil

A little over a week ago I decided I wanted to try stenciling, and spent an evening flipping through my old sketchbooks trying to find an image that was thought out enough that I'd be able to re-draw it digitally and vectorize it instead of starting from scratch and having to spend even longer figuring out the light/dark details. Early on the original drawing (not pictured) popped into mind. It then took me 30-60 minutes to find which sketchbook it was in, since I couldn't remember what year it was originally done (SP06), or where over half of my sketchbooks were (garage in a filing cabinet). I spent about a day re-drawing, polishing and vectorizing the original into the above. Then I got some feedback from some friends, most of which liked it, but changed it to below when two friends had very strong opinions about not liking the simplistic background.




This became the final design when I realized the bullet holes looked better as snow, and that the black background was more dramatic. As you can see two sheets were used: 1 for the guy, and 1 for the snow/breath. Here's the first printing of the stencil on 25lb. normal printer paper--something I will never use again, it barely avoided melting when it got wet. The slipping of the registration was actually caused by the whole issue with the paper nearly melting.

Run for the Billions

Requested logo for a programming project for someone I know on EFnet. He didn't want a total rip-off of the Monopoly mascot, but he did was it to be inspired by that visual aesthetic.

This is actually not the version I submitted to him just over a year ago. That one is as follows:




You can see that the "RUN" is emphasized instead, and that was a grave mistake on my part and solely based on not wanting to warp "BILLIONS" at the time.

Thinking about whether or not it was used, I'm quite sure I actually missed his submittal deadline by nearly a whole hour. So here's a tip: if your pro bono logo artist does everything last second, don't figure that the artist will do the piece any sooner if you refuse to say when the deadline is and assume this will make he or she take it as initiative to do it hours or even days sooner.

Vectorized Self

The photo itself was taken by a friend of mine, Lee Kauftheil, with an infrared modified Nikon DSLR camera and a fish-eye lens. Vector traced by me between Photoshop and Illustrator CS3.

2009 Calendar

Calendar project done in Illustrator. While a fun experiment for making 12 themed images, these are my favorite of those.

The inspirations came all across the board from comic books and a hybrid of Richard Amsel's "Barry Lyndon" poster and Saul Bass' poster for "The Man with the Golden Arm"--the latter seemingly a favorite of every design student to emulate at least once in their life.

Runner up business card

I designed a few smiley guys for the business card, this was the runner up. It was free-handed in Illustrator without any tracing. Not that that isn't obvious with the odd shapes, but still worth noting.

Business card

A business card I designed for myself back in '07.

Mega Man

My parody of the box art for the US version of Mega Man by Capcom.