You can see the full cover here.

Here’s a project I had  fun with. A few months ago I sent a rough design I whipped up to a wrestling company called Ring of Honor. They must have liked it because they gave me a gig designing the DVD art for one of their events! I actually attended this event live, so it was cool to be able to do the art for it.

Here’s the final product. I only had a week to work on it, but I’m happy with how it turned out. Hopefully I get to do more for them in the future!

In the meantime, today I saw this DVD cover for a wrestling promotion called Ring of Honor and I thought I could do better. So I did a quick rough in Photoshop, here it is.

I didn’t spend that much time on this, maybe I’ll revisit it later. I want to do a bit more to the background to give it a bit of depth, and punch up the type more.

Yesterday my Stormtrooper Helmet Photoshop got passed around a bit on Tumblr, that was exciting. It’s inspired me to update this blog more often, I guess my stuff actually does get seen by people!

I can see the proportions of the head aren’t quite right, I ended up squishing things a bit horizontally compared to the original photo. I think I was too worried about making the head too short vertically that I overcompensated, and didn’t give it quite enough depth. I also can’t draw hair for the life of me, or shade things. Even with all that, I am still pretty happy with how things turned out.  Not too bad at all for a beginner.

Larger version here. The original photo I was working off of can be found here

Click here for high rez

I’ve been practicing my drawing as well, but haven’t really come up with anything I’m happy with. Hopefully next week’s update is more interesting!

Well that may be an exaggeration. I really did love drawing when I was younger, but at some point there was a shift and I dove into computer graphics. I guess I decided that I couldn’t be the best at drawing, but this computer art stuff was new, this was something I could excel at.

Anyway, I’ve decided that this year I’m going to change all that! I’m going to really dedicate myself to drawing and get good at it.

Someone recommended the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain to me, and I’ve been doing some exercises from that. Already it’s done me a world of good. Of course my drawings aren’t very good yet, I know it will take months of practice. I am rediscovering my love of drawing though, and that’s an important thing. I’m already looking forward to the day when I can sit out in the park in summertime and just draw things around me!

But anyway, back to the actual work. Here’s a couple drawings that I have copied from the first exercise in the book (here and here). I’m not posting them to show off, they’re obviously nothing special. I just think it would be fun to see how my skill progresses, from this first step to what I’ll be able to do in a few months, or in a year. I’m trying to set aside at least one night a week where I can practice on my drawing, I’ll keep updating as I do.

Anyway, you can see the before and after here. The tutorial I used can be found here.

A lot of the work I do involves amateur photos, and they require a lot of correction. I think this will come in handy for sure! I love learning a new tool.

I’m pretty darn happy with my results. This is my first time trying something like this, and I think it turned out decently! I am going to have to try something like this again.

Here’s two versions, the original black & white, and one with some colour.

Anyway, down to business. I am going to try to update my blog once a week with something creative that I’ve done. Photoshop, web design, print design, it doesn’t really matter, I just want to push myself to create more in 2010. I don’t really do New Years Resolutions, but I suppose that’s what this is.

So with that in mind, I woke up this morning and looked through some Photoshop tutorials. I found this one on Computer Arts, and simplified it a bit. I didn’t really like all the shapes and such the tutorial used, so I just focused more on the masking technique. It was pretty fun, I love tutorials that teach me skills that I can use in lots of different ways.

Click here to see it in high rez.