Project 6 Logo

For this project the goal was to make a logo for my web site, or to put on any projects I create. The concept was to use my initials (B,G,J) to create some kind of logo. This image shows the whole design process progressing from top to bottom. It turned into some kind of bug using the combined letters. I am not sure if I will use this logo or continue working on it.

Project 5 Academic Icons

For some freelance work I had I made some icons in Illustrator for the web pages. They are pretty simple, for a lot of it I used the blend tool. I spent the most time on the calendar graphic, which I think looks the best out of all of them.

10 Minute Exercise: Water

This is my favorite 10 minute exercise I have done. I really like the simple but beautiful design and style. Used the blend tool.

Project 4 Stormtrooper Helmet

For this project I used the mesh to to convert this stormtrooper helmet to a vector image. It was going well but I ran out of time, but I really want to finish this in the future for my portfolio. The image before the helmet shows what I have done so far, besides the eyes on the helmet which were pretty easy. The left part of the image shows the original image, the middle is the mesh, and the right part shows the mesh with all the colors shown. I think it looks really great, especially when zoomed out one cannot even tell the difference. That one circular part with the black, where the ear should be still needs to be redone, that's the part I worked on first. The other parts I did after watching the tutorial in class and actually knew what to do.

10 Minute Exercise: Alien Landscape

I only spent a few minutes on this Alien Landscape, it's pretty boring and basic but I like the color scheme.

First Snow

If you hadn't notice by now, I love working with portraits/hair so I'd decide to do it again for my final project. First I used the blob brush to map out the basic shape of everything. Then I used the bristle brush the to paint the hair and skin shadow (Did I mention that I really like this tool?). The buildings were made with the blend tool and the shirt/scarf was shaded with the mesh tool. It was fairly easy for the exception of painting hair with a mouse since my tablet is dead. Still very fun though.

Website Layout

I decided to go with making a website layout. It took longer than I thought to make a simple and clean layout. Here I'm just playing with the idea of condensation on glass and using your finger to write or draw on it.

The background is made with the mesh tool and is meant to look like a blurred landscape/cityscape. I kept it lighter on top for the sky and darker on the bottom for the ground. The droplets of water are made with ellipses and various gradients. Those little line trails and all the texts are blob brush lines set to "Soft Light" mode. I set the whole thing to 800x600 since that's the smallest monitor size we see around nowadays. Of course since the whole thing's vectorized, I can get a larger picture if need be.

Mugen

Just got an image of mugen, and tried to copy him to the best of my ability. It turned out pretty well. All the colors are done with the mesh tool or blob brush. The background just used rectangles for the stairs, spraycan for the grass, and a gradient for the sky.

T-Shirt Design

Decided to give the t-shirt design a try. Since most t-shirt prints are limited in color, I decided to go with solid shapes that doesn't have too many tonal changes. Excluding black which would have to be the color of the shirt, this design only uses 4 other colors. Most of this is just me painting with the blob brush. The lines were made with the blend tool like in the tutorial we saw in class a few days ago. I had to bring this into Photoshop to add the background splatter. I tried live tracing the splatters but they just didn't look right, too chunky and not fluid enough.

Job Search Sites

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-T3CJV49aI
http://cghub.com/jobs/
http://www.3dtotal.com/
http://www.gamasutra.com/jobs/
http://phoenix.craigslist.org/med/

searching for jobs/companies

http://www.gamedevmap.com - has a map that directly connects to the home site of game companies in that area
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/jobs/?search=8882 - has a nice search engine that finds jobs based off of location and job type.

Scythe

I basically used the mesh tool and created each individual part of the scythe from a square. For the handle I just pulled out the highlight, and pulled in the shadow, its that simple.

Project 4: Something Shiny

iPods are shiny right? The colored parts are made from the mesh tool which I finally got comfortable using after looking at some tutorials. The screens are gradients. I made the reflection using the same method as before, making an opacity mask.

Project 3 Landscape

This project is pretty crappy. I made the background with the mesh tool, but it is pretty boring. And the object in the foreground isn't really finished. I will probably come back to this project at some point, once I have more skills, to make it look better.

10 Minute Exercise: Pumpkin

A simple pumpkin. I used the mesh tool to create it. I think it looks pretty good, some of the lines look crooked and bad. I've learned how to fix this on my current project. Sometimes the mesh tool won't create straight lines, but if you fix one line subsequent lines try to follow the first one and should be straight.

Project 2 Book Cover

This is my cover for an Edgar Allan Poe poetry book. I just used a brush to paint over the tree and insert the text. I then changed the color and size of the text to follow the tree. I used a gradient for the background and an ellipse shape for the hill. For the sun I used the Flare Tool, found under the standard shapes. The small text is easier to see with the full image.

10 Minute Exercise: Land Whale

For this 10 minute exercise I did the "Whales that have evolve from sea to land creatures". Instead of creating some strange land whale, I made a literal translation as a simple whale on a trailer, to create a "land whale". I made the whale with the mesh tool. I ran out of time to make a good looking trailer.

Waterfall

So after lots of frustrations trying to paint on Illustrator, I discovered the Bristle Brush which was a godsend. I could paint way more realistically with this tool so I went to town with it. The entire thing is painted on Illustrator though I did take it over to Photoshop for some minor color adjustments. Great tool and a step up for vector.

Temple-type1

Lots of carving out shapes and mesh tool. Oh, and a flare tool.

Mystic Warrior

I mostly carved out shapes by using squares and erasing them. The background are gradients, and finally everything was detailed by the mesh tool.

Book Cover

Just playing off the saying, "A picture is worth a thousand word." This mostly consisted of me painting with the blob brush and creating texts on paths. I find myself going back to these tools a lot. I attempted to mess with the mesh tool but I couldn't get a good enough effect so I scrapped it and opted to paint using a lower opacity for shading. The wooden frame and paper texture was added on using Photoshop afterwords.

Project 1 Brandon Jacobs

For my project one I experimented with using the Live Trace tool on many of my photographs. These four examples are the ones that turned out best:

James Dean: This is a photo of a statue of James Dean's head. The live trace gave it a nice painted look, if I were to work on this more I would try to delete and fill in certain areas to make it look more like a painting.

Beach: I liked how this image turned out, these are the settings I used:
1. Live Trace Using "Color 6" preset and changing max colors to 7
2. Convert to Live Paint
3. Effect > Cross Hatch and adjusted

Japanese Garden: I also liked how this image turned out, especially after I applied the filter. The contrast between the statue and the leaves is great.
1. Live Trace Using "Color 6" preset and changing max colors to 5
2. Effect > Palette Knife and adjusted

Tree House: This image is impressive because all the intricate vines are all vectors; there is so much detail it slowed down my quad-core desktop trying to process it. I made a really high resolution image of this one, click it to see it. I may work with this more on my home desktop, couldn't do much at the school. I also need to edit out my little brothers fist in the lower right corner :)
1. Live Trace Using "Color 6" preset and changing max colors to 9
2. Not enough RAM on the school computer to do any changes :(

10 Minute Exercise: The Mesh Tool

This is my first time using the mesh tool. It is really cool, and I can see it's potential. Mine is very basic and boring, I just moved the points around and changed the colors. I would like to actually make something with this in the future.

10 Minute Exercise: A Spotted Animal

This is supposed to be a furry creature with spots, but I ran out of time for the spots. Originally it was going to be a face, but I was stumped for a while. For this I used the shape tool, the crystalize tool, and some brushes.

10 Minute Exercise: Something That Flies

This exercise was similar to the first, nothing too complicated as I don't know many tools in Illustrator yet. This is just a Da Vinci-esque flying machine concept.

10 Minute Exercise: Something Sci Fi

This is my first illustration made in Illustrator. It is a weird, cube-like creature with large eyeballs. If I had more time I would probably add some limbs or something. I simply used the shape tool and paint brush to make it.

eye

I like doing portraits and figure drawing, so I thought I'd try my hand at doing an eye to see how I could do. I used a lot of tools, like the blob brush, shape tool, and the warp tool.

Lion

This is my sketch of a lion I did and I put through live trace.

Kratos

This was an original sketch of Kratos from god of war. I put though live trace and this was the best i could come up with for now.

Self

I did a black and white livetrace of a digital self-portrait. I lowered the threshold to about 70 to achieve preserve some of the details while getting a very inked look. After that it was took a lot of polishing to cover up stray marks and smooth out certain areas. After everything looked clean, the image was still missing something so I went back and shaded using an extra shade of gray. Lastly I slapped on a gradient in the background to follow the light source,

Red and Black

For this one I solely used the Blob Brush tool. I love painting portraits so just wanted to paint a face. :)

Black Bird

When I think of flying things I automatically thought of a bird. Using the gradient tool that we learned in class that day, I made the transitional shadows between the mountain and water. I spent the most time just tweaking with that so the bird didn't get much attention I'm afraid. I added some highlights on him to make him pop and show the light's direction.

Technologic

My first attempt at making something on Illustrator. Since I'm not entirely familiar or comfortable with the theme or program, I fumbled around quite a bit and started over a few times. In the end I used the line tool to create digital grids and filled in the blank space with a circular gradient. I then created a smaller circle shape and filled it with a texture to enhance the whole Sci-Fi feel.