Final Portfolio

Time has come at last to turn in out best and brightest pieces of work. This is what I got:

1) No. 5 Project ~ Russian Roulette

Despite its graphic nature this piece is probably my favorite so far. In it I pioneered a technique i would use for a number of later projects. I would do all the line work outside of Photoshop and then add color and such digitally. I know it isn’t very groundbreaking, but because I am a stranger to Illustrator it was the easiest and most successful option I had. Originally i had done this all with gouache attempting to get the flat vibrant color look of the Golden Age of comic books, but because of the surface I was using it all just started running and streaking. I said fuck it and started over. This was the first project i completely started over on and this little hiccup set me behind for the rest of the semester. I had to learn how to work faster. The touched up version does not look really any different than the original final version, but if you look close at the two there are dozens of tiny white spots and other places where i just missed adding color that i didn’t quite catch when i was rushing to finish it the first time. I felt I had a pretty solid idea when it came to this project. I should put the original comp and “finished” piece up just so you all can see what a train wreck it was. I tried to put Sharpie over gouache. Not a good idea.

2) Classical LP ~ Ode To Joy

I’m surprised I actually got this one approved. I was half kidding when I told Rusty I wanted to do a unicorn with a severed head on his horn, but he seemed to like it. To be honest I was gonna do it regardless if he said yes or no, by this point in the semester I was just done with this class. Don’t get me wrong it’s like my favorite class, but it does not count for anything at all towards my degree so it’s only got warm sentiments going for it. Sadly when I hear Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (Symphony No. 9) I in all seriousness think of unicorns, but ones more like this than prancing, majestic horses. It’s a long story, ask me about it if you’re curious. Point is, unicorns can be hard core. Naturally I put Beethoven’s head on the horn. I gave him that same stoic expression he has in every painting. Even in death I wanted him to look at you disapprovingly. Originally the unicorn head was not mount on the wall with the shitty pheasant wallpaper. You could see most of the body….it was terrible. I had to think of some way to get rid of the body without having to redo the whole damn thing so I just stuck it on a deer mount. A real one as a matter of fact, just to give it that real/cartoon contrast. Oh and I think the words are a nice touch. I gave them a drop shadow because all text need a drop shadow…that’s what they teach in Typeography right?

3) World Record ~ Worlds Widest Mouth

Accidental success. I originally chose the wrong color for his skin tone when outlining the image in Photoshop, but I liked how the orange-yellow gave him this obnoxious contrast with the rest of the piece. On that note, for some reason this piece hurt my eyes to look at on the computer screen. I don’t know if it was just my imagination or the way those Mac monitors display colors, but I had to get up and leave on a number of occasions. I finally got the hang of the tablet on this one. The guy and the lion look finished. And the background is mostly resolved. I feel like the two should have been a little smaller or maybe they should have broken the plane on the right side because it feels just a tad too centered.  Also it feels a little cluttered because the two images are butting up against each other. I just didn’t have time to fix these issues. Maybe with a little more practice I can make it look professional. Personally I’m a big fan of the nineties shapes in the background. It was such a gaudy decade when it came to graphic design that now it can be used ironically if employed with a little taste. This piece was meant for a magazine. I think it would be almost acceptable for a semi-important publication however my style doesn’t seem to match up with the prevailing style of this decade. You won’t see any large color fields or high contrast collages in my portfolios. Things today feel too clean and even when they’re messy they feel too tight. Ah well. If you can’t beat ‘em, try harder.

4) Book Cover ~ The Great Gatsby

I could have chosen any other piece to put in the portfolio besides this one, but like the World Record this piece feels finished. At least in my book. Rusty may not approve, but I think I resolved the text appropriately. Scouring the internet for an acceptable font from the period. I made damn sure to have a font that I liked. The stock fonts in Photoshop suck. Half of them just look like variations on Times New Roman and do we really need “Chiller” or the dozen or so scripts. I just want them to put less boring fonts in there, now is that so much to ask? You should see the actual watercolor illustration that I did for this. The final colors are an extreme departure for the muted beige that I had on paper. I made the blacks blacker and gave it this purplely tone by kicking the magenta and cyan in the ass. The yellow was subdued. My only wish, apart from better fonts, would have been to have a “sloppier” ink pen. Maybe one with a metal tip and a reservoir. I had some cool ideas for splatters and fatter lines, but all I had on me at the time was the Micron pens from Design I. Hindsight is 20/20. The text in the CD and the Itunes image is a little obscured by the dark of the car. There wasn’t really a better place for “Gatsby”. Believe I tried. Luckily I don’t technically have to submit them in this portfolio, but I do have to turn them in.

————————————————————————————————————————————————-

This is it for me I suppose. I may keep blogging my artwork or I may just blog about anything, but I’ll probably just forget about it and let it stagnate on a server somewhere in the Dead Sea of the Ethersphere. It’s been real and it’s been fun and truthfully it’s all been real fun. I’m gonna miss everyone, but I’ll be around. Say hi from time to time.  Oh and PC’s are your friends and Mac’s are hell spawn.

Alan J. Waidmann 

Home Stretch

For lack of anything better to do with my sunday night, i am blogging. This is my “World Record” assignment. It’s about the guy who holds the world’s record for largest mouth. I found it funny that he was black. A little stereotypical humor goes a long way. Originally instead of a lion I had an orangutan and it wasn’t for a while until i noticed the racial implications of such a piece. so begrudgingly i scrapped that and did a lion. For the longest time i was struggling with what i wanted the background to be. At one point the two were surrounded in a neon pink halo. Pink makes them pop so i had to include it in some way or another. God i tried all sorts of stupid things. I played with bunch of filters. The best by far was when i put an outer glow effect on the lion and the man separately so they were separated by this weird glow thing. it was pretty tight. But i had to turn in a “good” project. I’m actually getting graded on this shit so tacky is kinda out of the question. Then i was struck with inspiration. “Saved by the” Fucking “Bell”. That was the best show on while i waited for the school bus to pull up. The 90′s are as tacky as you can get while still being designerly sound. Oh and it let me use pink so by god i was gonna do it. Love my triangles! theyre the best aint they?

I’ll Be Bach! (Couldn’t think of any Beethoven puns)

ok the idea for this project was weird. We had to design an album cover for a piece of classical music. My knowledge of classical music being limited to 4th grade piano pieces I choose the only song i could remember the tune and God forbid the name for: Ode To Joy(Symphony No. 9) by Beethoven. Alas, all my comps and ideas got turned down until i struck upon the idea of doing a unicorn. Strangely enough this is what i think of when i hear this song and im betting it has something to do with the swedish unicorn Bjork in the game Peggle. God i used to kick that game’s ass. But then my problem was relating the damn thing to the piece of music so i did the only manly thing possible with a unicorn and had it goring a severed head. Which so happens to be Beethoven. Viola! there you go! instant connection. It all makes sense. I do with i had had more time to work on it though. I did it all in a day and a half. I turned out pretty well for such a short period of time. the one thing i was pissed out about was the damn Jpeg fuzz surrounding all of my lines. That was a pain in the ass to get ride of. Compression my ass. Oh and Beethoven is as austere as ever. In life and death. Now the song will forever be tainted for all those who read this by a unicorn prancing around in his castle in the clouds with severed head leaking all over.

Native American Youth

Alrighty well its about time for a less cynical blog than I’m used to. It’s a nice day out. I got a good nights rest and I’ve got a good book to read. Today is looking up. This is our Native American Heritage month poster design. The final illustration has words on it ,but to be perfectly frank they arent worth seeing. It is just a list of events that had already happened by the time we made this thing. My plan was to imitate the old etching style with line. The whole overarching idea of this piece however is of generations of native americans. Both are Navajo. The floating bust is of a traditional navajo medicine man. The man on the walkie talkie is a Code Talker from WWII. They used thier native language to encode transmissions between the American forces during the Island Hopping Campaigns. Sadly they look foreign enough so that during the war some were accidently killed by their comrades believe them to be Japanese. And the mesa in the middle was just a convenient way to separate them. we were supposed to work with this pantone color thing and have one extra color apart from black and white on the poster. I kinda cheated and just made the color into a drop shadow on the lettering. Like i said earlier nothing too spectacular.

Secrets of Life und Death

For lack of anything better to do I am currently blogging. The site that I usually watch “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” on is currently down for maintenance or copyright infringement. Point is I can’t watch anything so here I am. This is the LIfe and Death project. I originally was going to do a pill bottle in the life panel and then a spilt pill bottle in the Death panel. I felt it was a bit more subtle. The chicken feels a bit too obvious(or “Obvie” to you people who think it’s cool to not say a whole word) to me. But oh well. This one is definitely not going in my final portfolio. I was having a bad week when I was making this one and it shows. I tried to keep most of the colors consistent between the two so as to provide a bit of harmony. It worked to an extent. I probably should have done it digitally. There were some pretty cool ones for this project. Sometimes I feel I’m a bit too hard on myself. I live my life according to Ricky Bobby, “If you’re not first you’re last” and in the illustration and graphic design world I feel that’s somewhat true. We will see where all this takes me. I am currently designing themes for websites. Hopefully that won’t be a dead end. Here’s to selling out! Drink up!

It’s about time for a new post i s’pose

Ok so I’ll admit to slacking on the blog but ive had a lot of other stuff i’ve been busy with. And considering this class really doesnt count for anything in my degree i think im going to cut myself a little slack. I’m actually missing the “life and death” project on the blog at this point but theyre so far away on another computer ill get to them when i get to them. they aint nothing special.I actually put a lot of effort into this stupid society of illustrators poster design even though i know i’d never win. You should’ve seen the changes its been through.  I’m so happy that our grade is mostly based on the digital portfolios because that god damn fucking piece of shit laser printer in the lab killed my $4 print again. I’m gonna take a big wet shit in it one of these days and see if it’ll make a dark print then. on a lighter note i became friends with the tablet during this project. we have reconciled our differences and have made some beautiful artwork together. I s’pose Photoshop isnt really made for painting or design. thats what InDesign is for and Illustrator but i dont know how to use them. oh and i found out how to make hotkeys on the tablet and i got some pretty sweet ones. I’ve got a “Save As” one and a “Step Backwards” one which make work so much easier and i love that little wheel on the side.  oh and now on a less happy note. Trumans intermet is the worst thing in the world especially on sunday nights when no one has anything to do but watch youtube videos. So to all of you who arent doing work right now “I hope when Skynet becomes self aware it will track you through your ISP and hunt your ass down with its Terminators and then post that video on YouTube just as a warning to the rest of you” Thank you so much for your time and go to hell broadband wasters. That should be long enough to keep people satisfied for awhile. Not a lot of content just mostly misdirected rage but whats new.

Gun, Paper, Scissors! 1-2-3-Shoot!

So people this is my latest and greatest illustration as of yet. The project was to best illustrate the number five. Dumbasses are still criticizing me for having five bullets in the gun when Russian Roulette is played with one bullet. I don’t have anything to say to them. Its the fucking five project. There are gonna be five bullets because that’s the goddamn irony. You may have trouble viewing these because they’re both pretty huge files. The first is the “inking’ work for the final piece. I did it all by hand on a sheet of cold press. It took awhile. Then I scanned it in in two pieces on the large format scanner in the MacLab. I imported it into Photoshop then layered the colors and gradients into the piece. oh boy do I love gradients. I will say however that it feels a little too saturated. I was going for a more traditional comic book style and typically those have a bit more grainy and grayish feel to their colors. It’s probably fixable with a filter or something, but I did all the color work last night minutes before getting it printed. I may go back and change the colors later. Who knows?

Midterm Portfolio

1) Three Traditional Line Art(s): Well I choose these three mainly because they are my best line art drawings. I’m just head over heels in love with line art. If it can’t be done with lines it shouldn’t be done at all. Not necessarily only line art though. The rock you see here is done in a style you may see in older children’s books and other illustrations. I made it as if it were a woodprint or an etching. I just think the work traditional print makers used to do was gorgeous. The other two are from my architecture collection for lack of anything decent in my nature and people collections. I know Rusty put a work from both up on the site, but I really didn’t care for either of them. But its not what I like anymore; it’s what the customer likes. The building with the ivy was an accidental success. I went out searching for interesting buildings and I never expected to render ivy successfully, but I suppose in the end it turned out. Stroke of genius. The stairs were done in an attempt to stop drawing facades of buildings so I headed inside. The one that is on the site is really it’s second rendition after we got the assignment to redo three of our line art drawings. I did the same to the rock. I would be happy if all we had to do was line art, but as you’ll see the quality plummets fast as we moved into different media.

2) Two Watercolor Illustrations: These two watercolor illustrations are not representative of the rest of the pile of shit I made up to this point. Both of these are from the Three-A-Day projects Rusty was having us do. Where we would find a picture and make it three times in class in different colors and different styles. Apparently I was on an African bender at the time, whatever, they look good. At the time I was making these I was finally learning patience with GD watercolors. You can’t rush them. They take a year and a half to dry and you can’t futz with them during that time. I like pen, it dries almost instantly. I like the orange elephant. He looks like something from 2001: A Space Odyssey, horrible movie, but cool effects. From a respectable distance these might be passable as legit illustrations.

3) Three Traditional Line and Color Illustrations: Personally I prefer the frog, the shoes, and then the tractor, in that order, but for some reason everyone seems to like the tractor. To be honest I chose these three once again for a lack of anything better. All my other water colors are sloppy and the one I love (the rocket) I’m saving for the “Your Choice” illustrations. That is a very revered positioned to have. The shoes I made as a present for my friend Kayla. I subtly used line art just to clean up those spots that were a little shaky. And the tractor was done out of a craving for something mechanical and with wheels. I had seen too many people do sports cars in the past and if I’m not anything I’m unique-ish. I really half-assed that engine though. The frog on the other hand was just hands down one of the quickest and best pieces I’ve done. That took me no longer than ten minutes, including drying time. I was seeing how few colors I could use to make a piece. I just got lucky and places that paint right where it needed to be. Its textured skin was done with a natural sea sponge. They’re useless apart from making warts on toads.

4) One Gouache Illustration: So we have really only done two gouache images all year, but this piece holds a special place in my heart. It’s titled “The South Will Wipe Again”. We were given the prompt “Honest Abe” and all the creative license which goes with such a project. Namely it will contain something to do with Abe Lincoln and that’s it. I wasn’t able to scan this in because it wasn’t on paper, but on cold press board so I had to take a picture. That’s why it looks really grainy. The actual is pretty nice. At this point I had given trying to find a real job and decided my life’s ambition would be to be a professional dick and just make offensive cartoons. So far this is looking up. I would apologize to anyone from the south who still salutes the Confederacy, but unless you’re willing to come out publicly and say you want slaves I’ll just keep my sentiments all bottled up. The North kicked the South’s ass, get over it! Also, I love using purple to make shadows. Purple is my favorite art color, but it’s the shittiest school color ever.

5/6) One digital line and one digital line/color: Okay, so I’m lumping five and six together because I hate those goddamn digital drawing pads. It’s not like drawing on a piece of paper at all. I can never get the angle right for my hand. I don’t have that kind of dexterity. I suppose if I had the line work already done the pads would be nice to paint with, but other than that I want to snap them in half. I generally don’t consider digital as a real media, but that’s not always true. Also, it says line and color, but my hand is in gray scale. Gray is a color too and I’m sure if you look into it deep enough there are blues and such. At least this isn’t too cliparty unlike the rest of my digital pieces. Oh and the reason the can is so pixelated is because we had to do it in 72 ppi (that’s a really horrible resolution for a digital piece). I just don’t care about doing stuff on the computer and probably never will.

7) Your Choice: This rocket is my baby. Once again driven by a need to paint something mechanical I started searching for surface to air missiles, but unless I wanted to do a tiny rocket a half mile away I couldn’t find any pictures. Eventually I had the bright idea to start looking up NASA missions and came across this little image. It’s the takeoff of one of the Apollo rockets as seen through a fisheye lens on the rigging. I just love how those lenses distort the image in a circular fashion instead of just in one general direction. Originally, the watercolor washes on this were very sloppy, but after I came in with some pen it tightened it up a tremendous amount. It’s simple yet elegant. I played around with some of the colors on Photoshop. The original is not quite this dark and a little less blue, but I thought of this as an improvement. And thus concludes my Midterm Portfolio

Is That A Rocket In Your Blog Or Are You Just Happy To See Me

Check out this tasty M-F’er. It’s a painting of one of the Apollo rockets. I’m not entirely sure which one but its frakkin awesome. It’s seen through a fisheye lens and as The Beastie Boys and The Butthole Surfers know: Everything looks just that more bad ass through a fisheye lens. Oh and once again my good ole crutch line art played a supporting role in this piece. I tried some fade effects at the bottom near the base of the rocket. I’m not sure if they were to any avail, but i attempted to make it hazy. You be the judge. But to be honest I’m starting to really like watercolor i just have to learn some goddamn patience. Luckily Rusty realized we werent gonna make any of his deadlines so he pushed them back awhile. Like the next projet the #5 piece. I plan on making it in a very graphic style. Much like the old hand-drawn comics of the day. Few carefully chosen colors and some black marker to had just that much more contrast. Hopefully it will look good. I plan on starting it this weekend but i got a lot of other stuff to do first. Not to mention side projects for my friends that if I ever get around to ill post up here. Oh well i suppose it isn’t a good idea to write blogs in the same vein as Hemingway or Capote. Bottoms Up!

It’s Been Awhile

So pretty much i just kinda forgot to blog. It’s a grade but oh well. The point though is that I’m back and ready to blog. I got three new pieces. Well I only have two at this point. The other is on another computer and I have to go hunt it down cuz I refuse to rescan and re photo correct it. So look for it in upcoming posts. The visible two are both done in gouache. It’s kinda like watercolor, but it’s thicker and weirder. But it comes up nicely and it blends pretty well so I have a chance to fix all my little fuck ups.

So this is a montage or whatever my teacher calls it. I mean it’s not to music so I don’t really see how its a montage. I was hoping to do like an 80′s montage but i guess not. For lack of anything better I have Ash from the movie Evil Dead in it. He’s the arms with the chainsaw. It’s not really apparent, but he doesn’t have a right hand and his nub is attached to the chainsaw. If you haven’t seen the movie you really should. Zombie killing and lots-o-80′s gore. Also there’s a giant squid in the background. I had a strong urge to draw a mustache on him; a big furry handlebar mustache, but I got lazy. Then theres the hand with the aerosol canister and the barbeque lighter. It’s supposed to be representative of the fact that I get bored and light shit on fire. I’m really just a big child.

 Now it’s time to start offending people from the south and probably a few people who actually have a deep respect for history. I on the other hand am just a petty little kid who makes offensive cartoons to appeal to insecurities. Our prompt was “Honest Abe”. I really don’t know what this piece has to do with honesty, but it looks like he is honestly enjoying himself. The digital version of it looks like shit. I had to use a camera instead of a camera and I really don’t know how to use camera proficiently. I couldn’t scan it in because it wasn’t on paper. It was on this really expensive cardboard. Oh well. Not so happy with it but after much deliberation I decided to title this piece “The South Will Wipe Again”. Stay posted for other pieces.