Update - December

October and November were great months. I had an awesome Halloween costume, watched a lot of horror movies, and had a great Thanksgiving. I was able to wrap up projects, gained some new clients, and tied up some loose ends as well.

I had the privilege of working with Benny Hancock, an incredibly talented makeup artist out of Los Angeles and the UK, creating some new graphics for his YouTube tutorials. Benny wanted a simple intro and outro that he could edit a title into and jazz up the look and feel of his logos. You can see what we came up with over on YouTube. I usually don't work in After Effects, but we were able to come up a nice simple look and feel, and let the makeup do the talking. Check out more of Benny's work over at www.benny-hancock.com.

Cultivating Inspiration

During my college years, I can remember being really frustrated trying to find inspiration. It may have been a product of the school I went to, or just poor resources. I can vividly remember scrolling through the pages of Adbuzeedo trying to find that one spark to ignite my creativity. I also didn't have the blessing of time, as my school work was on a strict week by week timeline. In short: inspiration was a rough game. 

Now that I'm designing for a paycheck during the day, and scouting for new projects at night, it seems inspiration is abound. I'm constantly trying to fill my head and my notebooks with future projects. I've been able to cultivate my own inspiration even, by working to create multiple series out of past projects. Thinking up new iterations or new ways to create similar pieces is an exciting business. That's something that was never taught to me in any classroom. 

So that's my advice for this post.  Cultivate your own creativity by doing.  

Who Watches?

I used to paint a lot. I discovered I really enjoyed it during the middle of my college career and quickly became addicted. There's a few random canvases hung up around my apartment, but it never got too serious.

I just re-watched Watchmen over the weekend and busted out a super old canvas that had some long abandoned exploration of rose petals on it. I had meant to paint an ode to The Gunslinger of The Dark Tower, but instead decided it would be neat to explore the simple juxtaposition of that famous smiley face.

I'm posting some progress shots here so that you can see how it's coming along, but I still need to add the blood. Maybe this weekend I'll post another update of the finished piece. 

You can still see remnants of that Rose I talked about underneath the white here. In hindsight, I should have covered this up better, but I think it adds to the look of it as it gets further along.

DEM COMIC BOOK OUTLINES SON!

After Getting the base yellow down and outlining everything in a nice dark stroke, It was time to get my sketch on. I used these pencil lines to get a good idea of where the eyes and smile would go.

And here we have the face added. I like to keep everything rough, and now I plan on going into the eyes and mouth and adding small highlights. I also want to add some grungy lines around the face of the button to make it look worn and beaten up. We'll see how that turns out.

Welcome

Welcome to Black Anvil Design. Hopefully I'll be able to update this on a regular basis. Mostly I imagine I'll be posting about some design stuff, but then there's always books, movies, adventures, etc. I suppose we'll see..