Nic Cage As Everyone

*Modified Photo

I have several thoughts on the acting caliber of Mr. Nic Cage...but won't go into them. I was bored and happened to do one of my favorite activities: face-swapping. Nic Cage as a (female) body builder. This one took a record 8-minutes!

Click Here for more info on the meme.
Click Here to see the original picture.

Wes Anderson Desktop Wallpaper

I remember the first time I watched Bottle Rocket. My roommate said it was one of his favorite movies, and even though I had things to work on, I figured I'd at least sit down and do things on my laptop. Within a half hour, I had shut my laptop and focused solely on this movie - it was just too funny, quirky, and engrossing. I wasn't a huge fan of Owen Wilson at the time (Shanghai Noon?) and I had only seen Luke Wilson in Old School. But the movie was awesome, and introduced me to the world of Wes Anderson.

In this world, there are often stupid, yet life-affirming characters who desperately combat all kinds of psychology-fueled defense mechanisms and depression. In this world, comedy comes from normal people doing slightly abnormal things, and being gosh-darned proud of it. In this world, people wear shorts. After watching one, I had to finish, and watched the rest - Rushmore, The Royal Tennenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and The Darjeeling Limited. I decided to make a sweet desktop wallpaper with a collage of his films just for fun. They're all there - Bill Murray, the Wilsons, Gene Hackman, Adrian Brody, and the rest of the bunch. I made this before Fantastic Mr. Fox came out, but I probably wouldn't have included the puppetry anyway.

I really tried playing with the flow of the images, and even made Jeff Goldblum wrap his arm around Owen Wilson just for the heck of it.

Trigun/Hellsing Guitar

Before I get too carried away here, it should be said that the guitars below are NOT actually real guitars, they are merely Photoshopped mockups that I did for fun one day. I snapped a picture of my sweet red/black electro-acoustic (3/4 scale) and thought about what I would do to modify it. I made these in 2009.

That first picture is of the original guitar (strings

removed of course) And next is the Trigun version I did. The black and red scheme made me think of the overall imagery of the series, so I thought it was a natural choice. The Trigun guitar was made with various images grabbed from the web, and the "bullet holes" were also just grabbed online, probably from those window decals for your car. I also decided if I were to do this, I would spray paint the inside black to make it extra cool.

After making the Trigun one, I instantly thought of making a Hellsing guitar, since I just got into the series around this time, and thought Alucard (it's Dracula backwards!) was pretty badass, and deserved his own guitar. I used mostly the Multiply layer effect, though some were Darken. I also Colorized a few, to make sure that it was completely monochromatic with red and black. I thought about adding bullet holes as well, but it would have been too busy. I also added the magic pentagram thingy from the show in the sound hole.

I'm not exactly sure how I would go about doing this in real life...perhaps create some transparent .pngs onto sticker paper and then apply some kind of gloss to the whole thing.

Kurt Cobain Tribute Poem

It's been a while since I last posted, I chalk that up to enjoying my last winter break. Can ya believe adults with careers don't have winter breaks!? I didn't quite grasp that til now...but I felt like I haven't been as creative (outside a few freelance posters and banner ads) as I usually am without professorial encouragement - so I decided to make a little art piece out of one of my poems.

I never would have thought it would work out as well as it did, but I took a creative writing course last semester just for fun, and it specialized in poetry (I found out a week before class started). I wasn't disappointed or anything, I figured I could get by. The class was taught by Illinois Poet Laureate, Kevin Stein, and was one of the best courses I've taken at Bradley. We were constantly creating and critiquing, and the class fostered a community of poets eager to help each other improve.

The poem itself is my personal favorite that I have written in my beginning life as a poet. I was almost afraid to write a poem about Kurt Cobain, since I didn't want to let myself down in failing to convey the right mood. I also just wanted it to be good - Nirvana changed my life in many ways, and I wanted to do both Kurt and the band the artistic justice they deserve.

I hunted around morguefile.com to find some photos with a Creative Commons license, and simply typed in "seattle." I sifted through dozens and on one of the last pages was this bench that I used. If I'm not mistaken there are a few benches in Seattle that serve as tribute locations for Cobain, and this one had a perfect close up that demonstrated the reverence, hero worship, sadness, and celebration of one person. Thanks to Kristine Kisky for the photo and making it available!

I lowered the saturation of the whole thing, to make it mostly black and white, til the flower colors were the only bits of color. I shrunk it a bit and added a black Inner Glow to the whole frame, as well as added some gradient layer masking to make the image fade on the sides a bit more. I toyed with the idea of adding all kinds of images of cardigans, torn jeans, and maybe a Fender Jagstang - but I thought it was better with this simple display. I chose a Courier-type font (American Typewriter) because it, presents the poem in a straight-forward way (thanks for articulating that for me Lauren!) Cursive-fonts made it seem too girly/sentimental, and that's not what I was going for.

I plan on submitting this poem, among others, to some journals and things eventually. A few of them are begging for artistic accompaniments, so I may do that!

Nirvana Desktop Wallpaper

Due to the popularity of the White Stripes wallpaper, I thought I'd upload the Nirvana Wallpaper I made a few years ago (2007). It was one of the first projects I did with Photoshop on my first-ever Mac, so I was just gettin the hang of it, and using layer effects for the first time. There are plenty of GLARING errors (at least to me) and things I'd like to improve upon one day. I'd also like to resize it a bit better. But for now, I'm just gonna upload it. Obviously focused primarily on Kurt Cobain, but Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl are there too...

White Stripes Wallpaper

To commemorate the return of Conan O'Brien and the appearance of Jack White on the new TBS show, I decided to get artsy-fartsy and make a desktop wallpaper. (By the way, if you havent seen the rockabilly performance that Conan and Jack did, look it up - it's pretty cool).

The main idea for the poster came from a poem I've been working on - it's still in the works, but the title is "Jack and Meg". The poem is a descriptive journey through the world that the White Stripes have created and their roles as children wandering and battling with Meg's wooden sticks and Jack's plastic guitar. (It definitely sounds better in the poem). I decided to focus on the ideals of the White Stripes, from the earlier days of Elephant and White Blood Cells, and kind of ignored the more experimental styles of Get Behind Me Satan. The duo themselves went back to their older style for tours promoting Icky Thump, so a few images are from that era as well.

I hunted around for some rolling grassy hills and found a great one with a beaten grass path right in the middle. I colorized it red, and then duplicated the hills with a different layer effect to create some of the highlights in the grass. For the white path, I just cut out that part, made it black and white, and messed with contrast/brightness. I took out some trees I didn't like, and removed the sky - since I would be creating my own. I messed with the Render Clouds filter and placed it over a pure red background and a very light vector starburst shape. I placed a peppermint candy "sun" right in the middle of the starburst, and added some inside and outside glow effects.

The skyline features a few larger than life images of Jack and Meg, and I messed with a few layer effects to get them to look how I wanted. Found a cool picture of an African elephant since they have bigger ears and are overall cooler than Indian elephants (no offense). I messed with positioning and gaussian blur to create a sense of perspective, and had a little Jack White leading the elephants with guitar in hand, like a Pachedermal Pied Piper. I wanted more images of the group, so I took the cover of Elephant, and had them sitting in the tall grass, with Jack looking straight up at the peppermint sun. The lightning effects were added to give it a little more "color" (white isnt a color, but I just wanted more white).

After creating the initial wallpaper, I realized the aspect ratio and sizing was a little off, so I also made a more horizontally-friendly version using the clone tool to "stretch" out the landscape, and added more lightning (below). It was a lot of fun to do, but it makes me miss the White Stripes...obviously love all of Jack's other endeavors, but there's something really special about Jack and Meg together.

Eiffel Tower Power Lines

I always had this grand idea of taking power lines and super imposing the Eiffel Tower in place of each regular thingy. It just kinda reminded me of it - the metal structures holding up each line were just stripped-down, less Parisian version of the Tower itself.

It was done a few summers ago - before I fully refined all my Photoshop techniques. I wish I could say I took the original photograph, but it was actually the second image I found on Google (hope no one minds...) But I mostly used the Clone Tool to paint the sky over the original structures. I then placed a high-contrast image of the Eiffel Tower in each spot where it belongs. I shrunk and lowered the opacity for those that were further away to enhance the illusion of perspective. I also increased the contrast to get a slightly more dramatic sunset. It was just for fun, and was my desktop background for a while.

Dee-Xign-A-Day Blog/Face Morph

For my web design class, we had to create a non-functional Blog-like space. I remember that it was just one of those days where a bunch of projects were intersecting, and I had to crank this one out in a few hours. I really liked the header, even though it was pretty simple - just a half-tone effect of red and black, and a cool font (Cooper!) in front of a simple bullseye shape.

We needed to come up with something clever to denote it as a design blog, and you know how those clever designers love spelling things differently, so I chose to spell it "De-Xign".

I divided up everything which was pretty monocromatic with blacks and grays, with red borders. It was right after this project that my teacher told me I needed to experiment outside of red and black... lol. But on to more interesting things: the face morph. The story on the site is true, so I'll just repaste most of it here. You can see it hosted on my site Here.

One night, I was working on some video stuff. I revisited an old project (Out of Batteries) to change a few title sequences and alter the credits a bit, but the process was basically done. Anyone who has ever worked with video editing knows that the last part of completing a project sucks - cause that means you have to spend a bunch of time rendering (especially if you are working in HD). To kill some time, I surfed Facebook, stumbled upon this picture of my friends, and decided to alter it.

It took about ten minutes and the process went very smoothly. First I Lasso'd the guy's face, Refined the Edge and copied it over the girl's face. With the Hue/Saturation tool, it was easy to get the correct skin tone, altering mainly the Saturation and Brightness.

After that, just took the Eraser tool and made sure the edge was highly feathered and I was done. It's real easy (especially if the copied face is right in the picture), and usually has a good effect for humor...plus it's fun to do and to kill time with.

There ya have it, perhaps one of my best face morphs.