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.

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.