The Cool School cd cover

My good friend DJ Atlas is releasing another cd. This one is dance-oriented music for children. It's called "Cool School". Zeb (DJ Atlas) loves Calvin & Hobbes, so we decided on a cover that to me serves as a tribute to them, as well as making it child-friendly.

The front cover is the first time in a long time that I've done a project completely in Photoshop. It's all a photo composite, except for when I drew in his shirt, b/c the image I extracted Calvin from had him shirtless (it was a drawing of him flexing in the mirror.) The chalkboard writing is an actual font that I found on Dafont.com, called Denne Schoolgirl or something like that. I tried writing in the title with my Wacom pen, but I like this font treatment much better.

If any of you remember, I've been working on this project for a few weeks, and I found a lot of interesting variations on Calvin & Hobbes while searching for images to use. There were a few anime versions of the characters, some comic book-styled images, and even one made out of sushi or something. I like to see different renditions of a character. It's the same as a cubist, photographer, impressionist, etc. painting the same subject, but they're all different.

I didn't do a rendition of Calvin & Hobbes, since we wanted to make sure children would immediately recognize the characters, but I used color, cropping and silhouettes to make an original image, which was the main challenge. I didn't want to just find an image of Calvin and stick him on the front like the Calvin stickers on people's trucks where he's peeing on some name brand.

The inside cover was done in Illustrator and Photoshop, which is the combination I most commonly use. The squares were simply colored and arranged, while the silhouttes were made in Photoshop and imported in. That font is called "Calvin & Hobbes", and it's made to look like the title font from the strip.

I read Calvin & Hobbes somewhat regularly, and I always enjoyed Watterson's illustration. But now that I've spent a good deal of time on this project, I would like to read even more of the strip. I hope you all like it too.

A simple but classy Nail Salon logo

Click the logo for better resolution.

This logo is being used against my wishes. I did it for someone in exchange for something they had done for me, so she has the right to use it, but I tried to steal the logo back from her because she did something very selfish and very stupid afterwards.

The South Bronx FC Season 12 poster

For those that don't know, I play in a Wednesday night soccer league. I wouldn't say we take the league more serious than the other teams, but we do put a little more effort into being there, which is why we're the only team in our division, and maybe the entire league, that has jerseys w/our names on the back, and not even our real names, usually.

Besides that, I've been making online flyers to promote the games. It hasn't really worked; only our best friends and an occasional acquaintance ever comes, but it's still fun to make flyers for our online fan pages on Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. Here's the newest one that I've done for our 12th season, a teaser poster showing our mascot, Igoo from the Herculoids cartoon from the 60s.

The flyer was done mostly in Photoshop, but the text and the text background were done in Illustrator. I was originally planning to use teammates, but most of the pictures of us were too low-resolution at the size I needed them to be. But this way, the entire team is represented. Anyway, let me know what you think.

Logo work

This is a logo I did. "DL" are the 1st and maiden name initials, and "M" is the last name. She's a journalist, so I used Times Bold for a professional feel, but I used a simple ring around the text to make it look a little more interesting. I thought that it was visually appealing, but didn't stand out to the point of being inappropriate for the sort of business setting that working at a newspaper entails. I appreciate any critiques.

Project:Gold unveiled

You all should feel special. I haven't even sent the (simple) revisions back yet to the DJ. But it's ready to go; he just reminded me that I hadn't put my contact information on it. He's a versatile DJ, plus a good, thoughtful person. His birthday was on the 5th, so I'm glad he liked the project. Just one more thing that went good for him this week. "Magic Gold" is a dance-themed cd. I got to hear the mix while discussing ideas w/him, and the idea that you see was very strong in my mind very early on, once he told me what the project was about. I'm working on two more pieces with him, plus a possible book cover, so expect to see more artwork in this space, soon.

Hylandaz Redux artwork

I didn't like the front at first, but then I did, so here it is. The idea was loosely inspired by "Apocalypse Now" as well as by the original "Hostile Takeover" artwork. Doc, who makes beats for the album (he's the same Doc of the Single Minded Pros-if you haven't heard them, don't kill yourself, just listen to the music), loves "Apocalypse Now," hence 'Redux'. I have an electronic copy of the album from Doc, and it has new songs added along with a new song order.