On Original Artwork
Well now that I’ve completed two owl paintings, it’s about time to have them scanned in a higher quality than my Android phone camera. I went about fixing up the blue owl, giving him a better background and slightly enhanced colors. (The photograph that inspired this showed a blue background, while I used a black one)
The other owl is a curious image. The actual photograph shows none of the owl’s body at all, only a head. Perhaps it is peering out of the darkness, leaning over? We may never know for sure, because all we see is a floating owl head.
The next research will be on painting certain textures (like rocks) better, as well as trees and other forest props. These owls come in very blank backgrounds, but this is not a bad thing at all given their spooky context. Also, I have another use for paintings with blank backgrounds.
I was recently asked to show that I knew my way around photoshop and illustrator, and since my current official work has someone else doing the graphics, I decided to make a Spec Graphics page. Using my own artwork is preferable for such things, because rights issues is thorny. Even Creative Commons licenses make you have to write down your source and include an attribution somewhere.
Finding Other Sources
Since I don’t have incredible large amounts of time to create spec artwork to use in digital design wizardry, I decided I will use Creative Commons licensed images and do my best to keep a log of where they came from. To do the sorts of works that I want to do, I need access to pictures of just about anything, and can’t be spending too much on stock photography for spec demonstrations.
Speaking of money I’ve also somehow found decent open-source solutions to software that costs the same as a used car. For Photoshop, the answer is obvious, The Gimp. Illustrator has Inkscape, and InDesign has Scribus. I’m not sure if I’m crazy about Scribus yet, but it’s a good thing that print design is not my priority.