We can either retreat to the garrisons of fear, or charge forward towards the hills of hope...

The Garrisons of Fear by *Chill-Darkhawk on deviantART

This is my first photoshop piece of the year, and it was a doozy. This is a highly compressed version, (the original is 8" x 10" and 150mb...) but I still think it presents the piece fairly well.

This particular piece was inspired form a line of a speech at the DNC, which I originally miscredited to Barack Obama, but it in fact turns out that that particular line was from the speech by Susan Eisenhower.

If you'd like to view the full version, head to chill-darkhawk.deviantart.com to view it on my deviantART site.

I included a slightly more detailed description for the process of the piece, but for now after having poured over this for a few weeks, I need to take some time to let the piece speak for itself before I start explaining it all over again.

Typography By Hand

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While I forget what the sans-serif font is, the serif font is Adobe Garamond. These two 'words' were the first assignment of my introductory Typography course, requiring me to replicate, without tracing, the two renderings seen above. A digitally refined version also exists with labels of the parts of the letterforms (ie- crossbar, serif, spine, stem, etc. etc.) As you can see, I measured out nearly all the pertinent details, including the letter width and spacing distance between the letters. However, I was less mechanical with the actual curves of the shapes, since that seemed to best preserve any humanism left within the design of the fonts. More of the same to follow in more volume. Joy.

Introduction to Illustrator

So this would be the first completed project of the semester for Vector Illustration, aka the Adobe Illustrator class. The first assignment was to create 10 "logos" or simple illustrations using as wide a variety of the tools as possible. While many of these are simplistic without any real aim behind them, a couple stand out to me as being having a little something special. The Olives logo was the first one that originally came to mind when I sat down to start the project, but I quickly dismissed two ellipses with text as not being creative enough, though the more I thought about the piece I ended up with, I thought how much I would love to see this sign in neon over some little bar owned by a lady named Olive.
Aside from the standard shape tools, I also utilized the Live Trace tool, Type tool, Pen tool, including different brush effects, Gradients, Warps, and Transparencies. All-in-all I think a decent display of my aptitude with the basic concepts of the tools.