• MOTHER'S DAY GINGERS •

• MOTHER'S DAY GINGERS •

Look out for these cute Gingerbread characters in your local Morrisons supermarket this week. Following last months Valentines promotion Mr Ginger is back and this time he's brought his mum!

At first I thought of trying to model the icing on mums head in Form Z, my 3D programme. But I'm not such an expert with it and I could foresee lots of trial and error, so opted for plasticene modelling instead.

Once it had been re-coloured, re-sized and placed onto the ginger head I knew I'd made the right decision. The flower needed to look like rolled out icing and this simple version was pure artwork, light and shade created with the tools at hand in Photoshop.

Please click on an image to enlarge and bear in mind that these are very strictly copyright. ©

•CREATING MOLTEN LAVA •

•CREATING MOLTEN LAVA •

For this new beer clip for Golden Eagle Brewery I needed some convincing fiery lava.

I remembered a trick I'd used a few years ago, when needing to set some gravestones 'on fire' for  CD cover. The shadows between rocks, cracks in rocks etc if inverted and then filed with yellows and oranges took on a realistic kind of molten lava effect.

So I picked a stock photo of cracked mud - picture 1 - and ran radial blur over it to 'explode' it a little.

Then after inverting the photo - picture 2 - and adding reds and oranges into the cracks with an overlay glow it soon started to take on the feel of glowing coals and cracking lava flows.

In picture 3, I've used some 'noise' in a channel and exploded that with the same radial blur and sprayed extra yellows and oranges over the lava using this noise explosion as the mask. Picture 4 shows smoke that was used judiciously to overlay certain areas and give a smouldering, steaming effect.

Picture 5 shows the various type effects that were blended together and then overlaid onto the lava artwork, some of the yellow cracks from the mud photo can be seen overlaying the text.

In the final 2 pictures you can see how I arrived at the final beer clip design. The addition of a distant volcano, another lava field at the bottom and it's complete. One of the hops used in the brew is called Jade. Jade, and indeed New Zealand, were created by volcanic action hence the monumental name.

Please click on these images to enlarge and inspect closely, but remember they are all very strictly copyright. ©