•MOUTHWATERING CARAMEL SWIRL•

•MOUTHWATERING CARAMEL SWIRL•

A quick and satisfying job last month for TAG in Leeds. To create a delicious caramel swirl with photo-realistic illustration. This small vignette would be dropped into the bottom corner of a cereal pack so wasn't even taking centre stage as the hero shot of the product. Nonetheless it needed to convey all the sticky lusciousness that we associate with melted caramel.

From my own photographs (of honey, chocolate and golden syrup) and reference images from online sources, I distorted and then re-coloured melted chocolate to look like gooey toffee. Using the twirl filter and one or two other distortion filters in Photoshop and then judicious masking and trimming, I managed matched the flowing swirls of the brief.

Please feel free to click and enlarge these images but remember they are all very strictly copyright.

• DISNEY ANIMATION GAME SET •

• DISNEY ANIMATION GAME SET •

Another fun game that I worked on recently was this animation kit from Disney. It featured around a dozen or so Disney film-themed characters and game boards. Hopefully youngsters would have enough patience (or enough rainy days), to start the process of modelling the characters in air drying dough. This was greatly helped by super accurate snap together moulds.

Once the characters are ready they become the game playing pieces and can be place on the boards.

The game above shows Donald and Mickey's Hedge Maze. Created by judicious use of Photoshop custom brushes.

 This Mickey Merry go Round (above) whilst being fun to play helps with Maths too. It was quite a challenge for me as it required realistic rendering of a playground merry-go-round, with all it's associated highlights and shadows.

My 3D software of choice is Form Z. It resides on an older Mac which was in for repair.

So what to do!? I decided that I would have to make an actual scale model of the ride and found some nicely pliant plastic coated wire in my workshop. By printing off the base artwork and mounting it on foamecore I was then able to attach the 9 shaped rails in position and take reference photographs with real shadows. Then it was a matter of simply taking the resulting photograph into Photoshop and lifting the shadows. In the end the shadows had to be downplayed quite a bit anyway, but I'm still happy with the result.

Please feel free to click and enlarge the images but remember that they are al very strictly copyright. ©

• More Miles from Tomorrowland •

• More Miles from Tomorrowland •

More samples of the games I'd helped produce arrived just before christmas.

Here's another from the Miles' series. There was an incredible amount of detail (and therefore time) invested in this artwork. The biosphere 'egg-shaped room, for example, took 2 or 3 days to illustrate. I had loads of fun experimenting with foliage brushes in Photoshop though and learnt quite a bit.

You can read and learn more about customising Photoshop brushes in these two articles in Words and Pictures magazine ...

http://www.wordsandpics.org/2014/03/photoshop-brushes.html

http://www.wordsandpics.org/2014/05/photoshop-brushes-part-two-lets-make.html

Forrest Pruzan in Seattle commissioned half a dozen spin-off games and when I get around to photographing them all I shall be featuring them here.

Please feel free to click and enlarge the images but remember they are all 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. ©