Funny little experiment I found in my design folder.  The picture is from a camping trip to Oceano, CA my wife and I went on about a year ago (I think it was a year ago… darn this brain!).

That bird will mess you up

Upon a revisit to this image, it should say ‘Honk, Honk’ right?  Bah, I like it as it is.

I should probably upload the rest of those pics from Oceano up here sometime.  Hmm…  maybe this weekend.  Stay tuned!

Yesterday I mentioned my friend Elizabeth Joy Greene (formerly Koppa). Elizabeth and her husband Mitchell moved to Memphis, TN not too long ago and before she left I made her a design as a going away present.

Middle Names are Cool

You can read about their Memphis adventures and exploits at http://blogginginmemphis.wordpress.com/

My sister, Sarah, will love me for posting this. I threw this picture together quickly one morning while she was visiting back when I still worked at UCSB a few years ago.

Gir face of Doom

I think it is actually one of the earliest designs I ever did in which Mr. (Not So) Smiley made an appearance.

Oh, and if you have no idea who Gir is or why there is doom then look up “Invader Zim”.  It has to be one of my all time favorite animated series.

I consider myself a photography noob but I love it.  I’ve learned quite a bit in the last few years and one of those things is something called lomo photography or lomography.  According to Wikipedia, “lomography emphasizes casual, snapshot photography. Characteristics such as over-saturated colors, off-kilter exposure, blurring, “happy accidents,” and alternative film processing are often considered part of the ‘Lomographic Technique.’”

I do not have a lomo camera.  But I have Photoshop.  Enter Photoshop tutorial and experiments.  Yay!

This is just around the corner from where I live

Rejected Christmas Card - My wife has veto power

Kaleb: future stud ... is probably what his shirt says

Do Not Insert Dirty Joke Here

The last photo was taken just outside of Sacramento, CA about a year ago.  I’ll be sure to upload the rest of those pictures from that trip sometime in the near future.

While slushing through some old design files, I came across these old fun little exercises with a very easy to accomplish effect in Photoshop.  Enjoy!

This is Ander. I'm not this cool.

Where in the World is Vince Lee?

I know, I know.  I’m plagarizing myself.  I totally stole that first image from my own myspace page that has been up for years.  Oh well.

I like to find Photoshop tutorials and plow through and create stuff I’ve never done before to keep my skills sharp (or to procrastinate from other stuff… whatever).  One place that provides some top notch tutorials is http://abduzeedo.com/

Going back through my old design files from tutorials, I came across one based on replicating the bokeh effect in Photoshop.  Read more about the bokeh effect here.  The actual tutuorial  can be found at http://abduzeedo.com/awesome-digital-bokeh-effect-photoshop

I think the result is kind of cool.  Not sure where I can use this knowledge now but oh well.

Reminds me of Focus Features

As a side note, if you’d like to check out more design tutorials or other things that I like to bookmark, then I recommend you check out my Delicious account at http://delicious.com/IMMERSUSman.  Delicious.com is a social bookmarking service and is awesome.  They were pioneering tag based organization of web bookmarks well before the latest crop of web browsers.

Once upon a time, I was a diligent sketcher.  I love to draw but have found that the more I become teethered to my computer, the more I lose a little bit of the drive (or time) to have fun with sketches, or as I prefer to call them – doodles.  I still have a journal that is often more doodles than writing but it’s still a pale comparison to what I used to do on a regular basis.  With this in mind, I decided to make better use of my Wacom tablet (as opposed to just making designs for money… pshh…) and doodle.  A few days after Valentines day I spent at most 30 minutes doodling randomness on my tablet in Photoshop and then maybe another 10 adding some extra effects to a few items I thought were cool or funny.  Now you get to partake of the weirdness that is my mind.  Hooray!

The full size of both of these photos (you gotta click them) are both 1920 by 1200 which makes for a great desktop background, assuming your monitor is the same size as mine.

This first one was obviously in reaction to Valentines day from a few days prior to drawing this.

He even dressed up just for you

The coloring is not very clean because I just used one brush size and sped through the whole thing just to see what I could get.  Nothing was really planned when I made these.  It was basically “free-doodling”.  That sounds weird.  Moving on.

Prepare for Doom

I drew this with *almost* never letting my tablet pen from leaving the proverbial paper.  Originally, he was supposed to be saying ‘Hahaha’ maniacally but when I decided this might make a cool desktop background, I decided to just flip him so that the icons on my screen wouldn’t cover him (I’m on a Mac).

If you’ve got some fun doodles, I would love for you share them.  Send me your links in the comments or via the contact page!

Since I don’t get to create nearly as many illustrations on the computer as I’d like, every once in awhile I like to find a nice tutorial online to follow along with to get the creative juices flowing. For this particular one I turned to Vector Tuts which has a growing library of tutorials and a nice little community that seems to be flourishing. Anyway, I’ve posted the results of my bunny creation here. Thanks to Rype from Vectips for the tutorials contribution.