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Character Design/Color Scheme

 It’s no secret that I’m a big nerd so of course it also shouldn’t be a surprise that I play D&D. It’s a ton of fun and it means I get to hang out with my closest friends at least once a week. The snack food doesn’t hurt the experience either.

 

After starting a new campaign, I finally built my own character from the ground up and now I have Baerdora (Baer for short) who is a dragonborne monk. He’s a lot of fun to play and, since I enjoy him so much, I thought it only appropriate to give my first created character his own, true design. I also took advantage of a wonderful tool at paletton.com to help decide his color scheme.

 

After I finished drawing his design, I chose the base tone for his scales and tossed in the RGB code into Paletton and clicked through my color scheme options, eventually settling on doing a triadic scheme. I had originally done quad, but I felt it was a bit too much for the few elements that would be used here. After settling in, it was easy to just export the color swatches into Clip Studio and go all out. In the end, I’m VERY happy with how he turned out and I can’t wait for next Saturday to give my punchy dragon boy more things to smack around.

‘Play the Dragon’ Cover Illustration


I was recently commissioned by my good friend Ryan Molina to do some illustration work for his upcoming book. This is actually the second book of his I’ve done art for and it’s always a blast to work with a fellow nerd.

Here, I’ve done an illustration of the iconic Dragon Ball protagonist Goku playing video games with himself – one adult, one child. I even snuck in a poster in the back of the cover of Ryan’s other book I got to work on.

You can find the book on Amazon and make sure to also check out the webpage for his whole group.

Skillshare – Photo Manipulation

I recently completed a course on Skillshare working with photo manipulation and learning some more granular details about Photoshop and some of the tools that I had a general knowledge of. This course dealt a lot at first with Photoshop and image basics, which really nagged at me to skip ahead, but I’ve run into that trouble plenty of times. I stuck with it and soon I was learning some new tips and tricks that I actually never stumbled upon when working with things like refining a mask, adjustment layers, and Photoshop’s photo filters.

Here I have the three images the class used for a basis, and then the ethereal creation upon completion.

 

Apparel Design

For a recent job application I was asked to design t-shirts based on prompts provided by the job poster. For those prompts, I chose two –

Create a t-shirt design for Traveler’s Insurance 5K Run/Walk. Must include Traveler’s logo, with space around it. Must be a 2 color design with red incorporated either in the design or as the shirt color. They want some element of St. Paul, MN incorporated into the design – they run down by the river.

 

Homecoming T-Shirt. Lion appearing as though he is “inside us” so that our being torn or ripped away you would see that we still have the fight of a lion inside of us. The back would include the words “Royal to the Core”.

 

A Fantasy Adventure With My Niece

Last spring, my niece was given an assignment – to send a flat version of herself to someone who lives in a different place. The person who received it would take photos and journal their adventures together and send them back for presenting to the class.

 

While I certainly took her around Saint Paul and the greater metro area, I also couldn’t let a chance like this go to waste by NOT Photoshopping us somewhere crazy and wild so she could share with the class. I took a photo of her flat drawing/photo that she sent along, took a goofy photo of me, and comped it together in a crazy fantasy illustration I found online. Looks like she beat me up the cliff, but I might have been slowed down by the crazy view!

Trying SkillShare

I’ve wanted to try and expand my horizons and diversify my skills when it comes to design and I knew I couldn’t do it alone. So, I’ve decided to give SkillShare a try. SkillShare is a service where thousands of experts teach you almost anything under the sun – from motion graphics to sewing to, well, probably anything you can think of! So, I’m focusing on graphic design for now.

My first lesson was on fundamentals of design, layout, and using grids to direct the flow of design. Below are a few two page spreads that I assembled using what I learned through those lessons. They aren’t totally refined, but it was good to try something new and just get it out there.

Sticker Design Prompt

For a recent job application, I was asked to design stickers based off of two promts: “Thank you for making my party magical” and “Best Day Ever”. I put together a handful of different ideas using the required copy, some art assets I was given, and the option of making/creating my own assets to express the prompt. I had a lot of fun designing these which was a different experience than my recent works like character illustration and award design.

Design and Sublimation

Here are a couple of new items I worked on today that I thought would be really neat to show.

 

The first image was created for an award order with a quick turnaround time where we couldn’t get in a prefab plaque plate with a similar image and design so I was tasked with recreating the design and making our own plates. Stock photo searching and blending in to the black background for some dynamic lighting made short work of this task and it transferred to the steel plate like a charm.

 

The second is a plaque award where I got to design the piece from scratch. The client didn’t have a solid idea and wanted to see what we could do. Taking inspiration from a couple of items we had in our catalog I went all in and made something fun and on-brand for the team. This was also one of the few times I got to do everything myself – design, printing, sublimating, and mounting.