I’ve been plowing through my classes this semester leaving me ample time to do my own projects, but I have layed a few out for my break. The first will be a painting (Traditionally, busting out the old acrylics) of a walrus scene for my roommate. His favorite animal is a walrus, and I feel he deserves one alongside his walrus arctic tattoo.

This should be finished sometime during the break.

Another sketch I’ve been working on was for a t-shirt design involving eating acorns as a snack. My roommate kept throwing assorted Starbucks trail mix at me while working and I tried to execute that idea.

Finally, I’ve been trying more attempts at the visual storytelling ordeal. The first was just a trial run trying to suck the viewer into the scene, wasnt really working out for me.

Lifting up the viewer put more interest in the shot. I repeated some objects to bounce the viewers eye around and put in a few figures for scale.

Still drilling away at the sketchbook. I may be venturing out to SF over my break so hopefully that will be a jolt to my creativity.

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Sneakerpimps Invaded Miami with the presence of the Cool Kids and Clipse.

The walls were adorned with many rare and custom shoes, accompanied with live painting. The customs were remarkably weak for how hyped up the event was, but there were some sick classics keeping me satisfied.

They had a painting of my favorite shoe, the For Love or Money dunks. I will probably never see an authentic pair of them so the painting will have to do.

Cool Kids.

Overall I had a fun time at the event. Although be forewarned, if you’re looking to attend this event for just the sneaker exhibit you will be highly disappointed. The event was more like a concert garnished with sneakers. So sneakerheads stay away, but Cool Kids/ Clipse fans should definitely attend.

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FAMILY INVASION; this weekend my parents decided to pay a visit to my residence here in Tampa, causing me to put all of my projects on hold. Yes your assumptions are correct; I do work on projects during the weekend instead of going out and partying. I had an enjoyable time with them, and managed to replace some sleep with work time just to finish up this short.

It was done straight-ahead with as much brute force creativity as I can shoot out. I literally dived in with absolutely no pre-planning. I opened flash, took the circle tool to the canvas and went from there.

Here’s my hectic layer breakdown for you to give you an idea of how I slammed this thing out. I decided to avoid nesting my symbols, which still managed to poke their head into it.

I also took a trip down to Ikea in downtown Ybor which is still celebrating it’s grand opening phase. That, accompanied by the memorial day weekend crowd ensued as the worst furniture adventure I have ever embarked on.

For starters, Ikea is horrendously designed for the In and Out customers. You literally have to sneak by the cash registers to get to the warehouse to find your product just to avoid their maze known as the showroom. Unfortunately I didn’t know where my product was in the warehouse so I had to parade around and dodge an overabundance of impulse buyers just to obtain the coordinates to my purchase. After I obtained them, I went back downstairs, breached their security by ignoring their cash register militia telling me there was no entry that way, and infiltrated the warehouse. It was a mess, although I did get that certain Oceans Eleven rush, As if I had some master scheme to steal some emerald jewel when it turn was just a drafting desk.

I also ventured out to the Westside Skateshop sidewalk sale with my brother and met up with my friend Ryan. He fortunately passed me up these nice pair of Batmans (thank you much) and I also picked up a nice pair of Goofy Boys. The weather was sub-par but still a remarkably enjoyable experience.

P.S. The Hundreds design blog just did a huge tribute to Hardcore with a handful of colab tees. I know I’m going to pick a few up if I can get my hands on them here in FL, and I suggest you do the same.

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Outdoors is the new cool. This is me, accompanied with my Lung Leg Mishka tee, glaring at some fantastic designs at the Palehorse ‘Back in Black’ live t-shirt exhibit featuring 17 remarkable apparel artists.

They had the designs hanging in the center of the room. You went up, filled out a form with the designer’s number and shipped your order away right there.

They were pumping out some great music at the Czar Vodka Bar in downtown Ybor.

The most appealing perk that drew me out of my cave to this event was that they were doing all of the prints live. Unfortunately this restricted the prints down to a monochromatic theme but the work was still top notch.

Snagged some grub while they were printing my shirts. It took about an hour because they had so many orders, but  I’m glad that the artist are getting their recognition.

Here’s the shirt I invested in. The Kaws (Original Fake) feel drew me to it. It was created by Jeremy Madl over at MAD Toy Design. If you enjoy his work peep over to his site and show him some love.

End of the night cleaning up some work. I had to post this here because someone wanted to see my home setup. The tablet is in need of a serious upgrade but I’m content with the rest.

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Visual storytelling through environmental and industrial design is one of the most challenging creative obstacles I’ve come across. My previous two weeks I’ve slaved over my sketchpad as a result of realizing that my environmental rendering skills were mediocre at best; I often tricked myself into thinking I was decent just by over stylizing my scenes, which often worked against the story or message I was trying to send. You’ve already witnessed my first two steps forward by creating not just more believable images, but images that convey a stronger mood or contribute to a story more than just a ground for character to walk on or a door for someone to open.

This problem can be seen by comparing some of my older works to the new. In Stoise Blaster the heavy line-weight and rotating the axis of 2-d planes ended up causing the overall image to become more flat and less believable. On the other hand, some of my more recent backgrounds such as Library, has much more depth and a better overall mood. The increased thought process and pre-planning prevails in the latter, even though it was under the harsh restrictions of a vector medium.

Although I’m pleased with the result, I’ve still decided to scrap the tablet and digital all together until I’ve established better understanding of the environmental storytelling scheme. It’s back to the good ol’ sketch book for a few weeks. The first quick rough sketch I threw together didn’t come out too bad, but was far from the result I was looking for.

I wanted to add a claustrophobic and chaotic feeling to the image, so I shot the composition straight into the focal point as if everything was being sucked into it. I felt as if it yielded a much stronger and more appealing result. I left some of the overlapping render to show part of the process I took in creating this composition.

Although visual storytelling is a very crucial and challenging task, the threshold of the audience’s judgment towards any sort of visual image gives me just enough leeway to maintain my sanity. Everything that doesn’t make sense to me may make sense to the viewer, and/or vice verca.

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This afternoon I have embarked on two new life upgrades. The first being that I invested in a new sketchbook, and a much larger foundation at that. I’ve been trying to loosen up my style to try to increase my production speed so less pens, more pencils and more space. Now during a recent OS upgrade I decided to pick up the blue pencil and shoot out a quick sketch.

The result of this OS upgrade has graced me with a fresh, free copy of Windows 7. I’ve recently upgraded from windows XP (32 bit, dont ask me why) and have no regrets. I’m not one who supports upgrades and new trends often, for example boycotting vista, but this is one upgrade that has proven itself worthy.

The first little gem it presented me with was the luxury and ease of reformatting. I was expecting to format my entire drive with my windows XP copy on it (which I was planning on doing, I had way too many processes running and no time to slim them down) like a typical windows upgrade/install, but this was not the case.. It kept all of my old files in a folder called windows.old but disabled their functions, so they were technically not installed. This was fantastic because all I had to do for some of my older programs (the ones I didn’t want embedded in the registry) was to just drag them over to my new program files folder. It ended up saving me tons of time re-installing my old software.

A few other quick perks is I did notice that the new internet explorer has fixed the box model css bug which is such a relief to web designers, and the install cd contains the majority of the current brands network card drivers so you no longer have to rummage around for those primitive things called compact disks.

Another one of the more notable perks is how remarkable the new default wallpapers are. Say goodbye to the 1024×768 stock photos and hello to these beauties. Unfortunately they don’t label the desktops with the artists that actually created them (very Window’s like) so I don’t know who to pay credit to.

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This afternoon I’ve decided to retire another sketchbook. After scrounging up for blank pages and scraps left in it to sabotage with more ink and pencil (much more so the latter), the 2008 copy of Kevin’s Crazy Mind has officially been retired.

Below are few examples of it’s content, as wacky as they are. I may prohibit myself from diluting my next sketchbook with ink, I have a micron addiction that I need to break. More of these sketches you can find in the gallery section under Sketchbook. I’ll be keeping you up to date with a more consistent creative process outline via the mid 2009 edition of Kevin’s Crazy Mind a.k.a. my new sketchbook.

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While staring at a blank canvas, one of the most dreaded tasks must be creating an entire environment from scratch. I’m going to guide you through my thought process (or lack thereof) when I design mine. The environment I’m going to be guiding you though will be Shallows, a recent wallpaper I’ve submitted.

Here’s the rough conceptual development stage. This one I approached with a far fetched idea, started out by detailing a few rocks and decided to change it into an entire environment. It’s much more efficient evaluating your thoughts out quickly on paper (or screen) this way because you never want to spend your entire day making the details pretty when the composition doesn’t flow. There’s no real purpose in polishing s***.

I was trying to brainstorm up what kind of trees to pollute my scene with, and the one on the left which I ended up scrapping, I included here to let you know to not always commit 100% to something when there is a strong chance your next idea will work better. It’s a real defeatist philosophy but works often in my creative process.

Planted my first finished tree, unfortunately I didn’t designate a prominent light source in the scene so the detailing may hinder me down the road.

I needed some more depth so I started rendering out the background, the mountains appear too close so I’ll have to submerge them deeper with some atmospheric effects and more foreground.

I added some background fog to push it back further, but it’s still not to the point I would like. I also decided to play around with the tree composition and scale down the mid-road tree.

The lighting wasn’t really selling me so I decided to try some different times of day, I like the results here but it didn’t establish the mood I wanted.

The lighting felt more natural and gave me more of that morning haze feeling I was going for.

I started to play around with the shadows and started rendering out more of the reflections off of the objects, but there was still much more work to be done.

I needed more of a background to give it a more natural feel so I scrapped the lake idea and infiltrated the backround into adding more rocks and mountains to ease the transition from foreground to background.

Rendered lighting on the rocks and added a place for the path to go.

Switched up the composition once again, I threw the grass hills on the right of the scene to the left and put a forground or a “place to stand” on the right.

Completly obliterated the far background here and rendered up the rest of the mountains. I added some more of the blue mountains to the left to clean it up and bring it all together.

Did some more cleaning up and added some atmospheric fog to tie things up.

If you would like the have the full-size image you can get it from here, or my gallery. I can resize this for any sort of device or random sized resolution screen you may have; just leave me a comment or email me with your request.

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I just finished up some closit clearning and I am selling some of my clothes I no longer wear/ never have worn. If you’re interested in any of them shoot me an email, they will be put on ebay this weekend.

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My camera problem has officially been remedied. A hot week at the casino accompanied by some more persuasion towards a point-and-shoot have finalized my investment.

It sure does look pretty; it may not be an eos40 of 50d but nothing a few minutes of Photoshop cant help. Expect more creative posts once this badboy comes in the mail come the 27th.

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