Ideas-in-progress
I have just what you’ve been waiting for… Another sermon series design! I started out wanting to do a photo-driven layout, but couldn’t find images I was happy with. This is the first design I’ve drawn entirely on my Wacom tablet without working from a literal pencil sketch as a template. It worked great for the style I was shooting for, although any tighter line work would be hard to achieve this way.
Another sermon series poster for Hillcrest Church. Seems like I’ve got some kind of color gradient thing going on these. I wonder where that came from…
I have been having fun with hand drawn typography anyway, and then I went and met Chank Diesel, who seems to have done a lot of interesting fonts we all know and love. So here is another misc. type inspired sketch.
We’re doing a month long series at church on “Things Christians Fight About”. It is always good to stick with the safe topics like this. I did some supporting graphics, including the spicy title screen above.
Recently, I’ve been experimenting with textures using black pen, and hand drawn typography. This was sketched on paper, and then colored with a little Photoshop action.
Here is a sketch I did a while back. It even got posted to the Weekly Moleskine. Finally getting around to posting it here too.
In all my “free time” I’ve started volunteering over at Hillcrest, doing the graphics for each upcoming sermon series. It is a fun excuse to try some new things, and small enough projects that they aren’t too much to squeeze in edgewise some evening. This Grave Consequences poster is the first one I did. It introduces the series leading up to Easter this year.
What happens if you combine a hot air balloon with a tent? Now you know. This is a really bad idea in real life, of course, but it would work great in fiction. Besides, it was fun to draw. In retrospect, I should have added a door… you know, to keep the bears out.
It was a dark and stormy night… No, scratch that. It was dark and ridiculously cold. As in, “my car is all the way across the street so I’m going to wait here till spring”, kind of cold. When I arrived down at Touch of Europe, a few starving artists were already lurking in the shadows, working in their sketchbooks. I pulled up a chair and scrawled out this quick sketch of Cassie sitting across from me. Emphasis on quick. As you can see, she was wearing all kinds of layers which provided lots of folds and textures to try and sort out, as well as protection from the cold… as long as she didn’t go outside.
Hmmm… I probably shouldn’t have mentioned who this is supposed to be. Now everyone can tell how much it doesn’t really look like her. Oh well. Sorry Cassie! Another DrawnTown in the books. I’ll be looking forward to the next one. Maybe something in the Caribbean?
You can see what other people were up to over at Graphic Content.
Around my house we always seem to sucker ourselves into creating at least a few hand made Christmas gifts. The wild goose chases trying to find obscure materials are always epic. This year one such gift was a batch of fancy hot chocolate mix. First we had to find and perfect a hot chocolate recipe. We were forced to drink many steaming mugs of hot cocoa over the course of our research. It was grueling work, as you can imagine.
However, simply handing people a pile chocolate dust doesn’t work very well:
Merry ChristmaaaAchoo! …oh, sorry about that. Don’t worry, it will melt into the carpet, and disappear in no time…
We needed packaging for our “awesome hot chocolate.” I didn’t want to resort to the classic, but not very classy, canning-jar-with-label technique. After some goose chasing, we were able to supply ourselves with plastic bags from a candy-making supply store that looked perfect. Of course a zip-lock bag full of powder isn’t exactly decorative. Dress it up with some shiny foil wrapping paper, however, add a whimsical custom label, and you’ve got something nearly presentable.
You’ll notice we’re still transporting plastic bags full of a fine powdered substance… across state lines… so look for us on the news this Christmas Eve.
Below is how the final product turned out:
For more photos: