Digital hang-out of Alan B. Dowling – designer, nerd, husband, music addict, gadget lover, video game player.
BLOG POSTS: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.
Recently took a trip up to San Francisco with a bunch of peeps from our church – Reality Carpinteria - as part of a “Prayer Tour”. Basically, Reality Carp is going to be starting up a new church in SF – Reality SF – and our trip up there was for the purposes of laying some spiritual ground. I can’t think of a less weird way of describing this for my non-Christian friends. I like to think of it as giant angels and demons flying around punching each other in the faces. Or something like that. Spiritual warfare.
Epic Battle on Stainglass
Right, anyway, so we took 5 or 6 big ol’ white passenger vans up there on March 12th (and boy was it cramped!) and prayed, walked around a district, prayed, got lunch, prayed, got taught a bit about the history of the city, prayed, went to dinner, and so on and then headed home March 14th. That’s pretty much a summary of the trip in a nutshell. We all stayed at Hotel Whitcomb which was just around the corner from the U.N. building.
Classy
This would be a great background for a flyer
I like to check out YouTube from time to time and watch cats playing the piano as much as the next guy but every once in awhile I actually come across something with a bit more substance.
I had heard of versions of this video floating around before called ‘Did You Know?’
It looks nice. Decent effects, interesting facts. Though perhaps I should surround facts as “facts”. Many of the facts in the video seem statistically misleading and/or purposely provacative, which I suppose is part of the point. Wait, what is the point? I’ve watched the video a few times and I can’t really tell what the point is. To make Americans afraid of the sheer numbers of China and India? Or to prepare us for enslavement of our future robotic overlords?
Watch it if you’d like. Maybe you can tell me what the point is the makers of this video are driving at. Maybe it’s to show how you can pretty much indicate whatever you want with statistics given totally unrestricted parameters and control over the presentational context.
Ah, forget it… I’m searching for some more piano playing cats.
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!
My web/graphic design business - www.immersus.comYou should check it out.
If you are looking for the actual work of and/or to hire Alan, then go to the Immersus Media, of which Alan is the founder and Lead Designer.
