Edit: I need to remove all the work samples before I get into trouble. Six months into it and I'm finally signing contractor (freelance) contracts.
In school I had a background layout class. Aside from all the large 12 or 14 field drawings (look at me pretend like I still know how big 12 and 14 fields are) I also started coloring my drawings, for real, in Photoshop. Not shitty "oh let me use the paint bucket!" stuff, I mean custom textured fucking brushes and hundreds of brush/mouse strokes. You can see them in their super scaled down and hideously JPEG compressed glory here and here.
Each one of these took me nine hours to color. Yes, that is excluding the time it took to brainstorm, make thumbnail sketches, and make the first draft and revised drawings which would add another several hours.
As much as I enjoyed the final result, it was a lot of time consuming hard work, but I also learned a hell of a lot about painting in Photoshop (and a less extent for Corel Painter) and its brush libraries and palettes and how to enable those to make some very interesting custom brushes. I now use custom brushes extensively in projects and jobs, but never to such a large degree as these backgrounds for school.
Now at CCFV I have been tasked to help someone create twenty-six (26) backgrounds for Sprout's Let's GO! show (which, after reading the script of one episode, made me want to kill myself). Luckily, I have been asked to make two, because there's a lot more other work to do besides Sprout work.
[Removed this paragraph...]
The two scenes are a luau and a farm. I haven't even started the farm. But the luau has been hard enough (plus it's hard to do things correctly when you were informed incorrectly). I totally wanted to kill myself, or someone else, at work today. It's been excruciatingly difficult for me for some reason.
The luau, I was told, would be hard, but not as bad as I've done on it. The characters will enter from the left in their creepy car and then go to a live action picnic table full of luau-themed food.
I'm done with the luau now, because I am so sick of it. If I have to open up that Photoshop file ever again, I will cry.
The original file is 3,000 x 1,000, which may be the largest Photoshop file I've dealt with (The castle layout was 1,800 x 1,314. Wait, the 40 year old virgin is 1,526 x 1,858).
[Removed... sigh...]
And, like everything I post here, there are some caveats: [The following paragraph has been edited. A lot.]
Most of the elements in this is from various files in the 3 GB "Sprout_Resources" folder on the graphics server.
Very few individual elements were things I made, along with some cutting out elements from the flattened files and then re-drawing in the intersected pieces (namely a palm tree cutting through sand dunes).
I am grossly unimpressed by it, especially in the absurd timeframe it has taken (nearly 11 hours... with lunches and ... Internet breaks scattered... all over.) Here's hoping that the farm is easier. Farms have a lot more props I can fill the scene with. The luau, not so much because the food would be live action and I can't make hula girls. Also it's not animated, so tiki torches are also a no go. So flowers, palm trees, and coconuts were the best I could come up with.
I'm really tired right now. I was hoping to have the Ashes website finished last night, but every day something goes wrong, and I only manage to take care of one or two small things on my to do list for the layout. All I have left is the animated lightning, which I need Flash for...which crashes instantly on the MBP. Sigh. I'd take a coworker's suggestion and reinstall Flash MX 2004, but I doubt MX 2004 will open my Flash 8 files. I fucking hate how every new version is barely backwards compatible. Photoshop adds all kinds of nifty little features which almost always fail gracefully for older versions. I hope to god Flash CS3 gets something right.
Oh, Ember gave me a copy of the SG magazine. I haven't had the time to really look at it because I need some privacy... reading it on the train, work, or around my aunt and uncle just seems like a bad idea. But I think it's hilarious that she's page 69. However, I do not agree with some of the choices in determining which girls get double-page spreads. I won't name names because I guess said girl(s) in question are like popular or some shit.
I'm going to post this now because I know my image and link tags are probably fucked up and need fixin'. [Actually the tags were fine. Too bad it's useless now that I had to take it down.]
In school I had a background layout class. Aside from all the large 12 or 14 field drawings (look at me pretend like I still know how big 12 and 14 fields are) I also started coloring my drawings, for real, in Photoshop. Not shitty "oh let me use the paint bucket!" stuff, I mean custom textured fucking brushes and hundreds of brush/mouse strokes. You can see them in their super scaled down and hideously JPEG compressed glory here and here.
Each one of these took me nine hours to color. Yes, that is excluding the time it took to brainstorm, make thumbnail sketches, and make the first draft and revised drawings which would add another several hours.
As much as I enjoyed the final result, it was a lot of time consuming hard work, but I also learned a hell of a lot about painting in Photoshop (and a less extent for Corel Painter) and its brush libraries and palettes and how to enable those to make some very interesting custom brushes. I now use custom brushes extensively in projects and jobs, but never to such a large degree as these backgrounds for school.
Now at CCFV I have been tasked to help someone create twenty-six (26) backgrounds for Sprout's Let's GO! show (which, after reading the script of one episode, made me want to kill myself). Luckily, I have been asked to make two, because there's a lot more other work to do besides Sprout work.
[Removed this paragraph...]
The two scenes are a luau and a farm. I haven't even started the farm. But the luau has been hard enough (plus it's hard to do things correctly when you were informed incorrectly). I totally wanted to kill myself, or someone else, at work today. It's been excruciatingly difficult for me for some reason.
The luau, I was told, would be hard, but not as bad as I've done on it. The characters will enter from the left in their creepy car and then go to a live action picnic table full of luau-themed food.
I'm done with the luau now, because I am so sick of it. If I have to open up that Photoshop file ever again, I will cry.
The original file is 3,000 x 1,000, which may be the largest Photoshop file I've dealt with (The castle layout was 1,800 x 1,314. Wait, the 40 year old virgin is 1,526 x 1,858).
[Removed... sigh...]
And, like everything I post here, there are some caveats: [The following paragraph has been edited. A lot.]
Most of the elements in this is from various files in the 3 GB "Sprout_Resources" folder on the graphics server.
Very few individual elements were things I made, along with some cutting out elements from the flattened files and then re-drawing in the intersected pieces (namely a palm tree cutting through sand dunes).
I am grossly unimpressed by it, especially in the absurd timeframe it has taken (nearly 11 hours... with lunches and ... Internet breaks scattered... all over.) Here's hoping that the farm is easier. Farms have a lot more props I can fill the scene with. The luau, not so much because the food would be live action and I can't make hula girls. Also it's not animated, so tiki torches are also a no go. So flowers, palm trees, and coconuts were the best I could come up with.
I'm really tired right now. I was hoping to have the Ashes website finished last night, but every day something goes wrong, and I only manage to take care of one or two small things on my to do list for the layout. All I have left is the animated lightning, which I need Flash for...which crashes instantly on the MBP. Sigh. I'd take a coworker's suggestion and reinstall Flash MX 2004, but I doubt MX 2004 will open my Flash 8 files. I fucking hate how every new version is barely backwards compatible. Photoshop adds all kinds of nifty little features which almost always fail gracefully for older versions. I hope to god Flash CS3 gets something right.
Oh, Ember gave me a copy of the SG magazine. I haven't had the time to really look at it because I need some privacy... reading it on the train, work, or around my aunt and uncle just seems like a bad idea. But I think it's hilarious that she's page 69. However, I do not agree with some of the choices in determining which girls get double-page spreads. I won't name names because I guess said girl(s) in question are like popular or some shit.
I'm going to post this now because I know my image and link tags are probably fucked up and need fixin'. [Actually the tags were fine. Too bad it's useless now that I had to take it down.]
...or was that all a lie!?