Again, I'm not sleepy so I decided to work some more on my vector art of Audrey Hepburn...
And another look at the art with added details.
The highlights and shadows are a combination of the gradient mesh tool, gradients and blends. I did use the blur filter on the shadow behind her pearl necklace.
This image is the preview mode.
So I came home yesterday to find Diesel up to his old tricks...
Ok...ok... my husband put Diesel up in the cat tree... But ha! It still makes me laugh.
My dream home is finally coming together. My dream home being my dollhouse. 
The shingles are finally done and starting to work on the exterior. My dollhouse kit came with wood siding, but we decide to stucco the outside instead. That's what I'm doing in the photo below.
It's a lot of work building a dollhouse.
They draw and surf the Web for inspiration...
Here's what I've been working on for the past hour...
Can you guess who it is?
Here's another illustration about 10 mins into.
I'll give you a hint it's NOT Sarah Palin and here's another illustration, about 15 mins into.
Ohh, come on, you must have some clue?
Okay, it's Sarah Palin. Just joking it's not.
Last illustration cause I'm getting sleepy and should be in bed by now.
I'm sleepy, will continue this in the near future...
Good Night....
As a graphic artist my main job is to come up with and design layouts and illustrations from scratch. But sometimes I get my ideas from reporters I work with. My most recent page design is the York Revolutions playoffs layout. I received a preliminary sketch from Jim who is a sports writer.
Here's the sketch 
So this gives me a basic idea where the writer is going with his idea. I then start building my package based on his sketch. The idea was to layout the players on the page in their playing position on the field. I drew a baseball field in Adobe Illustrator and brought in images of the players and positioned them on the field.
Here's a sneak peak of the final page, to see the enitire finish page check out tomorrow's sports section in the York Daily Record/Sunday News.
Okay, not exactly, but I think it's impressive what a simple point and shoot digital camera and some artistic understanding can actually pull off a pretty darn good fashion shoot.
With on staff photographers limited and my magazine production deadline looming, I asked my supervisor if I could try and shoot the fashion spread for September/October edition of Smart. He said, sure. And here's the result.
After taking each piece individually I went into Photoshop and bumped up the contrast using levels, and then adjusted the sharpness.
I took the photos on a clean white background. To soften the flash reflection off the patent leather shoes, I held up a white paper napkin. You can use this trick when taking other photos and the flash is to harsh.
Dropshadows were also created in photoshop.
After the images were ready I went on to laying out the spread. I new that one image would be main, and then the rest would fall in line. I wrote the headline and decided that I needed to make the headline a little standoutish with out being over powering I used a thin modern looking serif font. I also like to play with font sizes and nestling of letters as you can see with the lowercase "b."
The rest of the design is clean and to the point, which makes the spread visually appealing.
To get your FREE subscription to SMART click on this link.
Here are some links to help with today's seminar led by News expert Robb Montgomery.
Another RSS Forward feeder (this one seems slower and I had trouble with it)
I can't decide what's more pathetic. The fact that Paris Hilton didn't know which way to look to see the teleprompter or Britney Spears winning the Best Pop Music Video and then in her acceptance speech thanking God. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I have anything against God, but I think God himself would not want to be exploited by a person that has far been following in the path of the almighty.
And the other odd thing, why is there a MTV Music Video Awards? When was the last time a music video actually played on MTV. I think you need to have MTV2 to see any videos.
I'm pleased to write about a co-worker of mine, Carrie Hamilton. She is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University with a Bachelors degree in Fine Arts. Besides doing daily graphics for the newspaper she also is a fine artist by heart.
Here are some of her sculptures that are on display at YorkArts She won an award of distinction for her work "Passage and Presence: Figure Series," composed of several ceramic figures in this weekend's YorkArts fine art juried exhibition.
Artist statement: I am making art to communicate the restless journeying of life, how the body inevitably decays, and how we as humans are all intrinsically flawed and broken. I am continually amazed at the many products and procedures intended to keep the body looking and feeling younger. Through my artwork I am examining the notions and stigmas related to old age, this is evident in my piece Passage and Presence. The piece is a series of small busts whose bodies are in various states of decay. Particularly I am interested in the way that the mind may be decaying while the body remains intact. Or how a broken body may be hindering further development of an ever-aging mind.
