I may have gone a little crazy with the glows but what the hell, it was fun. Here’s my sketch for the next in the activity:

What an awesome series – great writing, great art.

Gabba gabba hey.

Well, with a little research it turned out that the image was actually a montage of two different images and it had probably been done at the ad agency that hired me, so I was free to do whatever I wanted with it. So, off to sketching I was.

First I googled a bunch of reference images of cell phones and sharks and drew a few quick sketches to get a grasp of how they looked and how I could mix them up.

Since the image would be a single character on a basically blank background, the shape and design of the cell phone shark would have to be interesting enough to hold the image and composition together. So I started thinking in shapes.

Above you can see the sketches that I thought were worthy of finalizing marked. They’re far from perfect but I now knew what I wanted and where I would take the final sketches. There were two different ideas: One for the traditional cell phone model (which was much like the image in the brief) and another one for the shell fish model. I finalized sketches for both:

The first one was pretty much a cleaned up and refined version of the thumbnail. The second was a combination of two different sketches. I wanted both of the sketches to have a sort of a fake fish eye perspective. I added the mockup type, and sent the sketches to the client.

They went for the second one. The final had to be all vectors which was a challenge since I usually work with raster images – and the final would have to have a painterly, retro quality to it. So, after some emails back and forth with the client and tweaking things, I finished the piece:

Some extra space added around the edges for cropping and bleed.

So for starters here’s a little something I did for the Character Tag Team activity at Unit 16 again. After CamdenLikesGreen’s hedgehog sketch.

Forgot to add an apron and a hat, though.

I’ve been playing with the idea of setting up a scene in DAZ Studio and using a render as a reference for an illustration but haven’t gotten around to doing so until now. This time I did, however, and it really worked in my advantage regarding speed and probably outcome too. Much less thinking involved when it came to perspective, foreshortening and shading – even though this still just a sketch and a bit funky in places.

In case you don’t happen to know what DAZ Studio is, it is much like the better know Poser except that it’s FREE. You just need to register (again, for free) at the DAZ website, and you’ll be able to download your own copy. There’s a ton of free content available – including figures, clothing, hair, props – in sites like Renderosity.com or ShareCG.com as well as DAZ’s own website – because for the most part DS uses the same files as Poser.

Essentially what you do with DS is clothe and pose a figure, possibly include some props, add lighting and then render the scene. It’s like a “virtual photo studio”. It’s easy to use and good fun actually, I’ve ended up wasting spending a lot of time playing around with learning the program myself.

… and you’ve got hell to pay for it.

Another one for the CTT.

So inspired by the myriad of expressions mastered by David Caruso, this is what I came up with for this round of the Character Tag Team after Sticmann’s watercolor.

It was quite an enjoyable challenge, and even more so for my old computer which really couldn’t handle files this big. I had to do the final, full sized image in pieces (which the client put together with better hardware), and still the working file for the biggest of the pieces was 542 MB. Phew.

Check out some details too. These are 25% of the actual pixel size:

This was a fun project – very clear brief and just few minor, good changes in the sketching stage. The client seemed happy with it and I like how it turned too. There’s a slightly bigger version of the image in use on their website.

A bit of eerie synchronicity going on as well: Going through some biographies I just realized that I finished the image – truly unbeknownst to myself – on his damn birthday, June 23rd. So happy birthday, Glenn…

Fucking metal. Serious business.

And my entry for the next in line, a gentler, more confident fella:

So I decided to go for mood instead. Maybe young Grace Kelly getting a brief glimpse at the crystal ball – and her eventual fate.

I opted to go for a more practical, “realistic” design rather than the typical top-heavy spiked heels and microskirt type of designs you often see in superhero comics.

Didn’t even realize that Hulk is a Marvel character until I’d already finished the piece. Oh well, same difference.

“Friends or Foes” is a short comic I did last fall for a comic anthology that unfortunately hit the rocks and never got published. Too bad. Based on what I saw  there would’ve been good stuff in it. Curse you, recession!

Read it here! And enjoy…

I received a pleasant email from the Senior Editor of How Magazine. It informed me that Tempesthole.com has been chosen as one of their Top 10 Sites for Designers for this month, March 2009.

A utterly and completely unexpected honor but no less appreciated. It’s nice to see the effort I’ve put into the site doesn’t go unnoticed. Thank you very much, How.

We just have to let a few (thousand) of you go, and it’ll be just fine.

“Shoot like a Pornstar?”

Well, hell yeah!

In fact I did two versions of the illustration since I couldn’t decide which one I like best.

Second one is referring to a famous quote by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon:

Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy.

Honestly, the message didn’t even have a link anywhere and the only indication of what the point could have been was the sender’s address which linked to a project that apparently happened in year 2000. Go figure…

So, goodbye Bush – don’t let the door hit you in the ass. Hope the next time we hear from will be when you’re put on trial.*

In the mean time, the Guantánamo Bay detention camp is still running with full steam. You can sign a petition to challenge President Obama to close Guantãnamo, put an end to illegal detention, torture and impunity at Amnesty International’s 100 Days Challenge website. It only takes a minute to do it.

For more info about Amnesty’s framework to end illegal U.S. detentions check out tearitdown.org.

*) Not holding my breath, though.

Anyway, have a look around the new site. I like think It’s matured like any fine lady should, becoming slightly more charming and considerably heavier than before. If you find anything that isn’t broken (images, links, etc.) please let me know and I’ll do my best to break them too. Please update your bookmarks as well.

Here’s an illustration to fit the theme:

What actually is under the hood is Wordpress with a custom theme specifically developed this purpose.

Here she is modeling the hottest of the hot in fashion for Fall 2008! Perfect for every body type and occasion! Wow!

This one’s a project I did for The University of Lapland’s International Office. It included a magazine ad, some editorial material, a website and a small printed brochure to lure exchange students to the three higher education institutes located in Finnish Lapland: Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences, Rovaniemi University of Applied Sciences and the University of Lapland. For more info on the schools or the project, you can visit www.StudyInFinnishLapland.fi.

The first that that had do be done was the magazine ad and the editorial material for the article. I only had a couple a days to both come up with an idea, that would be both fairly fast to execute with the materials at hand (I only had the couple of days for it) and could be expanded to cover the whole campaign.

I came up with an idea of combining monotone illustrations of student characters with actual photos of the school premises. That way the illustrations would work as a unifying graphic element – as well as making the promotional material pop from the other schools’ mostly stuffy, official and highly similar ads. All this had to be accomplished without compromising the credibility of the schools.

Here are the ad and one of the images from the magazine article (the other was just a basic photo collage without illustration).

The next step was to design and produce the mentioned website for the campaign, which included doing a few more illustrations for the site’s headers. To avoid using images just for their visuals I included maps of the schools’ locations in the headers.

And as the last phase, I designed the eight page brochure of the campaign. Again a few new illustrations and I modified a couple I’d already used. Here’s a couple of spreads from the brochure and an photo with an illustration:

And finally, the characters compiled into a single image as well as one of the illustrations from the brochure.

NOTE: None of the photos are mine and their rights belong to their respective owners. They are either from the archives of the schools, the media archive of the city of Rovaniemi or www.Finnfoto.com.