At long last

Hello Blog land! I know I say this every time but it's been awhile since I've updated. The excuse for my absence this go round is I've had a lot of very exciting things take place all at the same time, all of which led to about 6 months of working around the clock. Now that I'm through it though I can sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor (and post pictures of course!). It's a lot of stuff, so I'll be revealing all of my various projects in phases.

The first to come to fruition is a children's book that I illustrated for BlazeSports. BlazeSports is the legacy organization from the 1996 Paralympics held in my home city of Atlanta Ga. They're a non-profit whose mission is to advance the lives of people with physical disabilities through sports and recreation. When they first approached me with this project they said the goal for the book was to encourage parents of disabled children to allow their kids to participate in sports. I loved that this book had such a strong mission behind it and that it will hopefully be something change the lives of many kids. Of course I took the job!

After months of hard work from all parties involved, the book was revealed at the BlazeSports annual conference last Friday. The road to getting this book on book shelves maybe awhile but I have faith that it will take off.

I'm pleased to present to you, "Ricky Played"





I couldn't be happier with the way the final product turned out.

All the talented people!

One of the perks of being an artist is you get to surround yourself with other amazing talented people. Mary Weaver, a good friend and past coworker of mine recently had her ADORABLE tshirt design accepted and put on sale on this site.



Unfortunately, as is the deal with this site, it was only put on sale for one day and I missed the deadline to post this link ( I know, I totally fail). However, I do invite everyone to check out her blog and site for more awesome illustrations. I'm getting a t-shirt in the mail for my birthday and I can't wait til the package shows up on my front porch!

I also just received word that another friend of mine's husband's cousin's (ok, so the relationship is a tad distant) video has made it to the finals in the HP You on You competition. Having never met this person but having seen his entry, I have to say that I'm impressed:



I'm always a sucker for hand drawn animation, so this would definitely have gotten my vote whether I was friends with a member of his family or not. I encourage anyone who reads this to also go to the competition page and put in their thumbs up for "Chris Hand Drawn."

Save the Date

While checking Design Sponge yesterday (I do this everyday) came across this brilliant stop motion "Save the Date" video that a couple made for their wedding. I can't get over how awesomely brilliant this is! Such a clever way to get the word out.

Save the Date_9/26/09 from Jason Harmon on Vimeo.

Invitations

One of my very good friends from high school will be getting married in October of this year. As one of her bridesmaids I've been helping her with some of the planning and I took on the task of designing the invitations. I jumped at the opportunity to create something awesome and unique (perhaps a little too enthusiastically actually). The theme of the wedding is "Enchanted Forest" so my friend and I discussed giving the invitation and aged fairy tale feel without going overly feminine and Disney looking.

Around the same time I discovered this wonderful product:



A Pazzles Inspiration Creative Cutter! With this machine you can cut just about anything straight from your computer! It's designed for scrapbookers and hobbyists but the more I read about this machine, the more uses I saw for it. What I would give to have had one of these in art school!

Of course, it retails for about $600 off the shelf (a little expensive for my tastes) but after shopping around a little bit, I found a great deal on one on ebay.

My friend's invitations seemed like a great opportunity to see what this creative cutter was made of. I begin sketching forest inspired designs and we ordered the paper.

An unfortunate feature about the Pazzle is it is not made to work with a Mac, which was a big hurdle for me. After a lot of trial and error however, I was able to get a version of Windows to work on my Mac so that I can run the program for the creative cutter. It's a little time consuming to have to restart the computer in Windows every time I want to use the product, but it was worth it for the result.





It took a little time to cut out each invitation individually, and we had to enlist several other friends to help man the machine while we folded and cut the corresponding reception and RSVP cards, but it is still a miracle to me that we were able achieve this quality without shelling out lots of money to pay for custom die cuts or risking loosing a finger cutting out 150 of these with an xacto knife.

I'm looking forward to hearing how they are received after my friend sends them out.

For the Love of Nikon

I recently purchased a Nikon D90 and several lenses to feed my developing photography addiction. My beloved Konica Minolta Dimage Z6 finally bit the dust and I'd been wanting to upgrade to an SLR for quite some time. This may just be the best purchase I have ever made! Since acquiring it I've taken 3000 something photos and I'm loving learning about how to get different effects and play with the focus on it. Shots that I used to have to set up a tripod for I can now take as regular snap shots!

Since Adam and I are moving in together this month, we thought it would be nice to take some "family" photos.

The "parents" with the furry spoiled baby.



A closeup portrait


And a romance shot.



I also got the camera just in time for Adam's sister's wedding last weekend. Nothing like a wedding to act as an opportunity for you to learn how to use your camera!

So I've been very fortunate over the past few days to have an influx of commissions coming in. The downside of this however is that it leaves me with less time to illustrate for fun, so I have nothing new to share today. I did however come across this AMAZING stop motion video done by a fellow SCAD alum, Bang-yao Liu. I do not know him personally, but I'm always happy to support a fellow classmate. As much as I love 3-D animation, it's always encouraging to see more traditional forms of animation being explored. I'm awe of people who have the patience to put together a project like this. Please enjoy:




Pretty awesome huh!

In the spirit of awesome stop motion, I also had to post the following video, "Her Morning Elegance," by Oren Lavie. I know this video has already circled the blog circuit but I love it none-the-less. Every little detail of this video is a work of art!

Fireflies

Last week I got my monthly edition of National Geographic (it feeds my need for travel when I can't afford to actually go anywhere) in the mail and I just now got around to reading it. Towards the front of the magazine was a brief article about how the worlds populations of fireflies are apparently down something like 70%! It had occurred to me that I had seen far fewer of them in recent years but I hadn't seen anything in writing declaring that there is a problem.

Reading this really drove home for me how you really cant take the small things in life for granted. Having fireflies out to light up the night in the summertime is one of those lovely bits of nostalgia that you really don't know you love until they are gone. Perhaps it's just a small thing, but I'm a little saddened by the fact that my future kids may grow up in a world without fireflies.

In tribute: