Graphics in Mind

Any Woot people here?

2009-07-15T17:53:00.002-05:00

Really could use some votes for this cool design by Matt (darthapo). It is called Galactic Junkyard and it contains rather worn space ships: The ships are: X-Wing (Star Wars), Viper (Battlestar Galactica), Gunstar (The Last Starfighter), Thunder Fighter (Buck Rogers), Star Fury (Babylon 5).

http://shirt.woot.com/Derby/Entry.aspx?id=33501

Thanks for your help!!!

Great Steely Dan musicians rock on Clay Aiken's new CD

2008-05-24T09:38:00.001-05:00

Keith Carlisle, Freddie Washington, Jon Herrington and Jeff Young (all who have played with Steely Dan backing Walter Becker and Donald Fagen) played on all but one track of Clay Aiken's new CD called On My Way Here. This blog takes a look back at their great contributions to music.

read more | digg story

Clay Aiken to Release Brand-New Album, On My Way Here, on May 6th 2008

2008-04-04T13:41:00.001-05:00

Clay Aiken to Release Brand-New Album, On My Way Here, on May 6th 2008

Time to celebrate good times, come on!

Been too long

2007-12-24T23:18:00.000-06:00

You know it has been too long since you have blogged when (a) you forget your password(b) they have totally updated and you don't even know how to login. *shakes head...hears rattling noise*

This is an oil done in Painter from a picture taken by fivegoldens in Kalamazoo. I just really like the picture.

Kimmel pastel

2007-06-18T13:10:00.000-05:00

I fell behind in my Painter explorations but I did graduate with my degree in Graphic Design. I am really looking forward to seeing Clay in Texas. We have been waiting forever for this...

UNICEF Clay

2007-02-03T16:39:00.000-06:00

GMA oil

2007-01-22T20:09:00.000-06:00

This was from a picture taken by Karen Eh! at GMA. I was playing with introducing color into the painting. I can't wait til Feb. 14th, to see Clay on The Jimmy Kimmel Show.

Snowflake lighting

2006-12-21T15:18:00.000-06:00

I had my eye on this one for a while but I just ran out of time to work on it what with finals and such. I started with the airbrush then went to soft pastels. Painter. I need to get back to Illustrator before I forget how to use it. Clay's NE concerts have been very beautiful. I really appreciate being able to see and hear clack since I am unable to attend one. Please consider this a heartfelt thank you to all clack gatherers, uploaders, sharers, montage makers, banner makers, wallpaper makers, skit writers and erudite commenters.

Artist's pastels West Point Clay

2006-12-18T22:32:00.000-06:00

This wonderful picture was taken by Invisible926 at the West Point concert. I used
artist's pastels in Painter. Am I at 12 yet? Guess I will have to go back and count them.

From the West Point concert

2006-12-17T15:03:00.000-06:00

I hope that all is well. ((((Clay))))

Concert Clay

2006-12-12T16:04:00.000-06:00

I think my last few drawings will be of the lovely pictures people
have been taking at the concerts. This one was taken by Invisible926. It is
an amazing picture. Thanks, Peggy!

Clay's hands

2006-11-26T08:47:00.000-06:00

The ConClayve Blog about Clay's hands

Libby's Boardwalk blog about Clay's hands

There was a man blog about Clay's hands

Something that really happened blog about Clay's hands

Clayspot's blog about Clay

Clay on Regis and Kelly

2006-11-17T22:48:00.000-06:00

He was funny. He was smart. He looked really good. I enjoyed watching it immensely and may I say a quick "Go Emmit!!". This was was done with the oils brushes.

GMA Clay

2006-11-16T00:21:00.000-06:00

I think this is number six in the series of portraits. The funny thing is that doing these portraits is so relaxing that it even inspired me to go back to my bridge series. This one was a screencap from GMA. I am noticing that the hair is so different in each portrait. Cool.

Congratulations, Clay!

2006-11-13T21:30:00.000-06:00

From the UNCC site:

Singer Clay Aiken received the Outstanding Young Alumnus Award. While he is famous around the world as the first runner-up in “American Idol,” Aiken also has used his degree in special education from UNC Charlotte. He graduated with a B.A in special education in 2003.

He founded the Bubel-Aiken Foundation, which supports the integration of children with disabilities into the life environment of their non-disabled peers through summer camps and other initiatives.

Aiken also served as an Ambassador to the Ronald McDonald House Charities, UNICEF National Ambassador of education. In September, President Bush appointed Aiken to serve on the President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities.

http://www.unccharlottealumni.org/alumni_news/news_detail.asp?news_id=61

Congratulations, Clay!

This was drawn in charcoal, soft first then hard.

David Foster Gala Clay

2006-11-12T23:14:00.000-06:00

I drew this from a picture taken by Galrow at the David Foster Gala. I loved the look of it. I created this one with hard charcoal pencils over soft charcoal. These drawings of Clay are part of my portfolio for my Painter class. I sure am enjoying them. Thank you for all the wonderful and encouraging words.

Love the mane

2006-11-10T13:40:00.000-06:00

This was done in Painter using charcoal brushes. The picture was a screencap from the Megan Mullaly Show.

All Is Well---New Clay CD

2006-10-28T19:03:00.000-05:00

It is a Wal-Mart exclusive. You can preorder it here:
All Is Well Preorder page

Thanks to Hartford Symphony for posting beautiful new pictures of Clay. Very inspiring.

2006-09-21T00:35:00.000-05:00

Clay's wonderful new album, "A Thousand Different Ways" is out. His voice is outstanding on these 10 covers and 4 originals but I would certainly encourage anyone to download the album from Itunes because you will get a magnificent bonus track, cowritten by Clay called "Lover All Alone". I promise you won't be sorry.

New pics! One is from the Clay Aiken Fan Pack that can be found at Best Buy and the other was taken at Clay's GMA performance by scrpkym. Thanks for sharing!

July 4th Clay

2006-07-08T19:08:00.000-05:00

I was over at Clayversity the other day and saw the new/old gorgeous pictures from mee2u2 and this one grabbed me so that I knew immediately I would have to take him into Painter and dally with him a bit.

Newest creation

2006-07-04T19:04:00.000-05:00

It was very exciting last night to hear news that Clay was at Kelly's Raleigh concert and with Ruben! Waiting up for pics/recaps was like old times. This was from a picture taken at the concert by fanofaiken. Thanks! Still lovin' Painter.

Dance-Illustration Friday

2006-06-20T21:04:00.000-05:00

Support

2006-06-20T00:08:00.000-05:00

One of the nicest things about being a Clay fan has been all the great people I have met in the past three years, funny, smart, passionate women who are such fun to be around.

One of the friends that I made is just that, but recently there has been some sort of back channel effort to smear her and make her seem untruthful. I don't know why people would go to so much trouble to bring another person down. Life seems to short to me to go around trying to hurt other people and I firmly believe this quote:

“Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people” by Eleanor Roosevelt.

I can't claim that I discuss ideas all the time (although I do love it, especially if the idea concerns art), I do like to discuss events (especially the basketball playoffs currently) and I have been known to discuss people (um, specially that cute red-headed singer guy). People are fascinating in all their permutations but it would never occur to me to start a rumor/smear campaign about anyone else. Why would someone do that? And I am helpless to defend my friend from this because of the backchannel way it is going around. Sounds kind of like a certain lying JP, doesn't it?

So my friend has decided to take the high road like Clay has done and just keep silent in the face of these smears. She has my support.

There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it hardly becomes any of us
To talk about the rest of us.
~Edward Wallis Hoch

Wallpaper clickable at your own risk!

Playing with Painter

2006-06-14T22:39:00.000-05:00

I told you guys that I took Corel Painter this last semester, didn't I? I really enjoyed the course although a few people wondered what I was doing in the class because I could already use all the other graphics apps that a designer needs and Painter is geared toward more fine arts. Well, I took it for two reasons. One was the professor. He is great and I have learned a bunch from him, the other is because I love doing illustrations and I thought Painter would be a wonderful weapon in the arsenal.

All semester I played around with learning to use the tool and the different papers, textures, media and brushes. It is an AMAZING app. You can create watercolors, pen drawing, pencil drawings, gouache, oils, acrylics...you name it and Painter can do it.

Now, why do I use Clay as a subject so much?? Coss he is beautiful er handsome.

Watercolor

2006-06-11T19:14:00.000-05:00

I have been enjoying all the different blogs (mostly about Clay) that I have been reading lately. A great place to keep up with them is the new Clayblogs.

It has been an exciting week, I have been playing with Illustrator CS2, which is awesome. I have always been about the pen tool with the bezier curves but lately it has been fun playing with the pencil tool. You can get a really sketchy feeling with it. It goes a lot faster than the pen tool also.

I had a request to explain installing fonts on a Windows machine. But now I have to admit I am still running Windows 2000 on my PC (Panther on my MAC). What can I say? I really have loved the stability of it. It never gives me the blue screen of death and graphics can be pretty intensive on a computer.

I digressed, sorry, back to installing fonts. Start/Settings/Control Panel/Fonts (right click on Fonts and tell it to Open). You will see a list of all your installed fonts. Now you can either drag your new font in to this folder, or go to File/Install new font and you will have to search for the location of the font you wish to install. Dragging is easier. ;) I wouldn't recommend going over 500 fonts in your Font folder as they have a tendency to slow your computer down a bit. (Please don't ask me if I follow my own advice, k?)

This week's art: Watercolor Clay (clickable)

Anime Clay 2

2006-06-06T19:49:00.000-05:00

I don't like this one very much but I really just got tired of trying to make the mouth and nose look right. Currently looking at more source material. If anyone knows of a really good tutorial on drawing manga/anime mouths please let me know. Thanks.

We (MaggieO and I) are thinking about making a pin out of the first anime Clay but before we have always preferred the cloisonné style and it isn't going to work with this one. It seems to be a choice between offset or screenprint.

Thanks so much for the kind comments. I really appreciate them.

Anime Clay

2006-05-29T00:34:00.000-05:00

This is my first try at drawing in a Manga style. It is much more difficult than it looks. My hat is off to people who do this all the time. It is a fun style.

Related Tags: Clay Aiken, anime, manga, art, illustrator

Clay portrait

2006-05-26T14:04:00.000-05:00

Still humming "Clay Aiken on my mind". I just finished this portrait of him from the AI5 finale. I did it in Adobe Illustrator. It is clickable.

Blown away

2006-05-25T21:47:00.000-05:00

I have only watched American Idol a wee bit this year but when we heard the rumor that Clay might be there, I really wanted to watch it. But on tv it was up against the first game of the Mavs/Suns series and do you think I was going to get the big TV??? Of course not. I didn't even ask. So my 14 year old son had to put with me watching his little 13 inch tv in his room. But even on a 13 inch TV Clay looked so good. I really like the new hair. I like it so much I made a wallpaper.

2006-05-22T14:52:00.000-05:00

Do you have a friend who is crazy about Clay Aiken? Looking for a unique gift for them? I just created this certificate in Illustrator. You can download the PDF version (1.3 Mg), print it, fill it in and give it to 'em. (the certificate I mean).

Enjoy!

Clay Fan Certificate

Let's talk about fonts

2006-05-21T17:00:00.000-05:00

I love fonts. It is amazing and wondrous to me how you can make so many variations from 26 letters and 10 numbers. They are so emotive or they can be. There are serif fonts (they have the little feet on them), san serif fonts (without the feet), display fonts (specialized to be used at large sizes and to grab attention to your headlines), script and/or handwriting fonts (can be used to give a casual, friendly feeling to your message).

There are multiple subcategories in each of these. There are also pi fonts (also called dingbats). These can be very helpful in creating a quick message. For instance, say I am creating a quick card to invite some friends to a cookout by the lake. I want my card to be friendly and casual, so I am looking for a handwritten looking font. A good place to look is DaFont. You might have to choose English or French language.

http://www.dafont.com

On their index page is a list of types of fonts. I am looking under Script/Handwritten. I start looking in the A section and right away, I see Angelina. That is exactly the look I want. So I download and unzip it. I install it in my Fonts folder. If anyone doesn't know how to do this, I will cover this next time. Continuing on, back to the index page of Dafonts.com. I look under Dingbats/Various and I find a great font called Culinary Art by GemFonts. I download that one. Then I choose one called 4YeoSummer because it has some great dings of summery things. Download and install those. Oh, there is something you can do if you don't want to install these. Once you have extracted them, you can open them with your font viewer by clicking on them,now just minimize them to your taskbar. When you open your graphics software, it will recognize them as if they had been installed.

I am going to use Macromedia/Adobe Fireworks to put this together although you could use any graphics app and probably even Word *shudders*.

Here is a quick invitation that I came up with. I used the 4YeoSummer dingbats: G for the couple under the umbrella, J for the woman on the floatie, P for the sun behind "Beach Party" and K for the boy waving on the bottom. I used Culinary Arts: B for the burger and U for the hot dog. Then I wrote the invitation in our font, Angelina.

I am not espousing this as design but just wanted to show a quick and fun way to use different kinds of fonts and dings.

Another short one

2006-05-17T00:02:00.000-05:00

I feel badly that I haven't blogged about anything substantive lately but at least I brought the pretty! This is a Flash movie of some pictures of Clay Aiken that I altered in Photoshop to make them Ansel Adams like dramatic black and whites.

I think about Elvis video

2006-05-15T20:29:00.000-05:00

I have been working on a catalog front page and also making some blog templates but I wanted to try to embed video. This is a montage I made in 2004. It is pictures and video of Clay Aiken set to the song, "I Think About Elvis", by Patti Loveless. Hope you like it.

Beautiful

2006-05-12T19:17:00.000-05:00

Clay in Uganda

I wanted to do a test post using flickr.com as my image storage site of choice because they have this neat button above a picture that is public that says, "Blog this" and you click it, choose a Title and write your post. Voilà!

Portfolio done

2006-05-11T23:36:00.000-05:00

Tonight my "book" (design portfolio) was due. I have been working towards this for a long time now so it feels unreal that I have my portfolio, a resume, a website, a logobook. I guess all I need is a job.

A lot of my class waited while our professor went over our books and we were talking about what kind of work we wanted to do. It was all different but similar. When people ask me what kind of job I want, I feel hesitant to say because my favorite thing is to illustrate but I have been told that things like layout out brochures and annual reports are where the money is. So does a person apply for that sort of job or freelance doing things you really like? That is the question.

There is a group of us from school who are talking about starting our own design firm which sounds like the best of all worlds. We are all good designers and have different skill sets and we like one another and have lots of fun together.

In the middle of getting the portfolio ready, the website up, reading "Painless Algebra" so I can pass my algebra final, I did something just for fun. We will be having CD Release Parties when Clay Aiken's new album is released and there will be a poster contest at some point. There have been some less than happy times lately so I wanted something bright and festive.

It gets bigger if you click it, but put shades on first!

Unanswered question

2006-05-10T23:30:00.000-05:00

My friend Maggie asked me what is the difference between a designer and an artist and I found this description in a curriculum description from NC State.

"An artist-designer is a creative practitioner and image-maker who brings form to emotions and ideas. There is, however, a difference between a traditional artist and an artist-designer: the artist-designer's visual message does not have to be personal, as they work for another, giving form to expressions or ideas of their client. In short, the artist-designer is a visual translator.

I love that definition. Thanks, Maggie! Thanks for the shoutout from The ConCLAYve also! I will start making some templates next week. *g*

Graphics in Mind

2006-05-10T21:30:00.000-05:00

Graphics in Mind

Well, we made it. Up and running. With a little help from a Ruby on Rails guru I know. This template was done in Macromedia Fireworks and then sliced and the graphic elements added to the code. I am still going to change the font on the title. And I am trying to decide if I like where the comments item is located.

Today in Corel Painter IX class, I showed my professor my new website. He liked it a lot and was very kind to tell me that he thought I was a very good artist. We have had many discussions about the difference between being an artist and a designer since I first took Design One class from him.

I am perfectly happy to be called a designer. I know many designers who are frustrated fine artists so I can see how that could bother them but it isn't a problem for me.

Oh, and as Prof. Reece was checking out my website, he noticed that I have done a lot Clay (Aiken) centric work. He remembered my Clay love from Design One which I took in 2003. He said that he really likes Clay because of the great voice of course, but also because of the kind of person he is. Genuine and kind. Kinda like my prof.

Important stuff first

2006-05-10T00:04:00.000-05:00

What is the most important thing about a blog? Why, how it looks, of course! So I am trying to figure out how to get my mockup turned into a blog template. If I figure it out, I will tell you how I did it. The mockup part was easy, I did that in Fireworks.