Tag: photos

Extreme Photoshopping – Yunyu’s “Dorothy” picture

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This week I was interviewed by Eastyn from PanelBound.com – thanks to Eastyn, an the interview is here. I’m also toning Small Shen at the speed of light, and it looks to be that chapters 3-4 will be done by the end of April *pumps first*. Meanwhile, I get to show you some Xtreme Photoshopping I did a while ago, for my musician friend Yunyu, who released a single called Dorothy which I did some art for. Chief among the art was a picture of her I photoshopped. Here, I get to show you how I did it, and what the original looked like.

 

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The original: This was a studio-taken picture Yunyu, which is fantastically done and needs no retouching. The backgorund was a picture of the nightsky a friend took, slapped together in a composite picture.


 
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Step 2: One of the problems with the original pic is that the picture isn't composed well. Yunyu is too small, and while the background is meant to emphasise the milky way, Yunyu is standing directly infront of it. So I cropped the picture properly, to show the foreground and background elements properly


 
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Step 3: The milkyway looks kinda plain, so I flipped the picture around, and added a bunch of glow effects of it to make it pop out more. I also changed the hue to a bluish glow, to even out the diffferences in colour. A nightsky should be bluish...


 
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Step 4: With the milky way now so bright, obviously I need to get the lighting references right. It doesn't make sense to be standing to the left of the lightsource when you can clearly see that Yunyu's lit from the left, so I swapped the picture element around so the light-source makes sense.


 

 

Final Step: Since the blue and the red contrast is so strong, I changed the hue of Yunyu's skin and hair to match the bluish glow. I left the red jacket mostly untouched, so that the red will pop out, whereas her skin tone will match the blue glow. And Viola! Click on the picture to see a larger version.

House of Odd

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This week I started on inks for chapters 3-4 of Small Shen, and also finished my short story for our Bento Comics Peter Pan anthology (which I’ll talk about in a few weeks). I’m also going to Adelaide Comic-Con as a guest om the 30th March – 1st April, but this post is entirely dedicated to what’s happening next week, which is…

 

Odd Thomas 3 - House of Odd

 

This is the third Odd Thomas book I’ve done, titled “House of Odd” and it’s coming out next Tuesday on the 20th March, 2012 (I posted some art from this a while back). This book was drawn in 2011, and like the other two books, In Odd We Trust and the #1 New York Times seller Odd Is On Our Side, it focuses on the adventures of psychic fry-cook Odd Thomas, star of Dean Koontz‘s best-selling prose novel series of the same name. This book is adapted from a script by Dean and Landry Q. Walker, and I thank the both of them for their fine work!

NB.I also got to thank Lala of Review Carnival, and Allen of Jazma Online for their interviews of me! Lala’s is a general interview, whereas Allen’s deals specifically with House of Odd!

 

  • For North American Readers: You can buy it here off Amazon.com
  • For International Readers: You can buy it here off BookDepository.com, which has free international shipping.

 

What’s the Story?
The story of House of Odd once again has Odd and Stormy trying to solve a supernatural disturbance, but this time it’s a disturbance with a difference! It occurs at the site of a supposedly haunted house, which has just been bought and renovated by Nedra Nolan, a friend of Ozzie Boone. Ozzie recommended Odd to Nedra as the resident ghost-busters of Pico Mundo, but Nedra isn’t impressed – she’s an ex-Hollywood producer who instead hires her own (and therefore competing) band of ghostbusters to figure the house out. However, neither Odd nor the ghostbusters are prepared for what will actually happen in the house…

 

Odd Thomas is a psychic fry-cook who can see dead people, who lives in the Californian town of Pico Mundo. Accompanied by his ass-kicking, gun-toting girlfriend Stormy, he often tries to help the forlorn spirits he encounters by finding their murderers. This involves getting into a fair bit of danger. Luckily, Odd has many (living) friends, many of them quite odd themselves, who help him in his quest. It’s a rather charming, off-beat take on the supernatural, with moments of action and suspense, as Odd finds himslf the target of some truly nasty people as he tries to uncover their nefarious deeds.

 

Here I Show Off Some…
I’ve got to end this with a picture of something Dean sent me for my work… signed, numbered, first-edition copies of the first 4 Odd Thomas prose novels!! It was so kind of Dean to make this generous gesture, so in return I sent him back some original pages from House of Odd. Mind you, I’ve never owned any first edition books before, and had no idea that they were so big. They’re beautifully-printed, leather-bound and the size of a Britannica volume. Here’s some pictures to share with the Internet. No doubt this is worth a lot!!

 

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The red book is “Brother Odd”. It has the prettiest cover design!!

 

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The lightening bolt one is “Odd Hours”. The green one is “Odd Thomas”, the silver “Forever Odd”, and the other red one is “Brother Odd”.

 

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The inside covers of these first-edition books are beautifully illustrated, as are the chapter openings. In “Brother Odd”, all the text on the pages were in the shape of a church window. I thought it was a real nice touch!

 

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There’s only 300 of each of these in th world!! (Well, 500 of “Odd Thomas”, 300 of the rest)

 

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This was actually sent to me in December 2011, but I thought I’d save it until “House of Odd” came out to show the world. So here it is!!

 

Twisted Tales – Dorothy

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It’s an early post this week, and I have some really exciting news! No, it’s not House of Odd coming out in 2 week’s time, though that is plenty exciting in itself. It’s the first, full-length music video of Dorothy, the first single of Yunyu‘s Music-Manga-Animation collaboration: Twisted Tales. I previously wrote about the trailer here, but now I can show you the full video, beautifully animated by the talented Thai animators The Commonists!

 

 

Dorothy is available on iTunes and Bandcamp:

 

What is Twisted Tales?

Twisted Tales is the name of Yunyu’s music album, but it’s not that simple. The story is about what happens when fairy tales come to live in our world (along with the various issues that living in our world has), but it’s not just a music album. Below, Yunyu and I talk about Twisted Tales in our introduction video:

 

 

As a manga artist (and a long-time friend of Yunyu), I had the biggest hand in shaping the visual side of Twisted Tales – it’s quite unlike any other project I’ve worked on, and I had some great fun with the material, some of which was quite unexpected. For example, I didn’t expect to do any photo-shopping of Yunyu’s photos for this album, but in terms of publicity shots, it kinda fell within the territory. Below is a shot I photoshopped for the release of Dorothy. I discovered a previously unknown talent for this sort of thing! It was fun to indulge too!

 

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Click to enlarge. I will be posting a step-by-step tutorial for how I photoshopped this picture later on.


 

The Art of Twisted Tales

I designed the character of Dorothy, which the animators The Commonists then brought to life. Apart from that, my job was to design the covers for the CDs and DVDs, which unfortunately is only available as part of a press kit. The idea is that people are no longer buying CDs, so at least for a while, you won’t be able to buy the CD covers and CD I designed for Dorothy. But that doesn’t mean I won’t show you all that nice art! Here’s a pic of it below:

 
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As for the actual art style, I settled on it a long time ago. It’s rather bright and colourful, but I feel that for a story about twisted fairy tales, that cheeriness works fine as a counterpoint to the dark subject matter. I would cite South Park as inspiration – childlike-graphics, but with mature content. It’s incongruous, like a subversion of childhood imagery, which I liked very much. Dorothy itself is a rather dark song, and the sequence of events that happen in this 6-panel story of Dorothy’s journey through space reflects that. The cutesy art brings that out even more so.

Since the theme of both Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz was travel, I decided to use airmail letters/parcels/stamps as part of the jacket design. The 5 stamps show Dorothy travelling along the yellow star road, meeting the scarecrow (Planet Brain), the tin man (a spaceship), and the lion (constellation of Leo) before she meets the giant blue star – aka the Wizard of Oz. The wizard turned out to be a disappointment, as he was in the original – in this case, the wizard is Death itself. You find out Dorothy’s fate in the final panel, which not coincidently is also the CD itself.

 

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Click to enlarge.


 
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I created a separate cover for the DVD version. Originally this wasn’t meant to exist since the discs were meant to be 2-in-1 or something, but people got confused. So this was whipped up at the last minute, so people can see they’re a DVD and a song on a CD.

 

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Click to enlarge.


 

That’s it from me, for Dorothy. The next song in the album will be coming down the pike in a few month’s time, so stay tuned!

Melissa Cameron – In Geometry I Trust

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Hi all, my laptop is still at the fixers so I don’t have most of my programs available, but I’ve been keeping busy with an iPhone game and Microsoft Excel (that’s a story for another post). While I wait, I went to the Gallery open of my friend Melissa Cameron, a jewellery designer. Her exhibition is called “In Geometry I Trust”, and it’s currently on show at a chic, trendy Waterloo gallery, one of many art galleries at the 2 Danks St Galleries.
 
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What: Contemporary Jewllery Exhibition
By: Melissa Cameron – “In Geometry I Trust”
Who: Studio 20/17
Where: 6B/2 Danks St, Waterloo NSW 2017
When: 28th – 17th March, from 11am – 6pm, Tuesdays to Saturdays

Melissa is a friend of mine from Melbourne, and her jewellery designs are quite distinct. Her inspiration is from architecture and the ideas of geometry that comes within that discipline, so her work looks very detailed and delicate. However, Melissa’s not a “typical” jewellery deisgner – her work is all hand-made, and straddles jewellery design and fine art, so not all of her work is wearable. The work that is meant to be wearable, fragile and complex as they may look, are actually quite durable.

 

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Here's a necklace from one her exhibition, which is for sale there.


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Here is more work from her line, which shows of her style quite well.


 

I don’t wear jewellery much, but I find Melissa’s work a breath of fresh air. She has a style that is quite unique to her, and since Studio 20/17 is a gallery that showcases a number of contemporary jewellery designers, you can see a wide range of jewellery designs here. Comparing and contrasting the different styles, ideas and motivations behind each of the jewellery designers is a lot of fun. Since nearly all of the jewellery designs are for sale, jewellery enthusiasts can also go shopping-mad there.

 

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Outside Studio 20/17. There are other small art galleries all around.


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Some of the other jewellery design works. There were heaps of work by other designers there.


 

You can see more of Melissa’s work at her website. There’s many works of hers that aren’t on display at this gallery, and my favourites are always the intricate non-wearable ones like the ones below. I imagine I’d like to hang one of these on my wall!

 

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The Sieve, from 2010


The Fishes, 2011. Antique 800 silver platter, stainless steel. 25 x 100 x 40mm


 

Anyway, the rest of the gallery was also quite interesting. There’s many, many galleries in the 2 Danks St complex, and since we arrived early to the exhibition, we wandered around looking at the other galleries and the artists on showcase. We saw some really wonderful and innovative artwork there! All-in-all, it was the first time I’ve beem to 2 Danks St, and it was a super-fun experience!

 

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Melissa at her Artist's Talk yesterday


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Melissa talks more about her work again.


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Melissa's necklace from an earlier line in action!