Tides.shorecrest.org Button (Image coming soon)

So far this week, I've been working on a button for the Shorecrest for Tides. Mr. Seymour recruited me to work on it and after carefully  viewing and observing the Tides website, I came up with a color scheme, a rather stark one at that. The wave came from a suggestion of Mr. Runge's with turned out very well. I hope Mr. Seymour likes my work and I'm excited to see my work on the front page of shorecrest.org.
Thanks again Mr. Seymour!

Starting with HTML and CSS

 This year, I'll be focusing a lot on HTML and CSS in order to learn the basics of website construction and engineering. Luckily, CSS, in my opinion, is loosely based on C so the learning curve isn't too bad. HTML, on the other hand, seems to be its own markup language but rather easy to learn and much more intuitive than some other languages I know. Anyways, this is a screen shot of the website I've made so far using a tutorial. I'll link the tutorial below since it's very well put together and easy to follow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3KESBQTD8k

Radial Blur

I've recently been messing around with the Radial Blur filter and have come up with some interesting results. By placing lines along an X and Y axis set up (perpendicular to the axes) and then using a radial blur filter, I came to this result. Lastly, I duplicated the layer and added a motion blur to give the subtle diagonal lines drawing from the upper left, to the lower right. No outside images were used in the making. Image is 1600x900 at 300ppi.

Surrealism: Devil to Pay

   This past week, the project to make was on Surrealism. Upon going over idea after idea in my mind, finding something, starting it, then scratching it a few days later, I conjured this idea. To many, this piece would appear excessively sanguinary although I find all the gore to be necessary for the meaning it holds. The focus of this image, a serpent erupting from someone's arm symbolizes how, inside us all, holds a small amount of evil. The serpent representing Satan, hence the title, Devil to Pay. Furthermore, the size of the snake holds a deal of importance in how it tears a large, painful lesion. Sometimes we must expel evil and terror invasively, which, through this piece, I try to convey holds to be extremely painful and scarring; and yet,  the pain would be just as equal to withhold such hatred inside.

Vector Desktop Background (1600x900)

   This post was originally supposed to be my current project, however, I wanted to wait for the piece to be done and presentation-worthy before I put it up to the world. Anyways, I made this background just this evening using Illustrator for the lines and Photoshop for glow effects. All the glows are layer styles so the color and intensity are completely editable. This year I really want to focus on non-destructive editing, a skill that would have saved me a lot of time last school year. The piece is in a 16:9 aspect ratio so it should display nicely on most modern monitors.
Enjoy!

Out of Place Eagle

The goal of this project was to design a piece where an eagle wouldn't be found in nature. Most of my work was done just this night and I've been working on other software and familiarizing myself with cg. Never the less, I wanted this to be one of my better pieces. I included many small details like the eagles in the background, the triple eye, and the selective color to give the piece more to look out without being overpowering.

Selective Color

This is an easy piece I made by using a technique to achieve selective color. Most people always make the background desaturated while keeping the subject saturated. I wanted to go out of the box by making the subject desaturated forcing the eye to be drawn to the out of focus background which draws the eye back towards the desatuated flowers.  Some choose to go about this using Color Range, Fuzziness, Range, Etc. but this way is far easier. The only adjustment you need a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer with a Layer mask of the area. The layer mask can be achieved by using the Quick Selection Tool while painting over the missed parts with the brush tool. This creates much better results than other methods. Although, the desaturation wasn't the only adjustment I made. I also added a Curves Layer in order to correct the background color along with a layer technique involving setting one white and one black layer on certain blending modes in order to increase shadows and highlights.