Design-Dhursday 2: Eyes

So the idea behind this D-D challenge came after I stumbled upon Johnson Koh’s blog 10Steps.SG and found a tutorial entitled “Making a Beautiful Pair of Fantasy Eyes.” It looked pretty cool and I thought it would give me a good excuse to fool around with photo manipulation in Photoshop, so I suggested the idea to Tatge and started looking for a nice pair of eyes. I used an image a found on Flickr, Tim in sanhazzay’s Mr Gray Eye, as a starting point and started messing around using the tutorial as a general guide. I ended up with the eyes posted below. During all this I learned a lot more about using Blend Modes and Adjustment Layers, however, the real lesson learned here was Brushes, Brushes, Brushes! So much creative potential that I was almost unaware of until now. I ended up download lots and lots of new brushes after finding a list of free Photoshop brushes on Tutorial Blog and now I’m in the midst of making sense of it all… which should keep me busy until I think of a new Design-Dhursday challenge for next time.

Design-Dhursday

Since Tatge and Keggeroo and busy doing nothing these days, Design-Dhursday has been officially moved to the 1st and 3rd Thursday of each month. Hopefully this will produce higher quality designs all around. So come back next week for “Design-Dhursday: Eyes.”

Design-Dhursday 1: Patterns

Welcome to the first ever Design-Dhursday post! Design-Dhursday is an idea that has been floating around between my pal and former classmate Tatge (Lying on Couches) and myself for quite sometime now… the idea being that if we have weekly assignments it will motivate both of us and push us to keep trying new things and learn new techniques.

This week’s challenge was suggested by Tatge after he saw a book of repeating patterns and suggested we come up with some of our own patterns from scratch. The following is what I came up with… it started with two variations of a simple black and white square tile then grew to three 4×4 combinations of those tiles, and then finally a large scale repeating design made up of all of these small patterns.

Next week’s challenge: Eyes

The idea behind this one is to create some amazing eye effects in photoshop. The inspiration can from the following tutorial I saw online a couple weeks ago: 10Steps.SG — Making a Beautiful Pair of Fantasy Eyes

Blood…

So.. piggybacking off of the Halloween spirit from my last post I found a couple of bloody designs I threw together back in Spring 2008 while I was still at school. These designs are really really simple and are just text on found image. I found the images on Flickr and did these as a basic exercise, so I apologize for not being about to credit the creators of the images. Nonetheless, I think these poster designs are kinda fun. The idea behind them was poster to hang around campus to promote the upcoming blood drive (I deeply regret not actually posting them around campus.. would have been some fun guerrilla marketing…).

Happy Halloween

I was feeling festive today, so I threw together a little Halloween greeting. Hopefully I can keep this momentum and continue updating this blog.

Designing a keggeroo logo

My first project in starting this blog was trying to design a logo and banner around the idea of “Keggeroo.” I had a couple of ideas, like a kangaroo with a keg in its pouch or a half kangaroo half keg creature, but after a few sketches I still wasn’t liking any of the designs. Then I came up with the “keggeroo rat” design, the legs and tail of a kangaroo rat with a keg for a body, and after playing around with that came up with the following design. This is still the first version of the keggeroo logo, so it might still undergo some rethinking and tweaking, but, all in all, I don’t think it was a bad first attempt (it is also the first time I’ve used the the pen tool in photoshop).

The keggeroo comes hopping in…

Hello everyone,

I’m Keggeroo (a play off of my initials K.E.G.) and I’m going to be using this blog as an excuse to experiment with graphic design and post my creations. So if you were hoping for a beer site or the rants of a drunken party boy after a raging kegger…. I’m sorry to disappoint you.

I recently graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, MN with a major in CAMS (Cinema and Media Studies). As a CAMS major I have always been intrigued by the images around us and how they are created/consumed, which got me interested in graphic design and digital photography. I took a couple courses on these subjects during my time at Carleton, but sadly I wasn’t very good and never got beyond the basics… so now I hope to re-spark my interest in design, goof around in photoshop, and try to learn some new stuff..

I hope you see something you like and I welcome any tips, comments, or criticism (preferably constructive criticism).

~K.E.G. the Keggeroo