Just Realized I Forgot My BIG REVEAL!

Some months ago, I gave a sneak peek of an abmCreative ad I’d produced for the spring issue of Starlight Music Chronicles. When the issue was put on hold, I forgot to get back around to uploading the final imagine. So here it is—the BIG REVEAL! (And cue the dramatic drum roll.)  🙂

I’m really proud of this one. While I used a few photographic elements, the piece is mostly layered hand-drawn art set with original textures and tweaked with colors and shading in Photoshop.

The individual drawings took about a month, and blending everything into the final image took about the same amount time.

Do You Remember Being Wild?

Do you remember running wild and free as a kid… perhaps through some summer meadow… or just down the street? Do you remember the day when you stopped… because it was “dangerous”… or “foolish”… and you had to get “serious” about your life? Do you also remember the feeling of leaving something behind?

I think that’s where the Wildboy comes from… or, Wildgirl… or pan or sprite… or whatever you like to call wild spirit. And there are those who say, “Oh there’s no such things as wildboys. If there were… well, where are they? Why can’t we actually find one?” And the answer to that is simple: When you look for the wildboy, you can’t find him—because in that moment of looking, you ARE the wildboy. The only question becomes whether to run back to the meadows and greenwoods where your spirit is always waiting for you.

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Please note: “The Wildboy” is a preview of “Theatre Xrisville,” an art-music-video project coming soon. Subscribe to this blog to make sure you don’t miss any details.

Pyramid Depth (Augmented Logo)

The wire-frame core of this design is a simple line rendering for a friend and reiki practitioner, who wanted a spiral set within triangles to lend the impression of peering down into a pyramid that had opened to reveal a conduit leading to something even deeper. As the original design was requested for small-scale logo use on things like business cards, I kept things simple and clean and only filled areas with solid colors. So the logo should work snappily that way. Yet as I’m partial to shading and multiplicities of color, I couldn’t resist slicing the wire frame into four pieces and overlaying them with textures to effect what looks to me like an album cover for a progressive rock band.

The background consists of two layers: a photo of a frozen lake near Hay Bay blended with a custom background image I call the Speckled Trout. The overall triangle image  (a simplification of an earlier design created for the same friend) blends shots of clouds, sky and the roots of a fallen tree. The primary work involved Photoshop and Illustrator. For final tweaking, I used Microsoft PhotoDraw, one of my very favorite low-mustard applications.

Please note: The adjectival phrase “low-mustard” is a term I just made up. It describes any application that would likely be shooed away from any swanky dinner party where the Adobes are regular guests.

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Copyright © 2015, Xristopher Bland for abmCreative. All rights reserved. Contact abmcreativeservices@gmail.com.

The Lady of the Crystal Cave (Music Video Screen Capture)

Ancient peoples saw caves not as dark, dank places but as entrances to strange and magical underworlds. So I decided to emulate this in a brief segment of a music video project for an overall fantasy-themed work.

Though the segment only runs for about six seconds, the work took an entire day working with both Photoshop and Elements, and involved so many photographic components, blending techniques and color adjustments that it would take a feature-length article to detail them all. Yet for all the complexities and time, I find such immersion to be quite Zen.

The “script” for the segment was a lyric: “Forlorn, sweet Lady Anne’s seen the setting of the sun / she waits in harmony until it’s time to run.” As a central figure in the project, the image of the Lady began with a photo of my partner Mary Beth, who appears throughout the entire project as the ethereal spirit whom the main character is seeking. The final image (a complex overlay) took almost half the day, and ghosts in and out of the segment.

I can’t thank Beth enough for her support, participation and encouragement. In beginning this project, I didn’t start out to promote an original song. (I just happened to have it sitting around.) I began with the idea of developing techniques to create something like moving artwork—rich and colorful images that anyone could create without the complex and expensive process of shooting against green screen. If I’ve made any inroads into a new way of creating moving images, I have Beth to thank forever and undyingly as the one who’s repeatedly kept me in the right place when the pragmatism of the world feels like a dominating invasion force against which my inspirations seem but folly.

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This image copyright © 2015, Xristopher Bland for ABM Creative. All rights reserved. Contact abmcreativeservices@gmail.com.

What Photoshop Reminded Me About Life (Conestoga College Photo Restoration Project)

In hitting the ground running on my first week back to college after many years, I admittedly did so with the wobbliest of feet. Although I’d had plenty of experience with a variety of digital-media products, I hadn’t really worked with Photoshop to any great degree, and as the opening course of Conestoga College’s Digital Media program came on with the speed of an over-enthusiastic, coffee-saturated intern bent on corporate notice, I soon found myself awkwardly clicking away like someone who’d just bought his first computer. It was humbling, to be sure, and as one of the older students at Conestoga, I soon found myself asking, “Am I no longer computer-savvy? Have I lost it?” The question lingered, but with the many Photoshop techniques I learned that first week, I learned how to repair and restore old photographs (exampled here), and in doing so, I learned that nothing is ever so lost or of ill-repair that it can’t be brought back. It was something I could carry assuredly, and I could completely see the job of image restoration as one to which someone would head off excitedly each day.