Starting an advertising identity.....branding

My good friend and artist George Handrahan came over today with all of his design and program knowledge and helped me get an ad together.  I am thinking about doing a campaign with some specialty magazines to get my work out there a little more.  It was a very interesting process!  He used InDesign to get the design started and switched back and forth a little with photoshop.  The first task was the most difficult - finding a font that was a reflection of not only my work, but directly identifying a genre as well.  Then a palette design was chosen, something that would make my work stand out but nothing that overwhelmed.  We went with a pretty straightforward design with a little extra to bring added attention.  Last but not least was adding a couple of images.  The color and design should make it easy to interchange pieces without too much work.  I'm sure we will fine tune a few times before actually putting it out there, but I'm really happy with the results so far!  What do you think?

STUBBORN!!!!

Okay, so sometimes (most times) I am very stubborn about a piece and defend my compositional decisions and the idea behind them.  After looking at this piece the entire week and getting some feedback from artists that I respect, along with a few others (LOL), I decided to change a few small things in this painting.  This is the part of me that my mom says I stand and stamp my foot until the very end.  Can you see the changes?    This is After.....

Before

Endurance, Snowmelt - reworked!

This was one of those painting that still just needed a little tweaking - a hard line here or there, change of color and a little pop in just the right place.  I went back to my original source, my original idea of mood and place so I would not lose the reason for the painting in the first place.  There were just a couple of things to make it better.  Does it really make it better?  Was the message strong enough that I was just nit-picking because it came back?  Who knows the answer, probably never will know the answer.  The painting needs to speak on it's own emotion, and sometimes technical correctness destroys that emotion and sometimes it defines it better.  Like my mom used to say - "we shall see what we shall see"!

This piece was tweaked as well.  I changed the direction of the sun and added some modulation to the sky a bit.  I still really like the shapes of the trees and the square format.  Not quite as "blue" as it once was!

March 2013 Newsletter

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