Speed Painting - digital style!

Painting is something that can be quite a time consuming process.  Doing sketches, working on the composition of your piece, planning a colour scheme, prepping your materials... That's already a lot of time spent, and you haven't even put paint to canvas yet. Depending on the piece, it can sometimes take days, even weeks to finish. It's nice sometimes to realize that not every painting has to be a masterpiece. It can be pretty fun to face the canvas without a sketch, or any set plan in mind and just throw something together, nice and quick. With software like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Painter, and a wacom pen tablet, you can create any style of illustration, and do away with the messy supplies. The process of creating a digital painting with a pen tablet is just the same as actual painting on canvas, without the mess!

What I'm posting below is my first attempt at speed painting. I gave myself a time limit of 30 minutes to go from a blank document, to a finished portrait of my daughter.  Doing a "quickie" illustration like this doesn't make for the greatest end result, but it's a nice way to do something creative that you don't have to invest a lot of time in. For this particular piece, I chose to use both Painter and Photoshop, and I recorded my screen while I worked. I then took the 30 minute video clip, sped it up and crammed it into 1 minute. It gives a nice little sneak peak of how things went from start to finish. Below is the final illustration, as well as the short "making of" video clip...  Enjoy!

A Reminder of Awesomeness

Time to take a little break from food pictures... not for long I'm sure. It seems to be what I'm in the mood to shoot lately. I should really take some time to cook some nice looking food and get a good setup going with proper lighting, props, etc... Until then, I'll just keep taking pics of my lunch!

Right now though, what I want to write about is more important, my better half Nicole. She's a pretty amazing person who has been to hell and back this past year, and still manages to keep a smile on her face. She also spends her days and nights taking care of our wonderful (but oh so life draining) kids, and still retains some traces of her sanity. Not an easy task! Then she has to put up with me.  -sigh-

As if this wasn't enough, she somehow manages to find time for some creative projects as well. She's half of our cake making team, she makes some pretty kick-ass dolls (I'll post a pic soon, I don't have one yet), and she also creates these cool little felt characters. I'm posting a pic I took with my phone of a few of them.

Anyway, I think like all of us, sometimes she needs a bit of a reminder of just how great she is, and how many awesome things she's capable of. Consider this post a permanent reminder! I'm also posting one of the very rare shots I have of her where she's not giving me the finger or sticking out her tongue!
Love you baby!  : )

What's for lunch?

I seem to have developed a habit of taking a few pictures of my lunch. Well, when lunch is interesting anyway. It's not like I'm obsessed with food or anything, but it does make a good subject. Today's lunch, yummy spring rolls, and some black bean rice.

Shooting food can be quite challenging at times. Lighting has to be set up just right, otherwise things just look off, and the food doesn't look appealing at all. Then, depending on the dish, you have to worry about getting the shots while the food is still hot, or before it dries out under hot lights.

There are a series of tricks photographers can use to make food look delicious, and keep it looking great throughout a long shoot. For example, a few scoops of shortening can be used to replace ice cream, which can obviously be problematic thanks to the whole melting thing. To keep meat, fruit or vegetables looking fresh and juicy, spraying a bit of veggie oil over the subject is sure to do the trick. Need a bowl of corn flakes in a shot, but don't want the cereal to get soggy? Use white glue instead of milk. Problem solved!

I could go on and on, but I'm sure you get the idea. So the next time you see a delicious dish in a magazine, take a good look and wonder what was done to that food to make it look so good. These lunch shots I post are not lit, or enhanced with foreign materials (I actually eat the food after I take a few quick shots), so they're not the greatest, but I still enjoy taking them. Hope you like seeing them.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Goin' low tech

Thanks to digital photography, and not having to worry about the cost of buying and developing film, people went from just taking the same old boring pictures at special events like birthdays & holidays, to now really documenting their lives. With 100,000+ pictures sitting in my hard drives, photography is definitely an everyday thing for me.

Digital is obviously great, but when I received my Holga (a very low tech, all plastic camera) in the mail, I got a little excited. Like a kid with a new toy, I was giddy when I opened the package.

There's nothing fancy about this camera, it's not much more than a plastic box that houses medium format film. It even comes with a roll of black tape that can be used around the seams to prevent light leaks. That is if you want to prevent them. Letting light in and getting random burns on the film can be a nice effect too. Thanks to the flawed plastic lens, the shots have a nice hazy retro feel. The results are completely unpredictable, and that's why I love it.

Here are few of thd shots I've taken with the Holga.

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Makin' Cakes!

It looks like we might be making a few cakes for people soon, which should be fun (I hope).

We've made a series of pretty decent cakes over the past few years (if I do say so myself), and it can definitely be a challenge at times. The kind of cakes we make are more like edible sculptures than anything else, and so many things can go wrong. The cake might crumble too easily when being carved, the icing's temperature might be a bit off, which makes it hard to work with.

Overall, it's pretty labor intensive, but in the end, very much worth the effort. Here are some shots of a few of the cakes we've made in the past...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone