Liquid Planet is a weird name for a lunch place

So I was dining at a relatively new Cleveland yuppy chain called "Liquid Planet", which was quite yummy, when I looked to my right and saw this:

Scary Liquid Planet Wall Decoration

This didn't seem to phase my girlfriend, but I couldn't stop laughing.  This smoothie and wrap lunch establishment seemed to want me to think that eating there can make old people frighteningly bouncy and make your kids do well at gymnastics.  The facial expressions in this photo may be a little hard to see, but I definitely think the blue-hairs on the right seem waaay too happy as they skip down the orange street.  And the 20-something guy in the middle looks completed nonplussed as he is vaulted over by his sister(?) like some sort of human pommel horse.  And all of it was photoshopped over some orange and yellow sunburst which feels like it should be out of a cautionary global warming ad. 

All in all we had a good meal, but I was a little freaked out to say the least by the odd mural-sized advertisement right by our booth.

Liquid Planet Rating:
Atmosphere: B- (only because of the scary old people in the pic)
Food: Yummytown.


On a different note, I am currently trying to export my blogposts from here to move my blog to a new location.  Stay tuned!

Creative Hands Ad Campaign

I've been pretty busy recently, and I just started working for Ohio Web Technologies this week so I don't have much of my own stuff to post right now, but I received the following ad campaign in an email the other day.  While I had seen one or two of the ads in the campaign before, seeing them all one after the other really blew me away.  From what I can tell, they seem like they were most certainly done in photoshop, using lots photos of hands.

Click the photo below to see all the ads.

 

Happy Halloween / Phun with Photoshop

Here are some festive Halloween pics that I Photoshopped for fun:

This was an image I used for my friend's Halloween party invitation.  I took a photo from his facebook profile, used Live Trace in Illustrator to get a simple image of it, altered some colors, then blended it in with a real photo of a pumpkin using Photoshop.  I could have spent more time making the light coming inside look real, but it was just a quick image for fun.  (Side note: the way the live trace worked accidentally made his chin look like a ghost - awesome!) 

This is me (in the center) and my friends dressed as the Incredibles for Halloween.  I used Photoshop to edit out the background, add a new cartoony background and Incredibles logo, add feet (our legs were cut off at the knees in the photo), and tweak a few other minor details.  

This photo and the two below are essentially unedited with the exception of the background being removed (and filling in body parts that were cut off in the original photos).

This is my friend Chris in costume as Frozone. I Photoshopped him on to Frozone's ski board from the movie.  This picture is actually a composite of about 5 different images - the photo of Chris, The Incredibles logo, the ski board, the ice, and the red city background.

We entered a Halloween costume contest for the tights/spandex website we used.  Please go here and click "Like" below to help us win!

Invitation shminvitation

Here is an invitation I made to a private art showing Gretchen Reifsnyder is having in the fall.  Her paintings can be seen at watercolors1.blogspot.com.

This is the front, which uses a painting of hers that she selected. The information has been blocked out.

Here is the back, leaving plenty of room for addresses and stamps.  I used Photoshop to isolate the frog from a more detailed painting and to extend the branch to about twice its original length.   

Phun with Philters

Last night I was at a concert for the hip hop artist Drake (my girlfriend won tickets on the radio!) and I took a few pictures.  I only snapped a few and they weren't particularly good or clear so I decided to use this as an opportunity to experiment with some of Photoshop's filters.  I went the extreme route so none of these are supposed to look remotely real. 

This is using the Cutout filter on a picture of the stage and the crowd, with some coloring effects.

Here is a picture of Drake's house band and their shadows on the wall, using the Chalk and Charcoal filter.

This is the crowd before the show altered with the Glowing Edges filter.  In my opinion, Glowing Edges can make any mediocre picture look stylized and AWESOME.  Look at all those glowing human heads in the crowd!

Neglected blog!

Hey blog followers - sorry for neglecting you.  I actually have a few commissions I am working hard on right now so hopefully I will be posting some new stuff soon.  The Bootsy's New Hat poll is closed and French Horn won - the resulting pic will hopefully be posted later this week.  Here's an HDR to tide you over.  Stay tuned!

The reason I like HDR (High dynamic range) photos so much is that there are a lot of ways you can distort a single image.  You can make a photo look hyper-real or give the photograph a certain mood or feeling that it didn't previously have.  The image above is actually taken from the same photograph as Stormy Tree (click the link to see) - I cropped it into two photos and used effects on them each in different ways.  To view more of my HDRs, click here. 

Cleveland Gets a Bum Rap

Yesterday was a gorgeous day and I took some photos while walking around downtown Cleveland.  The titles are below each pic.  As always, you can click the images for a larger view.

In Da Park

Merman With Aspirations to Fly

Reflecto-Cleve

Too Lips

Statues Are Cool Too, Guys

In Da Park 2

City Hall's Rear End

Shaded by Justice

Ye Olde Courthouse

Walking on Sunshine, Whoa-Oh

Science, Wind, and Rock N' Roll

Lots of Scary Shhh in the Ancient Land

This is a T-shirt design for my friend (and for me) based on a song we wrote when we were kids called "In the Ancient Land."  Just for fun.

Lemme know if you want to buy one when we get them made (on American Apparel shirts).  Please don't forget to vote for Bootsy's new hat on the right side of the page.

You Landerbrook, You Brought Her

Don't have much today - I've been working on a website for my boss.  This is a photo I took of our office building on Landerbrook Drive for the home page.  The picture used to contain a car, a van, two signs, and an orange post.  I love photoshop.

Click here to see finished website.

4 Red Cars and a snowy tree

I spent the afternoon working on some business card designs and on a website I'm building for my boss.  The business card ideas will be posted tomorrow, but until then you can enjoy 4 red cars and an FX-y photo of a snowy tree I took in January.

It was really weird - I walked outside and the world was black and white except for my car and the three red cars surrounding it.

Just playin' with filters.

Middle of Nowhere, Ohio

Haven't posted in a few days because this past weekend I was at Kenyon college visiting friends and singing with the Chasers.  Here are a few pictures I took of Kenyon's beautiful campus and the surrounding Ohio countryside.  Click any of the pictures to view them full size.

Kenyon's pretty church.

This horse was chillin in someone's yard.

Click to view this whole panorama of Middle Path.

Elementary school

Black Box theater

Someone's yard.  Awesome.

This one had huge powerlines in the shot.  No more!

Little stream along the road

Ah, America.

Many photos taken, One photo posted.

I took a bunch of photos yesterday because the sky looked weird when I got home, but this was the only one I really liked. It was originally a much bigger scene, but I thought the tree was a much more interesting composition on its own.

Selections from Magazine

These are some layouts for a ficticious bank publication done as an exercise in InDesign.  The images and the text used is generally placeholder text and stock images, and are shown here for layout purposes only.  Because this blog does not easily support PDF format, I have taken selections from the magazine and converted them to JPEG for easy viewing.     

The front cover.  The Generations Bank logo is my original design, and is up on an earlier blog post.

Table of Contents.  Obama, Avatar, and shopping.  What more could you ask for?

Editorial Spread (using placeholder text).  I designed grayscale fake advertisements for "Giant Mattress Bank" as well using a stock photo image.

Cover story spread (space in the word "Recession" is for the gutter).  Avatar, woot.

Back cover featuring an original CoffeeBean advertisement using a stock photo, along with mailing indicia at the bottom.

Sunny day + Cleveland Heights = More photos

I lied. This first photo was taken on Euclid Ave., not in Cleveland Heights.

It may have been a sunny day, but the trees still make it look like Winter.

Unaltered B+Dubya photo of a church in Cleveland Heights

I realize that my title is completely misleading, as none of these pictures look sunny or happy.  But I don't care.