No one can earn a million dollars honestly...

So last week, i got tagged on Facebook to play the Photoshop Game.  For those of you who don't know the rules (which probably isn't many since I re-tagged pretty much everyone to play) are as follows:

 1 - Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random... Read More”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to "Random quotations"
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

5 - Post your cover with your name/album title links

Here's what I started with,

Band Name: Shocker Toys 
Quote: "No one can earn a million dollars honestly" William Jennings Bryan 
Flicker Photo:

It's some guy playing the harmonica (or so the titled of the picture stated)

And here's what I came up with.

I basically played with an overlay of a couple Photoshop filters to get the drawn/painted effect, and then dodged the eye to make it a more prominent focal point. 

I used a radial gradient overlay for the colors, borrowing swatches from a picture of a $100.

The band logo, I took from an image off deviant art, desaturated it and livetraced it in Illustrator.  Added Text then faded the opacity it in Photoshop.  I created a block of text then used a blending mode to create a little more texture in the background.

Then I grabbed a CD guide template off google and laid it all out.

Fun times! :-D 

Thanks for reading and if anyone else wants to play or has played, I'd love to see what you come up with.  You can link me in the comments below.

Bad Dog! Bad!...

Animal photography is tough.  I have two very lazy, sedate dogs, and even getting good shot of them can be a big hassle.  One of them is so lackadaisical I'm not even sure if she's conscious half the time.  She just sleeps for hours on end then gets up and stumbles around only to find another spot to sleep in again.  The other moves the second a person enters the room. So any potential shot of her is obliterated by dog in the face. 

But every once in a while they do something or position themselves in a way that makes a decent shot possible. Like these morning shots I was able to get over the weekend.  (And yes, I realize that all the shots I ever take are of them sleeping, but that's pretty much all they do.)

I must admit, there's a bit of Photoshop magic going on in these.

Lets just say the brilliant morning sunrise coming
through the window was more seeping than bursting.

Again, you can see more shots like these on my flickr: HERE

Thanks again for reading!  Comment below if you like!

Oldies But Goodies!!!

Hello All!  It's that time again.  The first of the month, when all our files get backed up onto the external HD.  Let's all give a heartfelt sarcastic YAY! :-) ... But anyways, while cleaning out my computer, I stumbled over a shoot that I helped out on last year for a now defunct MMA sports wear company.  The shoot was fun, and the girls were cute :-),  so I thought I'd share some with you.

You can see more on my Flickr HERE

Thanks for reading, and feel free to comment below.