 |
|
And who can forget Rocky? Here I will show you how I created my business card logo and the burst on my Home Page. There are many steps to it, and it took a lot of patience
and experimenting. I don't know if I ever would have come up with the idea of using a parrot for my logo if I didn't own one but it makes for a very nice visual
effect and everyone seems to remember "that white bird".
My logo was originally a simple piece of modified clipart and eventually I
decided to create my own logo. I really don't like to use clipart, mainly because everyone can use the same clipart. If I am doing a job for someone I prefer to make sure that if my client sees their logo somewhere else...it was taken from my client.
There are a lot of steps to this graphic, but to keep from boring you and
potentially losing you in the process, I have shown the three major parts of the image
and described how they came about.
This is the beginning of it all...drawing his face. I used a lot of different fills and blends to get the chalky look of Rocky's beak. If you break this all apart you will have 22 different objects that were created, and then
filled and combined or grouped in different ways to keep some objects on top and others on the bottom.
It was all just a little easier than it looks.
The body was next, so first I outlined the shape and then I sized it to the beak. The nice thing about computer art is that if something is out of proportion you can very easily resize it. After getting the face and body put together it came time to add some color. Okay, so most of it is white, but still his feet and tail have color, and the shadowing on the chest and wings needed to be drawn in and filled.
I also used a lot of blends, and the body was shaped to get the best overall look.
You can really go crazy here and try to show all the detail, but too much
complexity sort of seems to detract from it all, and since this is a
business card logo most of it would be lost anyway.
This is the completed logo that I have used for my business card and
stationery. As you can see, adding a tree branch for Rocky to sit on and the sun and trees in the background sure brought the rest of it to life.
After owning Rocky for a couple of year, I realized that white birds are not as eye catching as the
very colorful Macaws, so the added color helps him to stand out. I filled the chest with a light grey fountain fill to try and highlight the shape of the feathers and also his skinny little legs. His legs are so skinny that there isn't even enough to gnaw on if I ever get hungry. For my Home Page graphic I had to take this image, without the sun, the branch or the trees and cut part of Rocky's body out to create the effect that he is bursting out through a hole in the page. There is a
very simple trick that I used to create the "hole" he is piercing through.
The easiest way to see what a hole in sheet of paper looks like is to take a sheet of paper and punch a hole through it.
I recreated the shape of the torn page and placed Rocky over top of it. One of the things I had to do is keep track of what I had grouped and how I layered them. The drop shadows often had to be ungrouped from the graphic so that they can go to the bottom of the page. The drop shadow of his beak had two effects to give it a dimensional look. The first drop shadow was on the page itself, and the second drop shadow was on the raised, torn piece. Then I added the feathers and put drop shadows on them
also, and my home page shows the finished piece after I exported it to a gif with a transparency applied to it.
I hope you enjoyed this demonstration...this is what goes into planning and creating a design. It's a lot of fun, and I
encourage you to give it a try if you have an interest in computer graphics. Although I started out as a graphic artist, I
knew nothing about computers and picked this all up by just going at it and having fun. Enjoy the rest of your visit and
please tell your friends to stop by and feed the bird!.
Thanks!
|
