away

so glad to see everyone's been liking my walter white edit! keep your eyes peeled for a jesse one.

anyway that's not why i'm posting this. i'm at home this weekend so don't have access to my computer and work materials, meaning i can't really do anything until i get back to my flat on sunday.

so yeah, guess that's it.

xWALTER WHITEx

SO. me and my boyfriend have finally started watching breaking bad and anyone who knows the series understand that walter is totally, 100% badass. we're only halfway through season 2 so as far as the program goes, i don't know all that much yet. i wanted to include more things related to breaking bad in the image, but, seeing as i still know so little... it was really hard. when i've finished watching all the seasons i'll make sure to be a bit more witty with this!

anyway, generally, i'm pretty pleased with the outcome. hypocritically  i don't really like it when people take images of celebrities and make them "alternative" but i haven't done a photo manipulation in ages and thought it was about time. i wish i took some print screens throughout the process of making this so i could do a kiiiind of tutorial, but, i just didn't think at the time.

here's one photo whilst i was halfway-ish to finishing. you can kinda see the process here...

i actually did quite a lot on this photo and it took me a hell of a lot longer that i thought it was gonna - probably around 4 hours give or take a bit? i'm just rusty as hell. and i went through so many different options as well - as you can see in the start and final image, the shirt is green. in the image above it's black. it was stupid things like that i kept changing. the plug colours too are different, can't tell you how many times i changed the colour of them.

here are some of the images that i put together and mutilated to get this final image...

holy fuck you have no idea how long it seriously took me to put them all in a row of 3. that was PAINFUL. blogger, please, get a better integrated photo system. please. here's a list of how i used them:

beanie - walters head. then applied text in 'old english' font. warped it to the shape of the front of the beanie.
badges - took the black flag logo badge and then placed it onto walter's shirt. applied drop shadow.
fabric texture - placed over 'heisengberg' on the hat. set to darker colour, gave text that woolen look.
ricky hoover - took his wonderful ears. don't look as big on walt... but that's not a problem. not enough space in the world for 2 sets of ears like that...
rose - cut out and placed on walter's neck. set to multiply.
swallow - duplicated and placed on either side of rose on walter's neck. set to multiply again.

obviously not the order i did things in but that is kind of the process i went through. other things i changed:

background - applied 2 textures, changed colour to dark red.
eyes - dodged & burned eyes, made sharper
skin - dodged & burned and also applied levels to give it a more "dramatic" look
shirt - changed to black... then changed back again.
plugs - changed colour from mahogany red (check me out with my fancy colour names) to black... and pretty much every other colour you can think of

i'm sure there was more but i can't remember it. i actually did the majority of this last night before i went to sleep and touched it up this morning, so i can't 100% remember exactly what i did. but yeah, i hope you guys like it. for once, i do.

if anyone wants to know exactly how i did something, please ask, i'll be happy to do a tutorial/walkthrough type of thing. :)

...

i'm already sick to death of this logo so i can't imagine how anyone else reading about it will be. but yeah, i developed it a little bit more. seeing as their casket nails, i thought i might develop the idea of a casket/coffin. i personally don't really like the look of caskets very much so i thought that i'd go for a coffin instead. here are two drawings i did just playing around with the idea...

horrendous photo again! also, sorry my drawings have been in blue and red. this is going to sound ridiculous, but i literally cannot find a normal pencil anywhere. A N Y W H E R E. this is why you shouldn't lend your shit out in uni! also, like my "wood effect"? hahaha. anyway, took these fellas into illustrator...

i lined them both out and pretty much immediately didn't like the first one. i'm horrendous at perspective so i had no doubt it would look strange on that angle anyway... and it does. at least with the front view one there isn't much to go wrong, haha. i also put the banner on the 2nd one but it looked stupid, so i took that off too. then i coloured it in.

WELL WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT. A TEXTURE! a grunge texture, as per. come on, everything looks better with a texture. this itself was still plain as hell so i thought i could incorporate the original nail logo i did.

wow, blogger really does murder the quality/colours doesn't it? anyway, yeah. that's the finished thing. as you can tell, i like things to be simple as hell. just how it's always been i'm afraid. i know it looks super plain at the minute, but i'm going to put the name of the... company? (i don't wanna call it a company, but you know what i mean) on the front of the lid. just need to think of the name first and also a relevant font to put it in or if i'm just going to handwrite it. we'll see.

yeah that's definitely enough of this for me today.

needed a new phone case

for my birthday my flatmate got me a wooden phone case that i'm totally in love with. but of course, after wear and tear the corners have all worn off because of the material and also half of one of the sides supporting the top of my screen has come off. my phone falls out all the time and i just don't think i can use it anymore. :(

i was just gonna buy one of touche amore's (a band) cases but seeing as it's an american website, the postage was waaaaay too much. so i thought i might as well just make my own. always wanted a title fight (a band) case so thought i'd just snag one of their logos up and put it on a case. here's what i came up with...

i think it looks alright. like, it'll do. the site i found to make them charges £19 plus free P&P. hella expensive but whateverrrr i got loans soon, ahaha. 

i was thinking though, i remember when we got out first brief for uni, one of my friends in class made a square box and got his designs etched into it. all he had to do was supply the materials and then the uni did the rest for him... from what i can remember. been thinking if i get myself a plain wooden case (because i love the feel and the look of them) if i'll be able to etch a design into the wood. i guess i'll just have to ask about it. anyway i rambled on way too much.

i hate illustrator

found some time tonight after getting home to draw the logo up in illustrator. thankfully for me, my flatmate is great with computers etc so he gave me a pretty basic run through of illustrator - something i should have learnt whilst doing my last project in uni but whateverrrr. anyway, here's the nail all draw up:

isn't it just adorable. anyway, got it coloured in etc and then rotated them to make that X shape.

i thought it was still looking a bit plain. i played around with the colours some more but there wasn't really much i could do considering it's such a basic shape with a basic colour palette - literally two colours. so, anyone who knows me knows that i'm in a strong believer in textures... grunge textures to be precise. so i went and whipped one up from the internet and applied it to the image.

immediately i think it looks a lot better. there's a bit more "depth" to it, i guess. adds a few more colours etc. anyway, i'm exhausted. while my boyfriend snored away all night i ended up laying there bored as hell until like 6am, then we had to get up at 9. siiiiiiigh. yep, glad i got these done though!

logo development

going out at around 4ish today and seeing as i only woke up around 1.30, i haven't had much time to develop the logo i was working on last night. i did manage to bring them into photoshop and work on them a little bit though and here are the few that i drew up...

two different head sizes. in my original drawings the heads were quite flat and wide but from some of the photos i looked at of the nails on the internet, it showed that some also had tall, thin heads. i tried both.

decided i much preferred the flatter head and then went and put the other lines on it. it also looked far too wide - as i want to put two together to make an 'X' this could look strange with such a wide image. so i shrunk it down and made it thinner.

i put the two together to make X's. i think i was right about the wider ones looking a bit odd, but, saying that, it's pretty hard to tell without having them coloured in etc. i think i prefer the thinner nails anyway purely because of the angle that they're able to be on. i put the wider nails on 45 degree angle and the heads were far too close together, so they are now on a 55 degree angle. the thin nails, however, sit at 45 just fine. eh, we'll see.

anyway i've ran out of time, i gotta go get ready and stuff to go out. i'll get round to developing these a bit more tomorrow when i'm home. oh, exciting times.

design logo

i love music and i love going to gigs. i also love design. i've always considered creating posters for gigs but never got around to it. i'm the type of person who starts something then starts because i don't want people to take the piss - because i know they will. but recently, a lot of people have been creating their own facebook pages for their "design companies" (lets use that very loosely because a) they're just kids who own a cracked version of photoshop b) it's not a company. it's one person sat in their room) and without saying that their work is bad, because that's just a matter of opinion, i guess i feel that if they can do it, so can i.

reeeeally rough ideas at the minute cause it is like 2.30am and sorry for the abysmal quality. don't have a scanner so took em on my phone in a dark light. aaaah well.

first ideas. going for the whole typical X logo with initials in the spaces. M&N are just the initials for my name and N&E are for north east, haha, yeah, i'll think of something less cheesy to put in. just needed to see what they looked like with stuff written in them. tried to think of images that are quite stereotypical to the scene - axes, arrows, daggers & casket nails. also tattoo related but that's good too.

thinking i like the casket nails the most. like i said, rough as a badgers arse but maybe tomorrow i'll work on them. thinking the final image will be full B&W anyway. we'll see.

i am...

margaret newlands, 19 and currently at uni.
i am also lazy, un-motivated and a general slacker.

i've given myself the task of doing something creative every day. if it's not uni work, it's for my own self gain. if it's not creating something, it'll be learning about how to do something creative. this blog isn't necessarily for people to look in on but more for me to log my own progress.

fingers crossed, good things will come from this!



ps. there's gonna be a lot of list writing
pps. like, a lot.