"You Or Me?"

"Leap"

This illustration came about from a picture I took of one of my friends and her sister who came to visit her. I saw a little something in it one day, and decided to get creative. The original picture makes me wish I could hang out with my sister, so in doing this, I decided to dedicate it to sisters and the crazy fun we have.
These two lady's are from Talkeetna, AK. So I chose to incorporate various bits of that into a collage.

Why Are We All Working So Hard Anyway?

I took this picture on September 15th, 2008 while at work. My coworker Cindy found this lil dude she name Otis under her deck one day. At the time she guesstimated he was maybe two weeks old. And being a lover of creatures, she felt the need to take him in. Being so young, Otis needed a lot of care. He needed to be bottle fed at least every two hours and of course needed constant love and attention. So for a couple weeks Cindy brought Otis in every day and we all eventually fell in love. I would get my very own visitation time. Otis soon came to acquire sight and a knack for playing w/ things and he especially loved chewing on my fingers and playing w/ my computer's mouse. He would come over a few times a day, and my hands would keep him occupied as he chewed on my fingers while I worked. On this particular day, I wore him out big time. He must have thought my keyboard looked like an ideal spot to catch a cat nap. He changed position a few times, but I was always able to work around him, except for the occasional change in my music's volume or the opening and closing of my disk drive. I found and ideal moment to capture Otis!
(Click on the picture for a link to The Daily Sentinel's Pet Blog about Otis)

I soon decided to join in!This is Otis w/ Cindy his second day at The Sentinel. In the time he was here, he nearly doubled in size.An Otis Update: 3.19.09
http://www.gjsentinel.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/communities/petphotos/entries/2009/03/19/the_computer_cat_grows_up.html

"Woods Lake"

A demonstration of how I turn random "doodles" into Digital Art :

Who The Heck Took The Pic??

The following are ads I've made using my own "photography":

This Farmers Insurance ad started out at a spec that was a full page going into the "How To Guide" special section that ran this last July. My rep didn't give me any details or ideas of what she wanted, so I was free to come up with whatever I could. I went on the internet looking for anything related to the Grand Valley and just decided to use one of my own pics. My rep had a very hard time selling it and it eventually came down to deadline. She ended up convincing the person in charge and that person convinced each of the agents to buy part of the ad so they could afford it.
The picture itself was one of the very first pics I took back in the beginning of June with my brand new Nikon Coolpix P80. A 10.1 megapixel, 18x optical wide zoom digital camera. I went up on the Colorado National Monument right after I bought it. The sun was just going down, and I thought it was the perfect time to play around.

This First United Methodist Church ad also started out as a spec. My rep gave me a piece of paper w/ a picture of Balanced Rock from the Colorado National Monument and the text that needed to be on the ad. She wanted a full color and a black and white ad so that the customer would have choices. I did a bunch of searching on the internet for images of Balanced Rock, and couldn't find anything worth using that wasn't already copyrighted. So I decided that night to go out and take my own picture. A friend and I ventured out at about 6 pm and found the rock almost too late. The sun had already started to set behind the surrounding cliffs, the rock was still lit, but only for a short period of time. (On a plus, I managed to convince the entrance ranger to let me in for free since I was only going about a mile up the road and would be about a half an hour or so.)
For this ad, I wanted to get the image to pop a little more, and give it a realistic yet not so fake look. So I applied a couple of different effects. The rock itself I isolated and there are actually two images, one on top of the other. The first layer is underneath and is the original picture. The second layer is on top and is the image of the rock that I applied the effect "torn edges" to. One looks real, one looks fake. I then took the top layer and did a "multiply" blending effect to it which blended the two layers with variations on transparencies. After that I created a background that I thought would look good w/ the rock and tada!
The customer chose to go with the black and white due to cost and it ran in last Saturday's paper and in this weeks Sentinel Weekly which comes out on Wednesdays

C M Y Knot???

Last week I had one of the most frustrating conversations up to this point in my working adult life. My adorable sales rep Judy came to me and and asked me which colors we could use if a customer only wanted to pay for one color. I said thats easy, we print in CMYK...Cyan, Magenta or Yellow along with the obvious, Black.

She looked and me kinda blankly and said innocently, "What color is Magenta?" I explained it as basically a florescent hot pink. Looking very puzzled as to why we would use a hot pink she asked, "well, what's Cyan?" I also explained it as yet another florescent bright blue. She looked even more puzzled. She asked me, "well why is it just those colors?"
The frustration begins. I had to try to explain to someone that knows nothing of the four color printing process why it is those four colors and not any other color (I am not certain how long she's been working in the paper, but I figured all reps would have to know this just for their customer's sake). Now I still don't understand myself why those colors, I just know that when they are combined they can make up pretty much any color in the alphabet.
Poor lil Judy tried so hard to understand, but without actually seeing the colors, she just wasn't grasping what I was saying. Which is understandable because I was definitely not giving the best explanation. I learned out of a text book which explained every step in maximum detail. So much so that I'm pretty sure I blanked out while ready and missed most of what the book was trying to tell me...(don't judge, I don't like to read and it was really really boring). We eventually called it quits.
Just yesterday, Judy came back to me, asking me what Cyan and Magenta are. To keep it simple I told her I was gonna make some swatches for her and print them out so that she and her customer would know exactly what they were looking at. I gave her a quick piece of paper w/ the CMYK colors on it and labeled them appropriately, and she said "Oh, thats what they look like." And off she went.
Still not satisfied with the example I gave her, I piddled around and whipped up one that is very clear. I even thought to include the RGB colors, just so she would know what that meant.Lemme tell ya, this seemed to help her out so much. I explained that when in any major printing process there are Four plates. One is Cyan, another Magenta, another Yellow and another Black. And that those four plates with those four colors are layered on top of each other. And once laid on each other, depending on the different percentages of each color, they combine to create any other color.
Like: 50% Magenta + 50% Yellow = Red
and 50% Cyan + 50% Yellow = Green
and so on.
After the visual explanation, she seemed to get it. She even said, "Oh! I had no idea that's what CMYK meant! We both still have questions. A major one being, who thought of Cyan and Magenta? (she is fascinated by these two colors). We determined that is was some man some time ago...but then we figured it was probably a woman...and we OFFICIALLY determined that is was a woman, a wife who's husband took all the credit for figuring out that these four colors are (what we now call them) the "MAGIC FOUR"
...on an ironic side note...I had to convert the example into RGB so that it could be properly viewed on the web. Because unlike Print, the Web works in RGB....wicked!