Artist a Day Collage Artist Greg Gossel

http://artistaday.com/?p=1084

I chose Greg Gossel for the Artist-a-Day project.

I really like his work because I definitely like grungey, collaborative art. It also looks sort of "back in the day", maybe from the sixties era, mainly because of the woman in the front as the focus of this project.

Self Portraits

Kuler Color Self Portrait

This is my self portrait! The blue and white color scheme wasn't of my own choice; it was generated on the Kuler website from a beach scene. Admittedly, I did tweak it a bit, but the main colors were from the picture :) I actually like these colors better than the ones I chose for my original one below.

I honestly didn't have many issues with this project; everything went very smoothly. In the beginning my layers kept intersecting but a friend recommended that I lock the layers and that nipped that problem in the butt right away. Another small bump in the road was trying to figure out which colors were darker, which were lighter, etc. because these are all different tints of blue so it made it a bit harder, but I got it worked out in the end. It wasn't that much of a problem.

The real issue I had was with the pattern background. For some reason it just didn't want to work for me but like everything else it ended up all right.

Overall I really enjoyed this project. The end result was pretty awesome :)

Original Color Self Portraits

I really like this color scheme too! I feel like I look like a strawberry or watermelon :P The only thing about this color scheme is that you can't really see the folds in my shirt very well. It's a minor detail but I feel like they really made the project come to life in the Kuler Color version.

Final Version of Original Character

(The quality looks lower because for some reason I couldn't get the computer to cooperate with me and get my image on here with the original file, so I had to print screen paste in paint and crop it down)

Work in Progress for Original Character

Unfortunately, I didn't stop to think to take a work in progress screenshot of my original character until I got the worksheet informing me to do so, and by that time the character was well done and I was almost done with the background.

Here's a small picture of my mad scientist without the background. (His nose is a little bit hard to see, but it's there)

I got to the idea to creat a mad scientist while I began my bookworm character. I started to make eyelids for my bookworm's eyes and they came out slanted, looking a bit evil. I could have easily rotated them to fit my bookworm's nice demeanor but I really liked the evil look, and a mad scientist was just the first thing that came to mind.

The whole image kind of just flowed from there.

Some of the problems I came across were getting the face and boots to the right shape. Apparently I'm not good at moving anchor points on shapes because I kept getting weird overlapping loops and other strange things while I was just trying to make the bottom of his face smaller. The shoes actually worked out a bit more easily but I still got odd overlapping loops.

Sometimes the layering was a bit annoying and it took forever to get the shapes to where I wanted them by "sending them back", etc, but it wasn't hard to fix.

Thumbnail Sketches for Original Character

These are the doodles that I sketched out for my original characters. I know some of them are incomplete but I really wasn't feeling those characters.

Research & Ideas for Original Character

I had a lot of different ideas for my original character. This assignment just instinctively took me to what I usually doodle, and in this case it was clouds, robots, and other various things.

A few things that I thought would be interesting for my character would be a few differently designed robots or a book worm.

These are sort of what I had in mind for the book worm idea:

http://tinyurl.com/7yxuhya

http://tinyurl.com/6rz9b7k

As for the robot, the image was just in my mind's eye ;)

Illustrator Abstract Version of Schiele's "The Poet"