More Glass Painting

Here are some of the latest creations with Vitrea Glass Paint. The punch bowl is my favourite. Now I have to figure out where to store all this!

Punch bowl and glasses

Fine Tec Watercolours

A couple of weeks ago we went to an art art store and bought one thing we have never used before to learn something new.

Fine Tec 600 watercolour set

Vitrea Glass Paint

Some glass painting experiments done with Vitrea 160 Glass paints by Pebeo.

I like this medium because it is just like painting with arcylics in terms of consistency; the paints are non toxic and the finished design can be baked right in the kitchen oven, after which it becomes peranent and dishwasher safe.

All of these glasses sold at a local festival. I think I'll try some martini and wine glasses next.

Door Handle Sketches

Here are some door handle sketches I did with a white pencil on black paper, just to change things up. I would like to pick three out of therse and make 3D models. Stay tuned for updates!

Oriental Girl Sketch

I recently got Autodesk Sketchbok Pro, which was something I stopped using since university. With all the new features and a great intuitive interface, this program is a pleasure to use. The sketch below is the first one I made with this program. Of course, I still need to get used to the program and get efficient at using all of its features, but so far, it is a great experience and it's tough switching my attention to something else.

Playa Watercolour

Needed to paint today. Dug up some photos of Spanish beaches, got inspired and made this. Enjoy!

Coffee Table

This past summer I moved into a new place and found myself in serious need of a coffee table. With some spare time on my hands I decided to enlist the help of a friend to design and build my own instead of just buying one. Unfortunately we neglected to take process pictures during the fabrication! I'll keep searching for some of the initial sketches, but for now here are a few pictures of the final piece.

The entire table is made from one full sheet of plywood (plus some scrap pieces we had in the shop). All edges utilize myter joints to hide the unfinished edges of the material. The result is that each platform appears to be made of solid wood.

Each staggered square platform is 3" thick with a central cube that everything is mounted to out of sight. 

Cut into the top of the central cube is a fire pit covered by rocks. Hidden beneath the rocks are two small dishes which get filled with standard gelled fuel typically used for fondue sets or chaffing dishes. The flames only rise about 2" above the rock bed but the effect is pretty cool.

Weldy-Weldy Cart

It has been pretty cold outside these past few weeks, but I wanted to complete a project that I've had on the back-burner for quite some time now. So I bundled up and headed out to the garage. I was eager to brave the cold because the project involved welding. If this is something that interests you, but you've never had the opportunity to weld, I strongly suggest that you search out some way to give it a try. It's a lot of fun and can yield great results. Find someone to show you the ropes... how to get set-up and give you a rundown on technique. Then it's all about practice, the more you weld the better you will become. 


This project was to build a cart for my welder. Since I didn't have the a bottle of shielding gas, I build the cart using flux-cored wire arc welding. The welds aren't as nice as MIG welds, but it still works quite well to fuse metal to metal. Below are some pictures taken throughout the process.

I began by cutting all of the metal stock that I required to build the cart. Since I don't own a chop saw, I rented one from the local hardware store. I wanted to make all of the necessary cuts during the rental time limit. After cutting metal pieces with the chop saw, there remained burs that required grinding.

FROG-O: complete!

I promised to show the results of my idea for a kid's glue stick, so here it goes! Below are my final submission boards.

Enjoy and don't forget to vote for this design here!

Henkel Adhesive Packagind Design Contest

Here is an idea I am planning to submit to the adhesive packaging contest by Henkel. Among the different groups of adhesives this company wants to see some designs dedicated to children. So I cam up with FROG-O gluestick.

The design of this packaging was inspired by the frog - green and slimy it hops from place to place and it is a character in many children's tales.

For now, I worked out the views of this product in illustrator and I am going to import them into Solidworks to make a more detailed 3D model. Stay tuned!

FROG-O glue stick packaging for Henkel glue competition

Gradients

Every so often I open up Illustrator and just mess around. The tools that it offers to create and edit graphics are seemingly endless, and sometimes I find it helpful to re-discover its capabilities.

I was inspired by the cover graphic I saw in the latest issue of Kootany Mountain Culture Magazine. It was a pretty simple image really; a series of gradient strips all smashed together. The effect was pretty interesting and I decided to give it a try. I started by choosing a swatch selection from Kuler and then began messing around with the gradient tool in Illustrator. Here's the result:

When I completed the gradient image I started to play around with the transparency and blending mode tools and began to layer some cool textures. These are two of my favourites:

This is really just scratching the surface in terms of what Illustrator can do, but even with only using a few tools you can get some really interesting graphics.

1972 GMC 1500

I find vehicles to be very intriguing. Automotive design can yield some pretty interesting vehicles. Certain sleek automobiles take hold of your attention as you gaze at them driving by. While others leave you feeling perplexed that they rolled off the assembly line.

Either way, they are an interesting subject matter and sometime you just gotta draw one! Observing and drawing vehicles provides a great opportunity to practice your illustration skills. Perspective, shapes, light and shade, line wight, color... you get to work it all.

In this case, that car I drew was a 1972 GMC 1500, and it's not even a car at all. It's a pick-up truck!

Sribbles

Something interesting I found through Stumbleupon: an online sketching application that traces your drawings in a unique way. Check it out here if you want to give it a try too. Warning: it is addictive. Here are a couple of sketches I made with it.

A 5 minute doodle of a cool guy in Scribbler

A more refined sketch of a girl

Motorcycle Render Part 2.

Here is the second installment of the motorcycle rendering project (moving forward from Part 1). I've narrowed it down to a few designs that I like, but I wasn't able to pick one single body shape. Rather I decided to combine elements from a few different sketches and ideas. In order to get some rough sizing and proportions worked out, I've jumped ahead to build a really quick and dirty model in SolidWorks. I plan on using this as an underlay to continue to work up the design by hand on paper. Eventually, once I have finalized the design, I'll go back the computer modeling. It's important to work out all the details before moving back into the computer... after all its garbage in, garbage out!

Check out the spinning animation after the jump! 

Watercolour Blots

My right hand hasn't  been feeling so great these past days, most likely due to the overload of computer/mouse-related projects. I figured I should probably stay away from anything digital for this next entry. Looking around my room, I found a brand new Moleskine (yet another Christmas gift).

I wanted to do a watercolour to break into this new book, so I got my palette, glad to be almost ready to go and realized that I should probably wash it before commencing a new painting. But people often say that a colour palette, which has some leftover colour from previous work is actually better to work with than a sparkling clean one. I like this theory.

My used watercolour palette

I mixed some colours together and randomly spread them over one page of the Moleskine. I then closed it and pressed hard, getting this result.

Watercolour blots on the Moleskine

Now for the most fun part: seeing things within the randomness of colour. In this case, I saw a mysterious girl getting away in a carriage.

Mysterious Lady

Noses

Noses are hard to draw. Human anatomy is all together hard to draw, but facial features seem particularly tough because we see hundreds of faces everyday and so it's easy to spot when one looks wonky on a page. I decided to give noses a try and I quickly realized how complicated they can be! Below is a page of some of the better attempts.

Daler Rowney Liquid Acrylic

I have hinted to friends and family that if they don't know what to get me for Christmas, to get art supplies. So this year I got some cool Daler Rowney liquid acrylic in Genesis Green.

Daler Rowney liquid acrylic in Genesis Green. And a fancy blue pen.

It is closer to ink in consistency and since I haven't worked in ink for a long time, I thought it would be a good idea to bust out some colour paper and see what this sparkly green acrylic has to offer.

30 minutes later and with a bit of Photoshop tweaking, here is what I had. The ink did not look as green on paper as it did in the bottle, which was a bit disappointing, but overall, the metallic shining effect was very nice. I think next time I'll try black paper instead of purple.

The Hair

Motorcycle Render Part 1.

I recently visited the Annual Motorcycle Show and got inspired by many of the 2011 models. In fact, for the first time ever, I had the opportunity to see my favorite motorcycle. With my own eyes, I saw the The beautiful F4 built by MV Agusta . Anyway, I decided to start sketching out ideas for motorcycles. I'm not sure yet if it's going to have a gas engine, or be powered by electric motors.

Here is the beginning of the process, the first round of rapid ideation... a bunch of quick sketches to get the ideas flowing.

Scratching the Itch

About a month ago I had an urge to paint. It's an urge I rarely feel but I had some free time and decided to go with it. After a quick trip to the local art supply store I returned home with a handful of Winsor & Newton acrylics and got busy scratching the itch.

This painting now brightens my living room.

On an 18" x 36" canvas, this was the result. The only constraint I gave myself was that this painting was going to brighten the blank wall above my living room couch. With some great tunes in the background I spent a few hours and just had fun learning to paint again.

The second painting in my recent spree.

Within a few days I was back at the art supply store adding to my new collection of acrylics. This piece (18" x 24") started to resemble the sun pretty early on. I liked the direction and went with it.

New Markers

Got some awesome Tria and Faber Castell markers for Christmas, so I decided to give them a try and sketch for a bit.

Tria Three-nib markers in cool and warm greys.

Warm and cool grey markers are essential for design sketching as they are great for defining areas of light and shadow. Something I wanted to try for a while too is a blending marker, which makes transitions between colours smoother on paper. The Faber Castell markers on the other hand have one tip that is flexible, so line variation can be achieved easily.

Having not sketched in market for a while, it took some time to decide on the subject of the sketch. While thinking about what to draw, I tested out the markers on some Letraset paper. Pretty cool.

Some initial doodles with the new markers.

As I looked around the room, I saw my laptop, which was fully charged and did not need the power cord for a while. So I drew the power cord connector. First in pencil, then in marker. A simple object at first glance, it contained a lot of detail! Plus, the fact that it is a white object made the sketch a great excercise for capturing light and shadow right. An hour later, here is what I had.

Marker and pencil sketch of a Mac power connector.