Just finished another digital painting based on a photo I shot. This one is of The Castro in San Francisco. I'm not sure why I love making art featuring locations in San Francisco, but my guess would be that it doesn't look like any other US city so there is something vaguely familiar but foreign about it.
On a whim the other week I submitted some photos to LFI not expecting much to come out of it. Well, I was a bit surprised when something actually did. They accepted two of my photos into their gallery and awarded one of them a "Master Shot" distinction.
Starting October 24th I'm co-hosting a series about comedy in advertising through the lens of Los Angeles ad agencies. I partnered up with Freelance LA co-collaborator Stephen Reidmiller, David Roth and Yuriy Mikhalevskiy of Purple Shit Productions and TBWA\Chiat\Day LA. The first event will feature a talk by Andy Pearson of Liquid Death, a standup show featuring comedians in the ad community and a showcase of comedic commercials from agencies in the LA area.
Tickets go on sale September 25th and are $10 each. You can find them here.
Every day there's some new feature introduced to generative AI that has potential uses outside of what was planned. Like, I doin't think Adobe was even thinking about Typography when they introduced their take on structure references within Firefly.
This isn't super new, it's been a few months since I started seeing people use AI to stylize single words, but I wondered how far could you push it? Well, apparently more than I realized. Here is what I did in Illustrator and what it looked like after I sent it over to Firefly.
Had a quick thought and made a visual to support it.
I've always wanted to be better at character design so I took some down time I had to practice a bit.
It usually surprises people when I tell them I prefer full-time to freelance because they look at my resume and see how much I've freelanced during my career. Well the secret is I never chose to be a freelancer. I was forced into by layoffs three times.
But I will say there is a lot I learned about the industry and how to work in it from freelancing for so many different shops. They are all things full-time people can figure out on their own, but usually it takes significantly longer since they are exposed to fewer agencies.
If you start at shops that have their shit together, you may think most other agencies are similar. If you work at a "chaos shop," you may think that's just how advertising is as well. The truth is that every place is different and freelancing for a ton of them teaches you that. It also helps you learn how to deal with different situations that can pop up at them, so the next time it happens you'll know how to deal with it.
Again, all things that anyone can learn, but being freelance just puts it on a fast tracked schedule. Regardless, the post seems to have struck a chord and got over 500 likes and 29 reposts in under 24 hours. Its still crazy to me that people react this way to some of the stuff I write, it's really me just getting assorted thoughts on paper for myself, but I'm glad there are people out there who feel the same.
The funny thing to me about ad agencies is that, especially as you get to the higher levels you aren't paying people to work for you as much as you are paying them to not compete against you.
I wrote this the other week and it mildly blew up. A week later the former ECD's at GS&P New York announced their new agency (post layoff) would be taking Liberty Mutual with them.
The other month I did a digital illustration of San Francisco and it let me reflect on personal style, something I never really thought I had because I was a bit embarrassed about my own artistic process. After some more work in Procreate and learning about other artists process, I've come to embrace my style more and actively want to make more work in it.
When I was in San Francisco the other month for a wedding, I took a photo from the elevator of our Union Square hotel that looked out towards Coit Tower. I knew right away that it would be my next piece.
Over the past month I worked on this as time allowed and I generally feel more ownership over it since this was based on a photo I actually shot vs. trying to adapt someone else's source material.
This past weekend I hosted a small party for my daughter since most of my LA friends hadn't been able to meet her yet. I wanted to play off the idea of a "sip-n-see" so I combined a bourbon bottle with a baby nipple, using the label as the space for the party info.
I saved it over a transparent background, again knowing that as I texted the invite out depending on when recipients read it would determine if their background was black or white and wanting it to look good on either.
Finally, the bottom line on the label is a repeat because it replaced my address, not about to just casually post that online.
This was created entirely in Procreate on my iPad.
I wanted to explore what the process would be to create a bespoke font using AI. I probably should have picked something easier because cutting out cat hair on a cat is already a pain, but everything else should be easier by comparison.
Adobe Firefly was my generator for each letter, then each finished and arranged in Photoshop the old fashioned way. I'm not sure how long something like this would have taken to do in Blender or Cinema 4D, but I don't know either so I guess the answer is an infinite amount.
My wife, daughter and I traveled to Atlanta last weekend so that she could visit my hometown for the first time and meet all of my and my parents friends. I wanted to make an invitation for the event and thought there might be room to play with the medium a bit.
Normally die cut and print invitations are going to be out of budget for a small event like this, but when you're sending something digitally there isn't really a production cost.
I thought about how I'd just be texting the invites to people so shape wasn't really an issue. I could do whatever. What I did have to account for though was day/night mode on people's phones. Since the background could be white or black depending on the time of day I realized I needed to export as a png so it would appear correctly whenever it was viewed.
A minor thing, but you'd be surprised how many people default to squares and rectangles for purely digital executions.
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