benwatts.ca

I’ve tried a couple times this year to participate in “Make Something Cool Every Day” (it’s pretty self-descriptive, flickr set here)  but despite my best efforts I haven’t been able to do it successfully. There was a time back in February-April where I was getting close to making something every week, but even that slowly faded away. To help get around the issue I thought I’d challenge myself to a one-hour exercise: 30 minutes to sketch, 30 minutes in Illustrator. That didn’t quite work out, but the result was a tentacled monster taking down a ship. Yup.

Oh, I guess it should go without saying that I was largely unable to adhere to my rules. The sketch was done in under 10 minutes — so I shifted the other 20 minutes to Illustrator time. Then came 30 minutes of Photoshop time … which came about after my time in Illustrator was up and I wanted to keep going; I figure switching programs and setting a new time limit is fair, no?.

What can I say, the system isn’t perfect yet.
The process is too lengthy to do one per day. Balls. It’s got to fit into 30-45 minutes.

Yes, I guess I am getting carried away.
1680×1050 download at Flickr. The sweet bokeh-style circles in the background: here.

This thing is nothing fancy, but it’s one of those things that I think is pretty cool because of how it started out … as a grey background with light grey triangles:

^ I made a triangle, positioned it randomly, repeated this a couple dozen times.
I had no idea what I was doing at this point.

^ At some point I got bored of doing that and started selecting (magic wand), filling, and blurring parts of the triangles.

^ MOTION BLUR! Now we’re getting somewhere awesome.

^ Added type, duplicated the blur, adjusted the colour.
At this point I decided that grey and easter colours weren’t going to cut it.

^ Enter vibrant purple-pink!

That’s about it.
There was tweaking to the type (masked bits of it) and added some texture and warmer colours to get the final result.