“Basket Case” is a new t-shirt illustration design I created featuring a wild-eyed disc golfer cartoon character in the Kustom Kulture/Odd Rods/Ed “Big Daddy” Roth style — complete with veined eyes bulging out of the head, a wild and crazy grin with an exaggerated, wagging tongue dragging out of the mouth.

Available for purchase — and customization — over at Zazzle. Click here to get yours now!

Disc golf is something I am a huge fan of, and I wanted to bring a bit of fun and cartoon attitude to the sport. Many of the shirts or designs I see available are very “hippie” based — a loose scribble, or tie-dye related artwork. Perhaps in some areas disc golf is popular with those sorts of folks, but all the courses I have played in the Ohio/Pennsylvania area (and I have played a lot of them) I have yet to see a hippie myself.

Typically the demographic is all over the charts, from your “Average Joe” to grandparents with grandkids, teenagers just goofing around to nuts like me who take it a bit more seriously. Disc golf is a great sport in that anyone can play as long as they can throw a Frisbee, the overwhelming majority of the courses around the United States (and the world) are free to play, and the equipment is very inexpensive. You can even use a regular ol’ catch Frisbee, no need to buy the specialized discs.

If you haven’t heard of — or yet played a round of — disc golf, I highly recommend giving it a go. Head over to Disc Golf Course Review for an extensive database of courses throughout the world, including player reviews of the courses, photos, upcoming events and tournaments and lots more. As I mentioned, there’s probably a free course near you, and it’s easy enough to bring your kids, parents, grandparents, wife, boyfriend — anyone can play this sport.

You may also want to check out the official Professional Disc Golf Association website, PDGA.com. Yes, there’s a professional competition-level to this sport and tournaments are taking place all the time, all over the globe.

A special nod to Tim and the members over at Disc Golf Course Review — I ran a poll with my fellow members to get some feedback on the design and the title of the shirt.

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Basket Case

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A cool resource for Star Wars geeks (like me) out there looking for vector art of the logos/insignias for the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire, seen throughout the original Star Wars trilogy.

These files are vector artwork, and free downloads. Enjoy!

Xaonon • Free Download: Star Wars Insignias Vector Graphics

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Star Wars Insignias — Free Vector Art Downloads

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The list for me so far includes: all font activation plugins for Linotype’s Font Explorer X, “Select Menu” for Illustrator CS4, Canon’s Scangear CS plugin to access your scanner from within Photoshop’s Import menu, and plugins from developer Worker72a such as the ‘Zoom To Selection’ plugin for Illustrator.

In my haste in upgrading, I forgot to check for the availability of these, and thought I would pass the info along to others in case you rely heavily on any of these. I am sure the updates are on their way, but for now you are out of luck.

Another reason I like to keep previous versions installed alongside and Adobe upgrades.

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Creative Suite CS4 Plugin Availability

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This is a huge bummer, as there is no easy way that I know of to display what you have changed compared to the default set. I can only speak for Photoshop CS4, Illustrator CS4 and InDesign CS4 as I do not use the rest of the programs in the Design Premium suite enough to customize keyboard shortcuts.

I can’t recall if this is the case with previous Creative Suite upgrades as well or if this is a CS4-only situation.

To add insult to injury, when upgrading to CS4 (from CS3), Adobe also moved some of my customized files that weren’t compatible with CS3 into a new “Adobe CS3 leftovers” folder in the Application folder on my Mac (I have no idea how this all is handled on Windows systems).

I suppose I should be glad they didn’t just throw them all away, but imagine the surprise I would have gotten launching a CS3 app and discovering lost functionality. The weird thing is that not all the plugins/settings were moved to this “leftovers” folder. I could see no rhyme or reason to it all.

Just a warning to anyone upgrading so you have time to plan to set up all your custom keyboard shortcuts.

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Creative Suite CS4: Custom Keyboard Shortcut Woes

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Monkey Bat at Monster Monday

I don’t know why he’s named “Monkey Bat” either, I just thought after I drew him that he had bat and monkey characteristics, and I guess I wasn’t feeling too creative about the name.

This drawing started out as a rough sketch in my sketchbook this time:

You can see I was playing around with very simple geometric shapes to construct this little guy. Ovals and triangles. I also wasn’t sure how to go about the ears, and decided to get to those when I worked on this in Photoshop.

Next step was to clean up one side of the artwork:

Even though the arm was on one side and the leg and face I drew from was on the other, once I duplicated and flipped the layer it made no difference:

Now he’s starting to come together. Next, I reduced the opacity of this layer, and re-drew the linework on a new layer:

This gives us nice, clean line art to work from. Next step is to clean up this linework, adding line thickness variations and other cleanups:

Now the basic line art is completed, and we can move on to color. This line art layer will remain the top-most layer throughout the rest of the process. note that it is on a transparent layer, any white in the background is it’s own separate white-filled layer. This allows us to do things with the sketches and line art without having to worry about the white being in-between the lines.

A flat color layer is added below the line art layer:

And then a shading layer is added, set to the Multiply blend mode:

Then, above that, a highlights layer (set to Screen blend mode):

A hair highlights layer is next (actually one layer, duplicated and flipped once again):

And then a final layer adding some hair details:

From here I added some flat color and a radial gradient on separate layers to give a simple background, and what you get is the final art seen at the beginning of this post.

If you enjoyed this post, found the Photoshop sketching walkthrough useful, or have any questions regarding the process, please let me know in the Comments section below.

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Monster Monday: Monkey Bat

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on BoinBoing via @DotatDabbled on Twitter

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Soup Can Skull

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I recently had a bizarre problem with this blog: the Sidebar was appearing way at the bottom of the home page, at the end of the last post entry. I saw some potential fixes for this on the wondeful web, and all seemed to point at an unclosed < div > tag. 

My first mistake was looking at the most recent post (which had an oversized image that I fixed). turns out the error cropped up a couple posts earlier and I just hadn’t been to the home page in a while to notice.

The fix was indeed < div > tag related. Here’s how I fixed it after a bunch of troubleshooting and scouring the code — or rather how it was introduced into the post in the first place and how to avoid it…

The short answer is that I had introduced these errant div tags into the post by copying and pasting a post in the Visual Editor mode from a Page to a Post (I had inadvertently created a Page instead of a Post, and so just copy/pasted the content — which included an image — from the Page via the visual editor to a new Post via the visual editor.

I am not sure if the image had anything to do with it, but I am guessing this is probably the case.

I thought I would post this for anyone else out there having a similar issue.

In summary:

• If you are having issues with your WordPress sidebar jumping to the bottom of your home page, check the HTML of all the posts currently featured on the home page — most likely one of them has those div tags in there

• Take this as a warning to use the HTML editor in WordPress if you need to copy/paste from a Post or Page to another Post or Page.

Also a thanks to Serge Madenian, his post on the ’sidebar at bottom’ issue led me to look into the div tag as a possible culprit. And although I found the problem in the meantime, he had quickly replied to my comment on his posts asking for assistance. Thanks Serge!

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WordPress Sidebar At Bottom? Div Tags Via Copy/Paste In Visual Editor

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at Pixadus.com • via @sthig on Twitter

Update: I tracked down the background on this fantastic image via Chuck Green and a comment on the creator’s Flickr set of this amazing image. From Photoshop guru Scott Kelby’s blog:

The photo was taken by photographer Anton Ismael, for the Jakarta-based ad agency Bates 141 (for their client software-asli.com) … here’s the link to a flickr page with shots of the set under construction. My hat’s off to the entire production crew, creative director Hendra Lesmono, and art directors Andreas Junus & Irawandahani Karmarga for really coming up with something special.

Good stuff!

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Physical Photoshop

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Green Goblin at Monster Monday

Yet another experiment with painting in Photoshop. For this drawing, I sketched the rough idea out right in Photoshop using the Wacom Intuos graphics tablet:

Very loose here, just trying to get the overall feel and general look of the creature. The next step was to flip this layer to get things more symmetrical:

Now you can start to see where you want to go with the lines an make decisions about which elements of the face look best. Time to go in and tighten up a bit to see who we have here:

In the version above, you can see I already went in and worked up one side of the face, and then again flipped the art (no need to draw things twice if you don’t have to). On yet another layer I started beefing up the line work on the left side.

Next step is to duplicate and then flip this new thicker layer on the left, and go in for the final line cleanup:

Here you start to see what is very close to what became the final line art layer for the finished art. Note that as I duplicate and flip layers, I am also merging them together so I don’t have a boatload of layers to keep track of (Mac users, Command-E will merge the selected layer with the one below it).

Once I am at this stage, I only have two layers: the rough sketch layer (which you can see peeking through) and this single line art layer, which is the result of many previous duplicated, flipped and merged layers.

Once the final line art layer is complete, I then add new layers under this line art layer: a plat color layer, then above that a “Shadows” layer (with Blending Mode set to Multiply) and then a “Highlights” layer (with Blending Mode set to Screen).

Sometimes (as was the case with this illustration) I will have multiple “Shadows” layers, all set to Multiply. I’ll work up the base shadows on one layer, then work in darker shadows on the next — taking advantage of the supremely useful Layers in Phtoshop. This way I can turn this second layer of shadows on/off and see how it’s working: is it adding to the effect or not? This allows me to not have to start the entire shadows layer from the beginning if parts aren’t working — I have the core shadows on a separate layer.

The final art you’ve seen at the beginning of this post.

If this post was helpful — or if you have any questions about the process — please let me know in the Comments section below.

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Monster Monday: Goblin (Green)

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Cartoon drawing of a blue devil/demon I drew up for Monster Monday.

Original sketch drawn in my sketchbook, graphite on paper, then scanned into Photoshop where the sketch cleanup and color was added using a Wacom Intuos3 graphics tablet.

Original sketch was very rough, the scanned sketch was tweaked in Photoshop and then flipped to save time and keep the symmetry. I build up my line work on multiple layers just so I can turn them on and off to compare how the changes look. Once I am pleased with the progress I will merge the newer layer to the master line art layer.

A fill layer for the base color was added, then a shading layer (set to Multiply mode) and a highlights layer (set to Screen mode) were added and the respective elements painted in.

You can see from the rough sketch below how I was working with very definite geometric shapes for the overall structure of the head:

I like to work very rough and loose at this stage to get the ideas out and not get caught up in details. I want there to be a firm framework underlying the drawing, but also energy and movement.

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Monster Monday: Blue Beast

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