JFlah's Blunders

My parents just purchased a new clothes washer and dryer. They kept the boxes thinking that maybe their grandchildren would play in them. I was looking for something to do and was talking with Mom about it and so I decided to fix the boxes up so the kids can play in them. I would've reinforced the seams with some duct tape or something so that they'd last longer, but Mom said it's probably going to be one of those things where they play with the box once or twice and then it goes to the recycle bin, so I didn't reinforce it. I didn't decorate them either since I figure they'll have a really short shelf life.   Photographs are below. Sorry for the picture orientation being off. Since I'm working on my parent's machine I wasn't able to get the photographs to import correctly for some reason. They're turned in the folder preview. I turned and resized/resaved the original files so I could post them, and I even renamed them, but they're impor...

We're still in "The Patriarchs" sermon series. Here are the last four sermon slides I've labored over. Sometimes I wish there was an onsite art director - someone, anyone with a basic idea of what they want from these slides. I've made some basic decisions about what I want to see in every slide for this series (the optical flare for one) to add some continuity, but I wonder sometimes if I had someone dictating what they wanted to see if it would help me with the amount of time I spend researching and developing a visual concept. Then other times I'm glad that I don't have to accommodate too much design direction - yeah, I want my cake and to eat it too. Had no idea where to start with this one. Spent at least four hours searching for ideas then another two finding source images that were in the creative commons. Collage was created by manipulating four source images. I also utilized some great lightning brushes I found a while back. I studied the way ...

Pencil and white crayola color pencil on cardboard done during a lunch break this week. It's not perfect, but I've never been perfect... The reference photo from Flickr

This week I spent about a day on advertizements for the youth group activities for this summer. I've been behind the eight ball since before the beginning of this month - trying to finish up promotional materials, the monthly newsletter, update the webpage, update the digital sign schedule, etc so I didn't have a long time to work on these and took as many short cuts as I could. I pretty much found "inspiration" and/or pieces online and adapted them to our in-house advertizing purposes through the wonders of photoshop and illustrator. Wish I could say that I had the resources and time to have developed these bits on my own without making use of the creative commons license, but such is the nature of the beast on occasion. If I was in an actual design company, I'd have access to the tools, time, and resources I'd need to do things the way I'd like, but until then... The amazing photo is from a golf poster I saw for Ritz Carlton's golf tourney. I...

VBS 2013 - created in Adobe Flash CS4 I've been brushing off my Flash skills, because I've been unable to find some ready made animations to use for our digital road sign. We have a strange configuration for the sign so all of the ready made animations get squashed when I try to use them. I got tired of noticing great animations on the rest of the digital signs I've seen in town but static boring stuff on ours and started thinking about what I could do to snazz things up. We got the digital sign in February and now I know what the software that I have to use to program the sign with can (and mostly can't) do, so thanks to a few "free" vector image sites, I can have the basic pieces ready to animate pretty quickly. The hardest part of it all is coming up with the idea and deciding if the 18pitch sign's resolution is going to treat my animation like I want it to. The roller coaster above was a free download.  It specified only non-commercial use in ...