JFlah's Blunders

It's funny how people think differently about things - here are basic ideas I offered for this week's sermon title slide: And here's what Pastor countered with from a google image search: I loved the idea of the hand reaching out from the pile of wadded papers with a help sign - and he wasn't opposed to it, so I was off. This is the first time I've been bold enough to ask for someone to help me with source pictures. Pastor did a great job and sent me come pictures but they weren't quite what I wanted so I took a few too. Pastor and my boss were hand models - used the sleeve from pastor's pics and the hand from my boss's pics, replaced the paper with a picture I took of some crumpled paper, took pics of wadded up paper, worked on shadows and balances and other such and ended up with this:   That awesome "help" font is Befn - don't remember now where I got it - might've been one of those stellar Mon...

Sermon titles and matching bulletin covers are a weekly task that can often be a fun challenge. That was definitely the case this week. I typically start with the layout that I have to print on the bulletin then adapt the layout to the SD slide format. These are a few from this week's attempts. Ok - so this is the "get the juices flowing" one. Pastor's tag line made me think of this funny little guy. Added the mites falling from his hand and a few shadows and voila - instant silliness. This was the second rendition including one of my favorite fonts . The picture is from here . This is the final rendition. Lots of texture and the mites falling. Ended up with six or seven adjustment levels before I found something that I thought would work. Haven't printed one yet, so might end up with a few more before I'm absolutely done with this. Last week, pastor couldn't bring himself to use what I'd created on screen since it reminded him ...

Sermon title: How's Your Image? Reference text: Genesis 1:26  Additional Direction: Carnival Mirror, Reflections; our image is distorted because of sin but we're made in God's image and He restores that at salvation. When in the research phase of looking for images that might be useful, all of the carnival mirror images I found were goofy. Could've made my own carnival mirror image and put it into a frame for an interesting effect, but ran across the apple reflection picture and thought it had potential too. Worked that one up but over did it - pastor said both images were broken and Christ restores so we nixed the broken mirror part of the image and voila! Done. This is the first shot at the design. Constructive criticism was that "both images are broken - Christ restores" - so I removed the broken image bits and kept the original reflection for the final version and added some filters. HD Slide version of the final. Source Images with bac...

This week's sermon title slide was a lot of fun to put together. Pulled images from several places to make the box work and then I pulled images to create the environment for the box before working on the text and such. Will probably work on the text layout a bit more - am not fully satisfied with the font choice or layout just yet, but it's very close. Started with this image and a title earlier this afternoon: Just a squashed old box photo. Ended with this: This is the "almost" final rendering. Will be working a bit more on the text layout, but the background is pretty much done. Was fun to find the box, choose a pattern for the wrapping paper, warp that paper to fit. Most difficult part was deciding on the color scheme. The most fun was making the bow fit and putting the shadows on there in a believable manner. Not really satisfied with how the box doesn't quite seem grounded on the wood, but it's not so obvious that I am overly concerned about...

Life's been so busy I have neglected to post much of anything even though there's been lots of stuff going on. This week I did a photo collage for work. Here's a copy of the final HD sermon slide. Here are some of the pieces I had to work with: Used a tiny bit of water texture from this picture: Found some random splashes and waves to create the wake for the boat. Used various splash brushes (from deviant art packs, brushezzy?) to make the water on the prow look a tad more realistic. Boat Structure Pic: Then I added lots of different adjustment layers and did some warping, etc... was fun making all of those bits and pieces look like they all belonged in the scene. I probably should have blurred the wake splashes a little more... these things are never "done" - just done enough because of time restraints - but it was lots of fun and I hope everyone likes it.

This is the third option. Added texture to the picture, changed the eye color and levels. This is the second one I did. The first one felt busy, and I wanted to see if the design would work with some negative space. This is the first version I did. Sure, there were lots of text arrangements and such that I tried first, but this is the first one I thought might actually work. So... yeah, sermon title slides. They're the weekly challenge at this job. Sometimes they're fun, but sometimes they're so much of a challenge that I'm right up to the wire working on them. I wish we had a communication team who could help me develop looks for various things - a sort of collaborative environment, but I'm the lone duck designer around here. When the new pastor came on board, we agreed that it would be better to use the SD image dimensions for the sermon slides since they were being shown on an SD projector. I'd been making everything in HD as per the new media...