The familiar fun of Photoshop
I use Photoshop a lot. Daily. All the time. But yesterday I used it to create a much more creative, painterly, illustration than I have done in a long time. And thoroughly enjoyed myself.
When I first started working in Photoshop, a few years ago now, I used it principally as another means of making paintings. The Fine Art paintings made a steady migration to more graphic design and illustration type work and over the past eighteen months there have been less and less opportunites to be truly creative. Most of my work now is image editing rather than image creation. There are some exceptions to this - but the work involved in putting together some artwork for the Makeouts website was the first time I’ve made what I would classify as a piece of artwork rather than a bit of design.
Definitely out of practice with this sort of thing, I can’t believe how long it took me (something like 8 hours). Still with a few more sessions I should be able to get my eye in and become a little more time efficent.
I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to achieve before starting. But I had some vague thoughts about using strong floral, graphical elements and that it would be a rich and lush design. The final design does achieve this, although it is darker and slightly more menacing than I had anticipated. But as an all girl punk band, it seems reasonably fitting in retrospect. There are currently two versions, the pink wallpaper is the original and the green topped design is the alternative. I’m currently leaning towards this alternative.
The challenge now is to design a site around this graphic - I think a single strong element like this artwork will really help to create a striking and complimentary design, but I’ll have to wait and see how that stage of the process goes…
