2012 Mayan Edition Wall Calendar

Well, you dimwits asked for it, so fine.  You’re the bosses.  Here’s a wall calendar featuring twelve, hot and sexy poses of your’s truly.  Make sure you ladies and gay gentlemen are sitting down.  I can’t be held responsible for any sudden heart attacks.

I created the wall calendar back in 2012 when I thought the world was going to end.  The theme of the calendar centers around death and destruction, but it turns out the Mayans suck at math just the same as me.  The world was spared from doom.  What a bunch of losers.  They must have had a similar Algebra teacher as me in high school.  Mr. Glessner was cool and all, but he was also always hungover.  Loud noises and teaching math gave him a headache, so we usually just played paper football during class instead.  It’s no wonder I’m a total dimwit.  That’s your tax dollars hard at work.

The wall calendar took me an entire week to Photoshop at 12 hour days.  I probably spent close to 80 hours making the damn thing.  Halfway through creating it, I wondered if this would be one of those times when I’m laying on my deathbed, reflecting back on my long and lustrous life, that I would wish I had that week back.  Wishing that my life would have been different.

Yeah, probably.  But too late.  Here you go, you dimwits.  Perhaps I’ll create a new wall calendar for next year in time for the holidays, and you can give it as a nice gift to yourself or your significant others.  Wouldn’t that be something.  It surely would.

Ten Italy Postcards

There is this saying:  when the going gets tough, the tough get going.  That saying could certainly be applied to my current (lack of) work situation.  It’s been challenging in some ways.  But fortunately for you all, I decided to forego all of that tough get going hullabaloo and design some killer Italy postcards instead.

My aim is that these postcards will help supplement my income until work becomes steady again.  Shouldn’t be a problem considering the postcards are pretty choice and they more than likely will be flying off the shelf.  But don’t take my word for it.  Take the word from the following testimonial:

“These postcards are pretty choice.  You ever consider making postcards of tabby cats?  People go nuts over them orange tabby cats for some reason.  My favorite kind of cat is the calico.  I like that grumpy cat too.”  – Sara M.

There you have it.  The cost is one postcard for $0.35 or three postcards for $1.00.  I’m not all that business savvy when it comes to this kind of stuff.  I don’t have an online store set up or anything like that, so if you like what you see, just shoot me a message and we’ll work it out.  And if you don’t like what you see, fret not.  I’ll be designing a few other series of postcards in the near future, including but not limited to orange tabby cats.  Thanks and happy viewing.

1. Get Caught Up In It

2. I’m Dreaming Of Italy

3. Rome

4. Like No Other Place On Earth

5. The Weather

6. The Accordion

7. Like A Whole Other Country

8. Don’t Try This At Home, Folks

9.  Died And Gone To Heaven

10. Buon Giorno

Photoshop Lessons: How To Make Your Very Own Christmas Card

I love Christmastime, and unless you are a commie bastard, chances are you love Christmastime, too. All the decorated houses glowing at night, Nat King Cole singing about chestnuts roasting on an open fire, gathering my nieces and nephews around the fireplace to tell them stories of Santa Claus dying in a tragic chimney accident.  There are so many wonderful Christmas traditions to take part in, but one of the traditions I look forward to most is giving and receiving Christmas cards.

‘Tis the season for giving, so I thought that I would share with you a little insider’s scoop into how I put this year’s Christmas card together.  Perhaps it will motivate you to create your very own Christmas card this year, or perhaps it will just provide further evidence into what a raving lunatic I am.  In either case, I hope that you all have a wonderful holiday.

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Step #1
For this year’s Christmas card, I thought that it would be humorous to mimic those delightful photos you see online of screaming children sitting on Santa’s lap.  The first step was to take several photos of myself, and choose the best one to superimpose onto a background image in Photoshop.

I donned some glorious Christmas outfits, used Visine drops to create some fake tears, and turned my living room into a makeshift photo studio.  If you are a religious person, I would suggest that you pray the following prayer:  Abba, Father.  Dear, Yahweh. Please do not let the neighbors come over to borrow a cup of sugar while I’m wearing this ridiculous turtleneck and taking photos of myself crying in my own apartment, and please, Heavenly Father, do not let the FedEx guy come to the front door to deliver a package and see me like this, either.  All these things I ask in your precious and holy name.  Amen.  

Step #2
Now that I had the original photo of myself to work with, I needed to select a proper background image.  I opened the photo of myself in Photoshop, did a quick selection, cut myself from the original background, and superimposed myself onto a few different background images that I found on the interwebs.  Don’t worry about matching the lighting and making a perfect selection just yet.  These are just a few roughs to get a sense of which images will work best together.  

Step #3
The final steps include blending the photos together, adjusting the lighting and shadows, fixing the color and saturation, creating a border, ect.  I won’t bore you with all the finite details, because it can be a rather tedious process.  But for those of you wanting to learn Photoshop a little better, go to the upper, left hand corner of the tools section, select the “Magic Wand” tool, right click your mouse, and shout “Abracadabra, kalamazoo!”  This is the Photoshop method that I tend to use the most, much to the chagrin of my college graphic design professor.    

Step #4
The Christmas card is almost complete. All it needs now is a holiday greeting and a few final touches.  I settled on a really simple greeting – Happy Holidays! – but you can come up with your own greeting, like, “Merry Christmas, you fudge packing, dingleberries!,” or you could always use a more traditional saying, like, “Seasons Greetings.”  Whatever.

Since my Christmas card theme is all about happiness and joy, I decided to really emphasize this by including some of those photos of screaming children sitting on Santa’s lap as the last and final step.  If you do a Google search, you will find that there is an abundance of hysterical, sobbing kids to choose from, but I dwindled it down to just a few of my favorites.  

I believe this concludes the Photoshop tutorial.  I hope that you found it helpful and inspiring.  Now go make your own Christmas card and spread some cheer this holiday season.  Good luck!

2012 Mayan Edition Wall Calendar

I went to college and took up studying graphic design.  It was during the mid to late 90’s, before everyone and their brother had a desktop computer and a laptop at their disposal.  I couldn’t afford a computer, nor all the software programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, so I was forced to go to the computer lab if I wanted to do my homework and master any design skills.  That was all well and good if you were a total nerdsley McGee, but I couldn’t stand being confined to a computer lab all day, so I played ultimate frisbee with my friends instead.

Even though frisbee was not officially recognized as a major by my university, it might as well have been, because tossing a frisbee around and graduating with a degree in Art is about the same level of uselessness if you want to go on and get a job upon graduation.

After college, I did manage to land a job as a juvenile youth counselor.  I held the job for a year and a half, got burnt out from counseling troubled teens with drug addictions and abandonment issues, but mostly I got burnt out from dealing with their no good, lame ass, pathetic excuse for parents.  It was a lot to take on as a 21 year old.  I was  basically a kid myself, so I quit my job as a juvenile youth counselor with no promise of another job on the horizon.  No worries, though.  I still had my frisbee and a degree in Art if all else failed.

I had saved up a decent chunk of money, bought a laptop, and sat in my parents’ basement teaching myself how to edit videos for nine months (talk about nerdsley McGee!).  Through a stroke of good luck and with a little determination on my part, I landed a job in the film industry.  I’ve been working on commercials and films ever since.  But along the way, I’ve tried to come up with ways to justify spending $60,000 on a college degree.  Mostly it manifests itself in designing cool covers for mix CD’s or photoshopping my friends’ faces onto sea otters.  Some would argue that alone is worth tens of thousands of dollars, but I felt I should probably do a bit more with it.

At the beginning of this year, I decided to design a wall calendar as an exercise to keep my graphic design skills sharpened in the event that I would ever want to do anything with it beyond making grossly mutated sea otters with human heads.  The idea for the wall calendar was inspired by this whole notion that the world is going to end on December 21, 2012.  Nothing like a little world annihilation to get the creative juices flowing, yeah?  I used images of myself, superimposed them onto various backgrounds, added some flames, an explosion here or there, a ferocious wolf, a collage with my girl Beyonce, and woolah!  The 2012 Mayan Edition wall calendar was born.

I realize it’s self-gratifying to make a wall calendar of myself, but cut me some slack.  $60,000 is a butt load of money.  I’m still paying off my student loans 14 years later.  I have to do something with the degree, so if I want to create a wall calendar with images of me celebrating the apocalypse, I’m going to create a wall calendar with images of me celebrating the apocalypse, doggonit.

The world is going to end soon ladies and gentlemen.  It’s a beautiful day outside today.  I think I’ll go toss the frisbee around…