Tuesday, June 02, 2015

Pretending to be a Graphic Designer

When I'm not writing or critiquing or trying to learn new programming languages or playing the harp or trying to be a better person, I make little cards using Blender.

Here's one I made for Mother's Day.  I based the design off of some water lilies carved on the side of an Egyptian temple.  The objects are the same color, and I tinted them with different colored lights.


 I made this card for my brother-in-law, who's an engineer.  I figured he'd like the platonic shapes and the simple lighting.  I wanted this one to look a little like some 1920 German lithograph.  There were only two lights, a white and a blue one.   I arranged the solids to be paired with their doubles (the icosahedron and the dodecahedron, the cube and the octehedron, and the tetrahedron with itself).

This was going to be a background for 2014's Christmas card, and we were going to be riding the notes like they were Segues.  I wanted it to look like a Brazilian bar Donald Duck Jose Carioca and the Arucan Bird dance in, but Mark said it was "too gay" and nobody really got their poses right, so we scrapped it for a more traditional card.

This time around I colored the objects so I wouldn't have a melange of colored shadows in the background.  Below (I think) the view of the camera, I used green and white lights against a few triangle shapes to imply a forest background.  Making the treble clef was particularly difficult because I imported it from InkScape, and converting it from curves to a mesh object introduced some holes in the object I had to manually go through and close up -- otherwise it would have had some funny looking holes in it where there was no outside facing the camera.

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