Thing-a-day.com

Oh man, I could officially be the last poster for thing-a-day this year. That’s either highly embarrassing or exciting. A little bit of both. Between being sick and visiting my friend in Chicago, I’ve been far behind with catching up on thing-a-day (I read them ALL and refuse to let me post my catch-up things until I’ve read them all). But, I finally finished reading them all this morning, and so my last few things…

Essentially, I bought this beautiful birdcage at target (I couldn’t resist) when I had come up with the idea to fill it with candles (including a bird one :p) and decorate it with fake flowers to give it a sort of beautiful natural wilderness look. I still am not sure if I’m done with it, I might add another flower at the top, etc… But we’ll see. I like it for now.

I guess I could reword and repost it here, but why don’t you just head over to my own blog and read my little re-cap and requiem for Thing-a-Day 2008. And you can find out what the hell this thing is:

Thanks for a great month, everyone!

Phew!

Greetings Commrades! Thanks to you all for the fun of this month! I have loved doing this, and thanks to Michelle for the idea/link to TAD! It’s been great for the FLOW. 

Following on yesterday’s theme, Russian poster style mashup with aquatic life…

This last piece was inspired by the results of the last photoshop tutorial I did for yesterday’s post, some of the other artist’s work I’ve seen on thing-a-day, a hand one of my students modeled and my own desire to make new art. Everything was modeled in 3D using Maya and Zbrush and rendered in Zbrush. The shader / material is courtesy of Arran Lewis. No photoshop manipulations although it looks like I did.

Well its over. I never could have predicted or preconceived any of the work I did for this challenge. This was the beauty of thing-a-day for me. The spontaneity that is often suppressed by daily routine and habits has been restored. Thanks to all those who commented on my work and those who inspired and challenged be to pursue new directions. I would like to keep tabs on several artist I’ve come to know from thing-a-day and hope they will continue to keep tabs on me. All of you can always find my work on my website: http://elliottmitchell3d.com/index.php and look for me in a few days on ZBrushcentral.com and CGSociety.org forums. I’ll most likely be posting under my real name, Elliott Mitchell (unfortunately MrT seems to be taken).

Just a heads up, I am looking for freelance work and other employment options as of a few day ago. Please e-mail me if you have any leads, jobs, advice or need of consultation.

One amazing observation I made was the global interest generated by thing-a-day. I have had 1400 visitors to my website since 9 days ago when I put up a counter. I have been randomly sampling visitor’s IP addresses who visit my site after seeing my work on thing-a-day. In the last few days visitors from the following locations have looked at 4 or more pages on my site:

Karlsruhe Germany
Moscow Russia
Kuala Lumpur Malaysia
Curitiba Brazil
Gothenburg Sweden
Dublin Ireland
Osaka Japan
Paris France
Falmouth UK
Chandigarh India
Sarajevo Bosnia and Herzegovina
Seoul South Korea
Lisbon Portugal
Vienna Austria
Tokyo Japan
Macau Macao
Stavanger Norway
MONTREAL CANADA
Vancouver BC
Amsterdam Netherlands
Canberra Australia
Rajkot India
Stockholm Sweden
Hong Kong China
Laxou France
Istanbul Turkey
Athens Greece
Villejui France
Basel Switzerland
New Brunswick Canada
And all from over the USA

“Be well, do good work and keep in touch.” - Garrison Keillor

This is dated the 29th, but it is actually my thing for the 28th (it was just after midnight when I put the date in I guess). We get one more last one tomorrow.

I wanted to do something other than 3D today because thats all I was doing all day at work. I was interested in what invisible.co and cignoh were up to by manipulating photos to look like film. I did the same tutorial they both posted. I cropped the images to 16:9 ratio first. I had to change some of the tutorial settings because they seemed not to work on higher resolution images. I wound up recording actions in Photoshop to automate most of the settings. One could do this to video in after effects fairly easily.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

My least favorite haircut ever, especially on corporate dudes who thinks it heps up their suit.

today i copied invisible.co’s earlier post and followed the same tutorial to give a film-like effect to a photo. my photoshop version didn’t seem to have all of the adjustment layers/filters that the tutorial called for (exposure and lens blur) but i approximated the best that i could and tried the effect on two of my photos:

before	after

the vignetting effect on the top photo is too prominent/hard, i was going to add black bars to crop to cinemascope or re-do the vignette. i also saved non-cyan/blue tinted images that can be viewed here.

on the other hand, i taught my daughter how to make real Ukrainian borscht.

I wanted to redo a still life I created as a demo for an intro Maya course I taught last semester. I used my own original photographic textures for the wood and background. I hand painted the textures for the fruit in Zbrush and Photoshop. I modeled the wood block and fruit in 3D. The scene is lit from the background image.

No offense to the original posters words!

today i practiced some more in photoshop… first i tried the gold tutorial that i tried earlier this month on a photo that i took last week. the gold doesn’t look so much like gold, but the matte edge looks better than my first golden egg attempt. also, i think i like the original photo better, but that’s ok…

* i have edited the gold look from earlier today based on feedback and the fact that i didn’t like what i made earlier… i think it definitely works better but still doesn’t look quite gold-like…

before	after

next i composited a pink cocktail umbrella into a photo that was taken of a friend of mine:

before	after

he just loves pink. i might even add a cherry/pineapple to the drink if i have time…

Doodling a character for an animation. Little Indian girl, still needs a name.


(I’m rusty with people and faces, so this was a good exercise)

Other doodles:
<– Mole men in the office
<– Large owls
<–Small owls
<– Gerbil powered solar system model

And this is my 3d assignment for tomorrow, playing with dynamics. It’s nothin’ special, but it’s not a big assignment:
embedded by Embedded Video

yes, almost nothing today.

went to the concert after work tonight. took me 2 minutes maximum to make some lame sketches — still unable to draw in closed public spaces. here they are:

and original set up: