Logo Design process

Personal Logo: Skyfish Art

For my personal logo I already knew approximately what I wanted, the symbolism behind it has formed over years of background noise that I won't go into here. The earliest iteration is from primary school, a C and an L interlocked (my initials). I kept that C and L in my design and introduced the Skyfish that I am now known for. Initially I was using the pure sketch for a logo, I wanted to embrace the rough. Peer pressure convinced me to vectorize it however, this was before I felt comfortable with the modern-sleek-flat-gloss seemingly curated by apple. The logo reads much better now, I have to admit, as it is very detailed for a logo, but I'm happy with this for now. I intended it to be primarily a watermark, so some complexity is desirable for me.

Final iterations on skyfish logo.

Finished vectorized skyfish logo.

Logo Design for LRC

I was approached by the client to create a logo for general use, and given colour scheme, previous marketing material and a mascot to work from.

Completed Logo Design.

Below is some of the process behind this Logo, hundreds of thumbnails. The design was settled primarily by the clients decisions and a tight dialogue.

I primarily worked to come up with a design that echoed the former mascot and the name by incorporating the image of a rat in the logo, abstracting as I went along. Meanwhile I also tried to incorporate shapes that would communicate the complex technical field that LRC conducts its business in. The client selected thumbnail nr 11 for further development and eventually became the end result.

Life drawing at blankspace oslo

Link to High resolution image

This is the result from yesterdays trip to blankspace oslo, a gallery that offers life drawing sessions. Drawing the human form is one of the most efficient way to improve drawing skill. For the first time I used my laptop and wacom intuos 3 for life drawing. that means both a pc and a tablet on the lap ( I used a second chair to hold the pc) It was surprisingly difficult. I never realized just how much disccrepancy there is between my eye movement and the hand drawing. Normally I can correct for the tablet movement by seeing the line on screen, but when watching the model, my lines are off by many degrees, resulting in thick and thin limbs and a lot of frustration on my part. Frustration was highest around 12-15 and nearing 20+ I started to get the hang of it and resumed working on figuring out what method of looking that actually results in me having reasonable proportions in the drawing. Actually measuring doesn't seem to work out well for me yet (at least not in 1 minute drawings), but getting one contour with (semi) blind drawing and then just going with it has the nicest looking results, even if they are inaccurate.

Game Jam: Ludum Dare 30 results

Ludum Dare 30, the weekend game jam, is now past. I held a local instance of it at Bitraf again.
The theme was "Connected worlds" and you can read my write up of it at this link.  (Ludum Dare 30, Escape from Animal Forest progress)

You can play the game on the link below.
Escape From Animal Forest

Looking at our scores, I'm happy to see we placed 83rd in mood, it makes me confident in thinking that next time, if I push just a little harder on the graphics, we could probably make something that really stands out. Seeing as we were a bit stumped for ideas for this event's theme, I spent a lot of time on the game design instead of the visuals.

Ratings

#83	Mood(Jam)	3.80
#156	Graphics(Jam)	3.97
#177	Innovation(Jam)	3.45
#204	Theme(Jam)	3.55
#229	Audio(Jam)	3.39
#268	Overall(Jam)	3.39
#384	Fun(Jam)	3.03
#487	Humor(Jam)	2.13
#1204	Coolness	49%

Desucon Quest competition winner announced!

Back in 28.06.2014, I walked around as a quest giver at Desucon, a cosplay convention. People who completed my quest got a balloon and a business card as a reward, with a chance to enter a raffle for a free sketch.
Boosterspice was the winner, (they successfully found Waldo in the convention) and requested a Steampunk machine for their sketch. I look forward to the next event!

Speedpainting forest fire creature

I have been streaming twice weekly lately, and aim to do a speedpainting every wednesday. The picture was drawn from a photograph I took of a bonfire some years ago, obviously I added the dragon creature. I chose this for studying colour and smoke, while I also need more familiarity with the forest.

Recycle art: Working on Rubbish

I enjoy making art out of used and discarded material, junk, rubbish, trash.

Here is the reasons why:

Pressure:
Working on fancy sketchbooks or expensive stretched water colour paper always puts this intense pressure on performance. "You spent so much money/effort on this, it has to be perfect!" Working under that mentality essentially degrades my work output, I worry, my lines and strokes become tight and careful, and eventually lack the freedom and roughness that I normally enjoy. Fancy material has it's place, but I desire that liberty I get when "no one is going to see this experiment, this is not meant to be finished art, so I might as well do something fun"

Environment:
Recycling is obviously good for the world, and by working on primarily used materials, the items I create do not add, but actually consume a part of the clutter some of us find ourselves in. Though I am not majorly concerned with materialism, I get quite a bit of satisfaction from taking items perceived as waste and re-purposing them, freeing up space in the process.

Dream catcher made of used bicycle gear and leftover metals.
 (digitally edited photo)

Ludum Dare 29 day 2

(Click here for day 1)

Day 2 of ludum dare 29 is now over, and we (Christina Lewis, Benjamin Benjaminsen, Tormod Berge and now Martin Kvale) have made a functioning game! It's not quite polished, but it has mechanics and art, and we are pretty happy about that. Download is here: Fishy Business, ludum dare 29

We all collectively forgot about the good ideas we had for names, and a decision had to be made, I attempted to make some sort of pun involving deep/ depression / fishing for compliments, but it was not to be. Growing impatient and the day ending, I went home and my dear coworkers went for the opportunity and named it "Fishy Business"

Benjamin finished the game's programming, and we were extremely lucky to have Martin Kvale of Krillbite Studio making some music for us! (They made Among the sleep you know)

I would like to say that our game was super deep and well thought trough, but in the end we had more of a "something something emotions as physical landscape" "something something metaphor" as a general direction. In the end, we had fun, we (probably) learned things, and I enjoyed working together with everyone.

(I will see about making some sort of video showcasing the game, I will have to figure out how first, in the mean time, you can download it up top.)

Skyfish out! 

Ludum Dare 29

I am participating in Ludum Dare 29! 
(As of writing, that is today and tomorrow)

This time's theme is "below the surface". My game jam sort of began a day in advance, spending the evening troubleshooting various problems with my laptop. In the end I got some help to get twitch streaming working, (but of course I forgot all about streaming when the game jam really came) At 8:00 this morning I promptly awoke on my own, checked the theme, and dreamily wrote down some obscure and confusing words into my smartphone before falling asleep for another hour:

Insects topsoil
Fungus network
Educatinal game about cells, clorofyll
Underwatet drama
My fish jump game
Something largr and looming on hook.
A persons emotions
A persons thoughts
A game about erradocating depressive thoughts from The mind, black sketchystuff, use erasing motion and gun play to kill sketchystuff.
A game about learning to swim
Drowning in everyday life; 2D sink or swim in city landscape with business men floating up and elaborate creatures eating people floating while normal life resumes below.
Man hiding in bath refill foam and water to not be embarrassed
-surface of a problem

Some hours later I arrived at Local Oslo hackerspace: Bitraf and met two strangers who had agreed to make games with me the evening prior. These people consisted of Benjamin Benjaminsen and Tormod Berge We presented our thoughts/ideas/associations, and like last time, my ideas struck fancy with my new friends and the idea we picked were the following:

"Drowning in everyday life; 2D sink or swim in city landscape with business men floating up and elaborate creatures eating people floating while normal life resumes below."

The current state of my work on this game can be seen below, I am trying to create an underwater-sort-of scene with skyscrapers, people and fish, but the buildings and fish will be provided by the 3D guy while I work on the overall mood and make sure the end result doesn't look like we threw a bunch of very different assets together. Trying to capture the pallette I had in mind is being annoyingly difficult, I wand a grim, miserable, depth, deep feeling, but without the planned paralax effect the depth doesn't really kick in like I imagine, having to rely on colours alone.

In afterthrought I'm not sure if it really makes sense anymore. It's quite literally "below the surface" and I imagine many other Ludum Dare entries will be set underwater, but I really like the idea of these business people stuck in the rat race feeling "below" in this metaphor of emotion as a strange underwater landscape with ominous fish in it. We/I are primarily operating on instinct with the metaphorical part, playing around with whether or not the people should float up, sink down, escape, be saved, be eaten, avoid the fish, get eaten by the fish, or if the fish are background elements.

Check in tomorrow to see how far we get, we have only scheduled these two days to work on it ;)

Sonen Game jam spring 2014

Sonen game jam just passed, a 48 hours frenzy of independent video game making. I entered as a participant, and joined up with two strangers to create a video game from scratch.

Team name: Pocket Fluff Entertainment
Game name: Space Whales
Game jam theme: Coupled

Play the game here
(two player game, WASD/arrows to move, 1 to eccholocate to navigate the maze. You win when whales are united) Sometimes it gets buggy and spawns you in an unreachable location. Just try again :p

See the other entries here.

Day one, we played around with a couple of ideas, we had several but eventually chose the most "game-like" of the one. The theme was "coupled" and we interpreted that as two space farers being connected with an oxygen supply. I didn't want to do space marines in space, so we compromised and made whales in space instead and went for a slightly comedic game instead of a serious one.

Day two, I suffered severe technical problems when Photoshop and Krita would not respond correctly, photoshop hogging my CPU to the point of the pc struggling and lagging too much to draw, and pen pressure missing from both programs. This was resolved thankfully by mid day, with 3 windows updates and a re-install of my tablet driver.

Day three, we finished up the music, art and programming. It got a bit hectic for my team mates who had their individual problems; the musician had problems with the software to loop seamlessly, and the programmer had a lot of things to do and some bugs kept appearing. 

Although we didn't win, it was a great learning experience. I discovered amongst other things, that Krita has a tiling function that I have been wishing existed for a long time. 

Image from Krita.org

See more about that at Krita.org, all you have to do is press W in krita and it activates this drawing mode. Krita is free remember so anyone can try it :3

I'm Exhibiting at Oslo maker Faire

 

Oslo Maker Faire is Right around the corner!

I will be exhibiting with a computer and projector, drawing live art for onlookers. The faire is about art and technology of many strange kinds and combinations! Featuring such as Norway's largest smoke ring machine and other fun things. Some beautiful, some intelligent, some useless yet interesting.  I will be playing with the open source program "Krita" and it's mirror drawing function as seen in my sample below.

 You can read more about Oslo Maker faire here: Oslo Maker Faire

Featured below are works of other participating artists, read more about them on the link above.

Update: Maker faire now being in the past, enjoy some videos from the event.