Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Here is a link to many of my illustrations represented by SuperStock.com – https://superstock.com/stock-photography/1428R-

My collection has grown to over 400 images there, and quite a wide variety.  I try and strike a balance between scientific medical illustrations and imaginative human conditions that tell a story.

I use Autodesk Maya, SmithMicro Poser and Adobe Photoshop in my common illustration workflow.

SuperStock markets my images all over the world, for books, magazines, and other media.

Facebook Quote Card #1

As Facebook grows and its users grow less daring and experimental, we now see cute little “thought note cards” appearing as posts.  These quotations are not original.  They are professional graphics that the user identifies with, selects, and posts.  Going deeper into this behavior, we see the evolution of the electronic Hallmark card, and beyond, which is huge.  The Internet provides gigantic opportunities as a sentiment pool which is primarily what Facebook resonates as.

There are many, perhaps most of us, who are unable to express ourselves adequately, and must find ideas, images, posters, banners, sounds, music, and yes, electronic greeting cards to enhance our intentions.  I like where this is going, and hope to see the craft of composing personal greetings, expand, grow and take off in more amazing directions.

Nice Tweeting You

Due to the positive response and the editorial buzz around social networking themes, I’ve been motivated to design additional illustrations along these lines for my stock image agency, Superstock. Here are a few of my favorites. I’ve also continued making medical illustrations as well, the most recent series involve new treatments of brain and heart images.

Sony releases Reader app for Android 2.2.  There appears to be a demand for other versions, as in this blog post from the Sony eReader Journal.  I’m working on a similar app for other platforms.

Congratulations to Career Element getting written up in Time magazine.

Exciting times ahead for CareerElement, a website I took an active role in the visual design and product development beginning April 2009.  They will be hosting their first high-tech career fair Tuesday, August 17, 2010, 4:30pm at the Stanford Park Hotel 100 El Camino Real, Menlo Park, CA.

CareerElement is led by CEO Paul Campbell a UC Berkeley Engineering graduate, and finishing his Masters at Stanford.  He assembled a strong team of software engineers who required User Experience and visual design help from Gregg Boot of west11.com design firm and me.

As part of the design team we had to start from scratch, brainstorming the name and identity of their new job hunting, social networking website, flow charting and wire framing the layout of the entire site.

There is much more in the works at CareerElement, so stay tuned and sign up for the career fair to learn more.

Update: CareerElement has temporarily gone offline for a redesigned, improved business direction.

Too much brandy?

Over the last three weeks I’ve been back at it with a whole new batch of “human conditions” illustrations for my good friends at Superstock.  To justify paying for the recent Poser 2010 upgrade, I’ve been using it to set up the character poses and then outputting the files to .obj format to import into Maya (ew, geeky, gory file format details!).  Once in Maya, I set up a number of cameras in 3D space, create a few props for realism, add my favorite X-ray, flesh and bone shaders, test render, and then render my 8K images in layers.  The layers then need color correction and polygon touch up in Photoshop as part of the final compositing process.  (Spell check still doesn’t like compositing, haha.)

Below are a few of my favorites.  I’ll have done over 100 of these after another week or so.  Endless good times. (Click thumbnails to see the big pictures.)

Life is complicated.  There are many choices, paths and decisions for us to make in search of our destiny.  There are paths we follow regularly that we are not even conscious of, such as the metabolic pathways keeping us alive in our immune systems.

I had little understanding of these paths, until I began these illustrations for Epitomics, a biotech company that manufactures over 1,000 different antibodies from rabbits.  According the Wikipedia, “Antibodies are gamma globulin proteins that are found in blood or other bodily fluids of vertebrates, and are used by the immune system to identify and neutralize foreign objects, such as bacteria and viruses.”

The maps are being carefully constructed in Adobe Illustrator from Epitomics diagrams and then imported into Flash to add linkage to their many unique antibody products.  Click here to see the current Flash Pathway maps, and there are more in the pipeline, and more data to be linked using XML.

Obviously, it is important to faithfully construct the pathway maps with scientific accuracy.  The spherical antibody nodes remind me of paintings I’ve made of beach stones, whose arrangements are pretty much random and meaningless.  I’ve been thinking about picking up the paint brushes again, and working on a few more of “the rock paintings.”  To make the stones more interesting, and their arrangements perhaps more meaningful, I plan on using image processing techniques, Photoshop filters and 3D rendering before projecting the design onto blank canvas.  I’m thinking about painting layers of imagery, similar to constellation star maps and the work of Julie Mehretu.  It’s a pathway I’ll have to decide to go ahead on, while my antibodies are still doing their quiet work to keep me in good health.

To see the artwork of Julie Mehretu, please visit her page on Artsey.net. (Update July 18, 2015)