Holding Sad Balloons

Artistically Anonymous

Well it's been a while since I updated this blog of mine, I've been busy kind of doing a bit of spring cleaning with past my artwork from Facebook. I kind of came upon a realization of even though I love painting and drawing I don't want to be known just for that, because I can do much more and a lot more. Basically I don't like being socially type cast as "an art dude" like some cheesy actor. So I've decided to separate my face from my art and make my internet persona Grey Valentine more of a "who" then "me" Soon even on my blog I'll update my image with a cartoon avatar.

Also, I've been writing and illustrating my own childrens book! I've also been meeting up with a writers guild made up of some personal friends of mine once a week or so. It's nice and it helps keep me in line to try to write something at less once a week; we critique and give input to our stories and ideas. 

I'm not really going to talk about my book online for now until I get legal copyright stuff cleared up. So far I think it's cute story with a macabre style, just the way I like it :)  

Holding Sad Balloons

Backstory 1: Well this is kind of a two piece kind of deal; the first one I created when I was in a bad situation in my life and felt pretty lonely and sad. The second one on the bottom a year later I was feeling a bit down and I kind of want it on a T-shirt so I put a boarder around it and also made the boarder it self part of the image and not just a black outline.

I started out drawing it with pencil and ink it with a ink pen and sharpie marker then I scanned it to color in Photoshop. When I colored it I toying around with the watercolor brush tool to give it a storybook like look to it. I work with several layers with intend watercolor sploshes in most of the balloons. 

The rain effect was made pretty simply; I made a simple gray layer the I applied and noise filter on it with a monochromatic setting click on to make sure the noise was close to same color if gray. I added an Gaussian blur filter right on the noise layer and increased the radius the give it speed lines. On the same layer I adjust the opacity down a bit then with a water color brush applied to the eraser tool and the flow adjust I erase parts that I didn't need. The end result a pretty cool rain effect ;) 

Backstory 2:The bottom piece I designed a boarder around it as an attended T-shirt design, because I though it would be lame to just have a rectangle image on a shirt. So I made gooey ink plots with some really cool smile faces along the edges to give the image more character if I decide to put it on a shirt. I added a white background and a black board only for the purpose of showing it online, but if it was going to be printed on a shirt it would just have the ink blot boarder.

The method I use to create the ink blot effect was all done in Photoshop. There's no real tricks involve with this but the standard brush, eraser tool, a lot of patience and imagination. The smears on the white background was done use a custom brush set and just toying around with it to give it a dirty dry ink smear look to it.

All and all the this piece was done in a very depressing time in my life; the character in the picture holding the balloons of course is suppose to be me. I guess I felt like at the time I made this all I was caring around was just sad balloons; also in the picture you'll notice the character is wearing a smiling button. It was my way of saying I'm only a little bit happy in comparison of caring so many sad things over my head.