I’ve been touching up photos for years using the rubber-stamp tool and healing brush. Last year I got a job working for modeling agency where I needed to touch up a grip of photos in a short amount of time. I found a quick and easy way to get that traditional airbrushed look while keeping the costs down for the company.

First off I just want to say, the use of traditional photography for models is sooooo much more attractive. Companies like Urban Outfitters use freckles and blemishes to show natural beauty on their models, and it’s so much more attractive than the plastic skin look. But, not all companies feel that way, so if you’ve got to clean up some skin, here’s the easiest way to do it.

Examples:

Here’s a couple examples of before and after photos using the process:

How To:

After you open up your photo in Photoshop, duplicate the layer.

After it’s duplicated, go to your filter menu and open up Gaussian Blur.

Adjust the blur depending on the photo. You want it to discard all detail in the photo but don’t blur it enough to kill the shadows and color values in the face.

Once you’ve blurred the image add a layer mask to the layer.

Once you’ve created the layer mask fill it with black.

Next, choose a feathered brush at 30% opacity and choose white as the color fill. The size of the brush varies on the space you’re filling, I adjusted the brush size throughout the entire image. Just color in the layer mask using white and let a little more and more of the top layer show through. When doing this there is a key thing to keeping this realistic. Do not color over the lips or the eyes or the hair (unless necessary). The detail in the eyes and lips create a realistic contrast between the skin and the lips making it seem like the whole image is in focus and crisp, but the skin is so soft and clean that it doesn’t show any detail.

If the model has a bunch of stray hairs stringing off her head you can brush over those to make the hair look thicker and fuller, but I think seeing the detail in the hair helps with the realism and makes it seem natural.

After a good amount of playing around with your brushes, your final image should look like this:

Another helpful tip on enhancing the model is to bring out the color in his/her eyes. This model has beautiful eyes, but you can use the same process as above (minus the blurring) to color select the eyes. One you have them selected you can use hue/saturation to bring out the color and make them pop.

Summer’s here, and if you haven’t already planned and branded your summer events, it’s not too late. If you’re on a tight deadline or on a budget, it’s still not too late to start promoting! I’ve been able to drop prices on many of my most popular products and I have a slew of extremely high quality and highly affordable products that I’ll be offering in the early fall. If your summer is already planned out, be sure to get started early on Fall promotion.

Price Drops and Product Updates

I’ve been able to decrease the price on business cards, letterheads, brochures, envelopes and postcards. I’m also able to do short runs on almost any and all products (excluding custom silver or spot glossing). I’m also able to offer a faster turnaround, even same day on some products. For those of you that don’t know, not only do I offer 16pt cardstock, but I can also offer extremely rare and impressive printing techniques. If you’re interested in pricing on any of these products, e-mail (hello (at) dunlapstudios dot com) me your preferred quantity and turnaround and I’ll get you a quote right away.

New Products and Products On the Horizon

I’m now able to offer car magnets, coroplast yard signs, indoor and outdoor vinyl banners and movie theater style gloss posters in all shapes and sizes at extremely affordable pricing. No minimum quantity, and turnaround is just as fast as my small format products.

In the next few weeks I’ll be offering plastic business cards, silk heavy laminated 16pt cardstock (spot uv capable), new presentation folders, new stickers and new magnets. And… you’ve got to try my new EndurACE 10pt paper, and extremely resilient material that is waterproof, fade resistant and extremely hard to tear (I know from experience), perfect for menus, business cards and door hangers.

Dunlap Studios Summer Promotion

On top of dropping my prices, I’m also offering 15% off of any order placed between now and September. I will also be including a free order of 500 16pt full color/full gloss business cards with every order over $500 between now and September. Just mention this posting when contacting me for an order. What are you waiting for? hello (at) dunlapstudios dot com

I’ve been getting really into children’s illustration and childrens graphics recently, with a lot of focus in vector work. I’ve been getting a lot better and really loving the style. However, I was annoyed with the limited amount of kid/logo friendly fonts when I’ve been putting artwork together. So I decided to make my own that was completely customizable and worked well with textures, since the majority of my designs focus on texture.

So here it is! Blockobet! It’s a fun typeface, and I love being able to apply different layer styles to the different blocks in each letter. Check out the typeface in it’s entirety and an example of how to use it after the jump.

Blockobet- Click Here to Download

And, here it is in action!

So, it occured to me yesterday that as of April/May 2010 my little freelance adventure has turned 2 years old. I started by making my Dad some business cards and realized ‘Hey, I could really use some extra work’. 1 month later I was putting together marketing materials for The Path Christian Church and branding Bare Apparel. I’ve had an amazing two years and have met and worked with so many amazing people. The best part about not doing my freelance work full-time is that I can be extremely selective with what work I take on, so I can honestly say I love ALL of my customers and enjoy all the work that I do.

To celebrate turning two I wanted to post up all my most memorable moments in the past two years. Check it out after the jump:

Featured Designer:

I wanted to post up some links where I was featured elsewhere on the web. I went through a couple of pages on Google and chose some of my favorites.

Layers Magazine- I was brought on as a featured designer for Design Makeover. I was featured on both the website and the May/June issue last year.

JustCreativeDesign- Featured as ‘Designer in the Spotlight’ on one of my favorite design blogs. It was early in the DS run, but it’s cool to look back on the interview and see how much has changed, and how much hasn’t.

JustCreativeDesign- Featured on the post ‘Advice for Design Students’ along with many other great designers.

Featured Artwork:

These are some links of my favorite exhibits I took part in. My favorite of all was 2009’s Phoenix Design Week where I was a featured designer at Santy for a week. There wasn’t much coverage of the event other than twitter/facebook, but I did make a post of some photos from it here.

Abduzeedo- Featured an MSCED print in a wallpaper contest

PowerToThePoster- This was an AMAZING project, or I should say IS an amazing project. Regardless of your beliefs or what your stance is they asked several designers to create a poster that showed the designers voice. When I created mine I was number 16 on the page, now there are 157! So happy to have been a part of it, and even better my poster was featured at the Power to the Poster exhibit in Lincoln, Nebraska.

PhxDW09- I also created a poster for Phoenix Design Week that was displayed all throughout Santy both in print in digital form.

Favorite Posts:

All of you that read Dunlap Studios know that my posting is pretty speratic, however I’ve put up some great reviews and tutorials in the past two years that I’m extremely proud of. Hopefully the quality of posts would make up for the lack of posting… eh? eh? Here are my posts that received the RT’s on twitter and that I received the most feedback on.

Relation:Ships- My most popular post by far. A review of client/designer relations and what is needed to have a working relationship. The post features artwork from the children’s book “Relation:Ships” I wrote for my daughter.

Designing on a Budget- A tutorial of a logo design put together on an extremely tight budget for Washington hip-hop lable True Vision.

Design Fail: Wedding Bros- My first and only negative design post. I posted up a cover from the movie Wedding Bros and gave my input on what needed changed. To my surprise the producer of the movie commented on the post!

Behance Action Method- A little review of my beloved Behance, this review was posted all over the web, even on the Behance website.

Orgivation Magazine: Breathe Carolina- I LOVE doing illustrations for Origivation. They literally let me do whatever I want, and I’m so proud of the ones I’ve done. Here is an in depth tutorial of how I created my first illustration for Origivation.

Creative’s Christmas- Some tips on cheap creative ways to wrap your gifts. I’m the king at custom wrapping.

My Outlook on Spec Work- I hate it, sorry to spoil the ending for you. But I hate it. I wrote it over a year ago, and I wish it was longer and angrier. The post includes some weird illustrations, I don’t really remember why but they’re pretty funny.

Dwight Shirt- I made a shirt of Dwight Schrute and posted it on Design by Humans. The weird thing is it was posted ALL over the internet, but it didn’t get many votes.

What Can Twitter Do for You?- My first real post on DS, and it actually was all over Twitter. Kind of funny because I’m rarely on twitter… I guess I’m just not very social anymore

Thanks everyone for such an awesome 2 years! Customers, blog readers and anyone who has ever supported me, I appreciate it so much and I’m excited for more to come!

I’m hoping to take a trip down there in the next couple of weeks to get some pictures of the products in action, and to get Tobie and I some ice cream. Currently Scooptacular is flashing flags, sidewalk signs, business cards, punch cards, flyers, mailers, tablecloths, banners, t-shirts and contour cut graphics all sporting my branding and color scheme, and there’s more orders to come! If you’re in the phoenix area go get some homemade ice cream and check out my hard work!

Chosen Logo:

Color Scheme:

Font:

Alternate Color Schemes:

Printed Materials:

Photos from the store:

Here’s a recent logo I did for Little Red’s Basket Boutique. This was one of three options, and it was not the chosen option, however it’s the one I want to show off. I would normally put up a case study on why I created the layout, but this customer was pretty specific with what they were looking for, so I can’t really thank my creativity. I may post the chosen logo once they put it into action.

Here are the fonts I chose for this layout. The first is made by the wonderful miss Teagan White:

And last but not least, Lane, one of the greatest sans serifs on dafont.

I found an awesome free resource for t-shirt designers. I have used GoMedia’s blank t-shirt templates for a long time, I don’t want to knock them at all, it’s a great resource, but they do seem very lifeless. I always wished they had created a pack that used live models so you could show how the design fits the body. To my surprise, Ninth Wheel already had this idea and is giving the templates away for free! They’re not very high resolution, but their great for proofing them to customers and showing off your work on your site. Check them out after the jump!

There are a number of templates to choose from: girls, guys and kids…. which is awesome! All of them are layered .psd files that include a unique background and different shirt colors, including all of the Threadless colors. Check out the templates here!

Check out how the templates work in action:

Here’s a shot of the layers, grouped to profection!

Here’s my most recent illustration for origivation magazine for the band Hot Chip.

I think I’ve started each post from the past 6 months with an apology for not posting and promise to post more. I’d really love to post more and I thank all of my readers and subscribers for checking my site from time to time. However, if I’m not posting then I’m busy and it’s good to be busy.

Here’s an update with Dunlap Studios, I’ve currently knee deep in work right now… and loving it. I’m at the point now where I’m scheduling days ahead and picking and choosing the projects I want to take, which is a blessing because for awhile there I was doing EVERYTHING…. and you can’t be good at anything if you’re trying to take on everything. I’ve also made a point to give myself more free time, allowing more times with friends and keeping my daughter my top priority. It’s not easy trying to bring in business and keep customers happy while they’re always at second place, but I think I’m doing very well juggling them around.

I WILL be posting some more recent work very soon. I am finishing up another illustration for Orgivation Magazine, which I’ve done two pieces for before. You can view my Buckcherry piece HERE and my Breathe Carolina piece HERE. I’ve also did a massive rebranding for a East Bartlesville Christian Church which has required a lot of design and printing. Each time I want to post up my work for them I add more to the portfolio. You can view EBCC’S website by clicking HERE, it as well as all of the other projects were designed by my partnership with MyNameIsVince, IndieWebStudio. Yet another project still not off the ground, but it’s coming! I also have a personal portfolio site and some other personal projects I’d like to finish up before the end of this month. Keep a look out… stay classy San Diego.

View recent branding projects after the jump:

Welcome to part 2 of the Beaverwoods logo design process. I’m not going to give much of an introduction, considering it has all been said in the first post. This post focuses on the additions that were requested after the first proof was received.

The children’s ministry at Beaverdam loved the illustration style of the first proof, and we’re happy with all that had been done thus far. BUT, they wanted to add another big element. What would Beaverwoods be without a beaver?

The children’s ministry requested that I add a beaver at the base of the tree, illustrated in the same cartoon style as the tree, as well as adding their church logo to the tree trunk. So, I got to work.

Concept/Sketching

I sketched up my beaver friend in Photoshop using my Wacom tablet. I don’t normally use my Wacom for sketches, I’m a big fan of the pencil and paper duo. But, I needed a quick way to do initial sketches, as cartoon illustration is not my natural style and I knew I’d be doing a lot of erasing. Once I had created a sketch I was happy with I printed it out and inked the lines that I’d later add in Illustrator.

Vector Time!

I imported my sketch into illustrator and put together a new color palette. One that mixed well with the current logo colors, but I also added in some colorful attributes to make the logo more vibrant and kid friendly.

I lowered the opacity of the sketch, as I did in the part 1, and got to work with the pen tool. I just went through and followed my ink lines, which makes this process go much quicker and easier.

Once my outline is finished I created color layers below it and begin to fill them in. I did each color layer at a time until I had used each color from the palette.

Voila! Again!

Once my color layers have been set I dropped out the original sketch and looked at my finished beaver.

Merging Illustrations

I then added the beaver to the tree illustration, but needed to play around with sizing to see what worked the best. Since it’s a kid’s logo the beaver doesn’t need to be proportional to the tree, it’s more important that it’s easily seen and recognized.

Once I have the beaver in I extend some of the grass shading underneath the beaver to make him seem more apart of his background.

Dropping In the Logo

Once my beaver and tree are set it’s time to drop in the church’s logo onto the tree trunk. I wanted to make the logo look like it was actually a part of the tree and not just pasted on. In order to do that I lowered the transparency of the logo making the tree shadows apparent, making the logo look like it was on the actual tree.

Final Proof

Once I had everything in place I sent the final proof. The church was extremely happy with the end result and I can’t wait to work with them again in the future!

Thanks for taking the time to read, please comment! If you like what you’ve read or seen subscribe to my RSS feeds!