Sin City Style

The goal here was to make it look like a scan from the comic, although it's probably way too photo realistic.

Calvert Vaux Preservation Alliance

This is a site I've been working on for a family friend, photographer Alan Strauber. It's nearing completion, and should go online w/in the next week at CalvertVaux.org

My Sweet Illusory OS X Desktop

This is a shot from the BLUEFLY studio. Lighting and camera by Ian Roberts. Styling by Paul Colombo. Color-correcting and retouching by me, Dan Black.

How to accomplish this desktop effect (OS X only):

1. Get a nice shot for your desktop.

2. Set it as your desktop

3. Open a finder window and position it wherever you want, but make sure its somewhere you won't move (because this isn't a real transparency, we're faking it).

4. Take a screenshot of your desktop (apple+shift+4, then drag over the whole desktop, release your mouse). Try to make sure you take the whole screen by dragging from the top-left to the bottom-right.

5. Minimize the find window.

6. Take a second screenshot of your desktop. You may have to move the Picture file that was created when you took the first screenshot. Again, try to make sure you get the whole screen.

7. Open both screenshots in an image-editing software of your choise. I used PhotoShop CS2.

8. Copy the first screenshot (the one with the finder window open in it) and paste it on top of the second screenshot (the one without the finder window open).

8b. If your screenshots were exactly the same size then they should match up. If you made a mistake you'll need to match them up. You can do this a number of ways, but I prefer to change the top layer's blending mode to "difference" (blending modes can be found in a drop-down above the layers palette) and then moving the layer around until the information that matches up cancels eachother out, leaving you with a mostly black screen (the portion that should be different, in this case where your finder window is, will appear to be color-inverted). Once you've lined them up you can change the blending mode of the top layer back to normal.

9. Select (in PhotoShop using the marquee tool, hotkey M) the area of the finder window that displays a background (default is gray I believe).

10. Hide the top layer (the one with the finder window displaying). You can do this by clicking the eye icon that is next to the desired layer in the layers palette. Do not deselect the area from the previous step.

11. Crop the image to the current selection.

12. Flatten the image (in PhotoShop: apple+shift+E) and delete any remaining hidden layers.

13. Duplicate or copy and paste the background layer into a new layer.

14. Blur the new layer. I used gaussian blur, but at this point you could apply whatever effects you feel like. I also lowered the opacity of the blurred layer to give it a glass-look.

15. Now save this as a jpg (I believe other file-formats will working, but jpg is pretty standard at this point).

16. Go to the finder window that you wish to make 'transparent' and change the folder view to icon mode (there are three icons at the top-left). Now click the actions icon just to the right (it looks like a gear/cog) and select 'Show View Options' from the dropdown.

17. If you want to use just one finder window to navigate then check the "All windows" radio dial at the top of this panel. This will create the illusion of transparency as your icons load on top of the same background every time. Now go to the bottom of the View Option panel and check the Background: 'Picture' radio dial. If there is no picture loaded click the 'Select' button and go find the image you created in steps 7-15.

18. Close the View Options panel. That's it! You're done!

There are obviously problems with this method, for example if you scroll the image scrolls with it (sadly). Also other finder windows will have this background, and moving the finder window destroys the illusion. If anyone knows of a method to perform true transparent effects I'd love to know. I'd assume an apple-script could control this beautifully, but that's not really my area of expertise.

Under Construction .gif for Bluefly

made this image for bluefly as part of a warehouse move page. this would display along with some copy to the effect of 'this portion of the site under construction.' the idea eventually was replaced with something simpler.

vxn

just a quick sketch, thought it looked good though

In the Midst, by the Might

this is a character i made up a while ago, and changed quite a bit, KANAK, espionage and stealth is his game. took me about 11 and a half hours

Ultimate Fashion Face-Off, Turbo

Collaboration with Hiran Kuru

Chimeran Overlord

quite basically this is a non-direct depiction of a character from a ps3 game, resistance; fall of man. done with 2H .5 mm lead in a mechanical pencil. took about 4 hours total

...

i honestly dont know what to call this, it feels very titleless to me...

the filename is "Emogoth" but it didnt seem to fit, so i guess a somewhat nameless title has been input

though ill probably think of some half-assed title by the time i get around to posting this on my DA account ( http://zetimenvec.deviantart.com/gallery/ if any of you care to look at my previous works)

At the slight of time

quickly drawn and well done i feel, better then the astro chick, and took about half the time to draw, started the sketch yesterday, scanned, outlined, colored, and shaded within the next day...

i had fun with this

Astro Chick

sketched it out initially by hand, then inked and colored with a mouse... i feel i need a less simplistic approach to doing ambient light, ive only gotten ambient to come out right once using this technique, and it was with a vector peice, so i dunno. well wait no, there was two, but w/e.

Dancing in the street

this was sketched, lined, colored and shaded with a mouse

Bluefly.com Photo Retouches