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Welcome to the world of Shawn and Octoberson Design!
I'm a graphic designer who's finally starting to branch out into other areas of art and interests. I've been a graphic designer/production manager/graphic/production director for a local magazine. While I like designing ads and helping to produce a magazine every month, I also love to draw.
My hope for this blog is to post all sorts of new things that I've created, from sketches to finished works. I want to put my name and my work out into cyberspace, maybe it will end up making more creations to put into my digital portfolio! Please feel free to contact me if my design skills could be of use to you.
Last year one of the writers for the magazine asked me if I could do an illustration for her husband. Since I was very interested in trying to do more freelance work and have more experience with Photoshop to color and piece together things into a design, I said sure. It turns out she was looking for a drawing of the Bates house from Psycho.
I'll be the first to admit, drawing houses, buildings and backgrounds is usually not on my list of favorite things, so I asked her if I could do something besides just a drawing of the house. Finally I came up with the idea of making it a new movie poster for the old movie.
I've never really done a lot of posterized pieces like this, but considering the time the movie came out it made sense to me after doing some research. To this day, like the Hellé piece in my previous blog, I feel I could do a little something more with this, but what mattered is what the writer thought. She loved it, so I guess I didn't do that bad...
It's always kind of weird talking about sex with your mother. What's even weirder is hearing your mother's take on sex or anything sexualized.
That's how this project started.
The character's name is Hellé and she was created by Shawna Moore, who's a romance writer and a friend of my mom's. Shawna knew of my mom's artistic talents and was asking her to please do a drawing of her character for promotional work. Mom was happy to help her, but then admitted she was a bit rusty at drawing people. So mom came to me asking for a little help.
Shawna had a certain image in mind for Hellé, right down to the pose. Mom was trying to explain what she understood of the look and the pose to me and I remember the longer the talk went on, the more uncomfortable I got.
"Maybe we should drape her over the bed seductively."
"I think she needs to have more cleavage. She supposed to be sexy, after all!"
Yeah, it was enough to make a grown man squirm uncomfortably.
Instead of mom collaborating with me, I asked her to let me run with the image and see what I can come up with. So I went back and forth with Shawna and my mom to show them the various stages of me doing my very first attempts at coloring using Photoshop. Looking at the piece now, I'm amazed by it because I feel I have managed to improve in a short time. Still, as a first time coloring job, I'm proud of how parts of it still look going on two years later.
So that's that. And now after that awkward talk with my mom about trying to make Hellé look sexy, I'm ready to admit that I wasn't born, I was sent here in a rocket ship from the planet Krypton. (I love you, mom... seriously!)
