These are two photos I took in Montreal, Canada, in which I removed most of the transient objects (like people, animals, temporary signs, etc.) in Photoshop.
Exhibit #1: Notre Dame Basilica, before and after
Exhibit #2: Japanese Garden, Montreal, Canada, before and after
This is a series of women’s faces from stock images downloaded from the stock.xchng website. In Photoshop I generally removed blemishes and softened the skin on all the subjects, then reshaped and enhanced the faces to achieve what I believe to be more attractive results (Exhibits #1-5). Exhibit #5 is an age-reduction exercise, and Exhibit #6 is a hi-key adjustment only on a previously processed image.
Exhibit #1.
Exhibit #2.
Exhibit #3.
Exhibit #4.
Exhibit #5. Age reduction approx. -15 years
Exhibit #6. Hi-Key
This is my latest paid project, a PowerPoint presentation, subject: “Bullying.” It came to me through Guru.com. The “employer” wanted around 9 slides, and left it up to me to input pictures and style. I used a collage of my own photos for the background, giving it a sort of gritty, restless effect. Then I googled “bullying” and found a number of appropriate images that related directly to the employer’s text.
Flow dynamics of normal vs. cancerous capillary. For University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center Doctorate Student’s Thesis. The image below shows my preliminary pencil sketches that I presented to the client. The first sketch was a full-color sketch that pretty much depicted a representative style suggesting colors and textures that might be used, but significant changes were suggested, which led to the 2nd and 3rd black-and-white pencil sketches, from which the final rendition was produced.
This is a series of six illustrations I did for Mentor Corporation, for their SeedVue Instructions for Use document for physicians and nurses. The SeedVue Brachytherapy Seed Holder housed tiny radioactive pins that were implanted inside the patient’s prostate gland to destroy cancerous cells.
Circulatory System and Airways of Bronchial En-branch (Acinus)
Rendered in Adobe Photoshop. Self-promotional illustration.
Human Kidney
This illustration was rendered entirely in Photoshop. A publishing company contacted me about leasing the image for use in their trade show booth. It was fortunate that I typically work on a large scale in my Photoshop illustrations, and I was able to provide them with a high resolution TIFF file at just the size they needed.
HER2 Protein Receptors in Cell Wall
Dako’s mission is to fight cancer, by providing high quality antibodies, instruments and software we are raising the global standards for fast and accurate diagnostic answers for cancer patients. I produced this illustration for Dako’s marketing department, and it was ultimately placed into one or more of their catalogs.
I started the illustration in Adobe Illustrator, just to get a row of polylipid balls to line up across the viewing plane, following the contour of the cell wall in a circular path. In retrospect, I think I could have made the cell even more circular, then applied some wave distortion to make the wall look more organic. Electron microscope images of cells I had seen showed that cells are typically less irregular shaped than I made them out to be, unless, of course, they’re misshaped by cancer.
I had wanted to make the receptor shapes look more symmetric, like flower petals, but the client insisted on their ultimate depiction, like deformed spoon shapes. So my goal was to make the scene visually imperfect and organic, more realistic, less generalized.
The DNA strand in the center was particularly challenging, and probably would have been more effective if I could have rendered it in 3D, but that is a skill I have, unfortunately, not developed in my illustration experience.
An exploded view of Apple’s iPhone4 rendered for iFixit.com.
A few years back I applied for a website design/development position at iFixit.com in San Luis Obispo. iFixit.com posts photographic tutorials on how to fix a large variety of electronic devices that are out of warranty, and allows users to add their own repair experiences to the website, like a wiki-type forum. It was decided that I didn’t have the necessary web experience, but the CEO was interested in some of my line art work I had posted on my website. We met for lunch, then I took a tour of their facilities.
I was then contracted to illustrate this exploded view of the iPhone 4. iFixit sent me an inoperative unit with a toolkit for dissecting it. Before opening the phone I had to decide how I would approach the project, knowing that if I fully disassembled the phone at the onset I would probably never be able to associate the relation of one part to the next. What I ended up doing was to carefully remove and illustrate one part at a time.
Ultimately, I had illustrated and labeled practically every mart part within the phone, which numbered around 25 parts, each part on its own layer in Illustrator. Using well organized, labeled layers was critical to this project. Each layer was duplicated and the objects on the duplicate layers were filled with a red color, then each layer was brought into Photoshop. Each Photoshop layer was finally exported to a .png file for input on iFixit’s website, focusing on the relevant part being replaced on the iPhone. See below for an image highlighting the main circuit board in red.
The main circuit board of the iPhone4 exploded view is hilited in red to show the iFixit.com subscriber the part being referenced. Each part of the exploded view is similarly hilited in red, corresponding to its own area in the website.
Here is the link to the illustration as it is currently being used on iFixit.com’s website.
Each of us is supplied with a variety of specialized “white” cells, namely macrophages, T-cells, B-cells, and antibodies. These cells are infused with shared chemical markers, and they all team up to fight hordes of invading bacteria at the site of an infection. After the battle is fought its memory lives on, so the next time your body faces the same infection, it can be defeated much more effectively.
Add to that the huge amount and variety of other mostly benign creatures that reside inside, and they could all comprise a visual—albeit ghostly—walking proxy of yourself. Just don’t lend them your credit cards if they decide to take a vacation from your body.
And if knowing that you are a walking biological repository of minute monsters doesn’t set well with your sense of unsullied sterility, then you could do worse than have to take a regime of strong antibiotics to help your white cells fight your infection. Except that you’d be destroying a bunch of benign critters in the mix, or at least upsetting their balance in your body for years to come.
