Herald of Creation was a nice chance to use some of my favorite photo manipulation techniques in an interesting way and combine them with some vectors from Go Media.

Many people (and companies) today believe that they have a very firm grasp of Social Media Marketing. They will tell you about how many followers they have on twitter, how many friends they have on facebook, in a bid to sound impressive. Its really not.

Viral Video is a marketing tactic that has been brought to the forefront specifically through Youtube. It’s amazing to think how much this particular website has effected our lives and even our culture and language. More importantly however it has spawned several niche industries and new marketing techniques and strategies. Fairly quickly I’m going to give you a few brief tips to help you in your viral video efforts.

Creative people by nature are less rigid and more eccentric than your traditional office worker, so the corporate world can be tough for us (particularly if you are very sensitive or empathetic). So in order to help you get through the 9-5 I’ve put together a little post that I hope will keep you off the ledge or from slicing your ear off!

I’m really excited about this! It was a great honor to be featured in Photoshop Creative’s Reader’s Gallery section. Four of my favorite pieces of art were featured in this month’s issue including: Energetic and Celestial Being.

Todays Music Monday Inspiration image was a request from a watcher of mine on deviantart.com enjoy!

Finding a good web hosting company can be a difficult thing if you’ve never had to do it before. If your not the most tech savvy person in the world it can terrifying, and you are likely to end up getting a lot of things you don’t really need. I’m going to do my best to give the no-nonsense approach to shopping for a good web hosting company.

New York is a truly wonderful city, particularly for creatives. You can barely walk down a street in this city without encountering a barrage of colors, advertising, art, architecture, and any number of inspiration, its is literally a creative playground. I took the opportunity to take some pictures while in the area of the 35th and Broadway, as well as when I was in the Subway catching my train back to Brooklyn. These are the ones that really caught my attention.

Raven Dawn II is a follow up to my original Raven Dawn image using what I’ve learned since that time. For this image I took a simple and clean stylish approach.

Many people have asked me lately how I achieved some of my goals and popularity as a designer so quickly. In all honest I’m forced to admit that it has more to do with my understanding of 2 things rather than some tremendous talent I supposedly have (I still have a ways to go to be the designer I want to be), and those 2 things are: Marketing and Technology, and the fact that applied them to Brand Development.

I really enjoyed working on this particular image. Look at me was a chance to try out some new techniques. I did extensive retouch work to this image including, completely recreating the eyes and lips, whitening the teeth, and smoothing the skin.

I used different adjustment layers to really get the image to pop. The butterfly wings I did myself using a reference. The model in this image was great and had very unique and expressive features that allowed this image to work the way I imagined it.

This is a short and sweet deal today. In the process of trying to help some fix their Godaddy site, I determined that it doesn’t handle PHP includes in the way that I’m used to (as with most coders) I have been fighting with it for a few days and going to Google for solutions that never seem to work. Finally I broke down and called customer support who insisted I had coded it wrong, when I had tested this repeatedly in XAMPP, Dreamweaver and my own browser and I KNEW the files were being referenced correctly.

Roberto Blake Interviewed by GraphicEssence.com “I’m actually really happy this interview came up and GE had some really interesting questions for me!

The recession is still a probably for many, not just in the United States but abroad as well. The economy has hurt people from many different fields, and the Graphic and Web Design fields are no exception. The job crisis is very scary, but embracing fear isn’t the answer, finding solutions is, and as a Graphic Designer living in the recension I have some interesting advice that will help you through it.

This past week has been interesting, and in many ways a real treat for me. I was independently contracted by an old employer to teach 14 adult [military] students an Advanced Level Photoshop CS4 course. Not only was it an opportunity to impart my knowledge on to a group of people and share my unique perspective and skills with them, but I learned things from them both as artist and as human beings throughout our time together as well.

Digital Illustration color work of my character Sidney from my online comic Project Rave.