Marketing and self promotion today is pretty straight forward. Think about what you do in your everyday life when its time to make an informed decision. Personally if I want to find the best deal on computer hardware, I do a Google Search. If I need a plumber or painter, I ask friends for recommendations and I still do a Google Search on the people they suggest.

I then go to their website and try to find information on their services, rates and what people are saying about them.

This is how most people qualify their buying decisions in the technology age. And hiring and investing in you “is a buying decision” and you need to think of it that way to market yourself effectively in 2012.

Designers need to invest in the future of this market as well. The need for print designer’s continues to shrink with every new devices that is capable of enabling media and ad delivery. A huge shift to digital media buying has been taking place for the past 5 years and show’s no sign of slowing.

A great collection of photo manipulations from a variety of talented digital artist and designers.

No matter what level you’ve reached in your career or journey as a designer, there is always room for improvement! Today I’m going to cover a few ways you can improve your design skills and reach your next level.

Force of Nature is a fairly simple image to create but uses several techniques in combination to accomplish something clean and visually dynamic.

In my time I’ve had the opportunity to work with many creative and talented people. Whether they have been models, musicians or dancers, each of these people has been unique and inspiring. One of the greatest talents I’ve had the pleasure of working with is Sir Ben Marx (Marc Benjamin).

Melody Nieves is one of my favorite people in the online design community and its was a real treat to interview her and ask her some questions, and more about her blog SexiDesign.com

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.

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!

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.

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

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