Don't Take My Kodachrome Away

copyright and all that stuff by yours truly

I’m often trying to impress on my students the importance of being a good photographer. Not in the sense of using a camera, but in terms of being really good at framing and composing with space and light. This is the point of all the art history classes we make them take too. Design starts with visual composition and directing the eye, and if you don’t really understand what Caravaggio was doing with light, how good are you ever really going to be at laying out a page, much less designing a poster? And of course, the more you understand the old masters, the better your photography will be. You are not just taking a picture; you are composing the frame, controlling (or revealing) the light, and most of all, guiding the eye.

A place where not thinking like a photographer really shows up is in 3D renderings. To be fair, just getting those first few renders to actually happen at all is a huge victory, but once you begin to assemble a portfolio, you can’t just render. You need to make beautiful images.

 The key is to realize that rendering are never used in their raw form in the professional world. They are always adjusted in After Effects, Photoshop, or some other compositing program. The first round of adjustments are pretty much what you would do to a photograph. Levels adjustments, color corrections, that sort of thing. Then, it is all about giving the rendering life and atmosphere; the organic sense of light and air that a camera captures (with the guiding eye of the photographer) but that the sterile world of 3D is missing until we add it in.

 The basics of this post production are captured in this tutorial by Nick Campbell over at Greyscalegorilla. He demos the technique in After Effects, but you use the same techniques for still images in Photoshop. In a more recent tutorial, he takes those basic techniques to the next level and throws in some color lookup tables. And finally, a tutorial by Konstantin Magnus on creating atmosphere in architectural renderings gives a full tool box of techniques for making renderings anything but sterile.

(Bonus: 6 methods for making vignettes in Photoshop)

“The Bear”

This advertisement won a Film Craft Grand Prix along with a bunch of other Lions at Cannes in 2012.
br /> I ran across it in the latest installment of “Best Ads Ever” on Adweek. Peter Nicholson who is profiled in this installment also picks the “The Bear & the Hare” which I featured here way back in 2013 (the timing of my writing this post is a fun coincidence since I taught the Frank Stanton quote featured in that post in class yesterday.)

Color Backgrounds

A sidebar from my upcoming book on portfolios for visual designers. This is from the section where I talk about the four main colors you can present your work on: Black, White, Grey, and Ivory.

Color backgrounds

A color background—or even a palette of colored backgrounds—could work in certain situations and for certain visual designers. This is both really hard to make successful and hard to maintain though, so it is not listed as one of the choices. Like all things in the visual arts, rules are made to be broken, but things tend to be rules because they are really hard to break well.

It Takes Practice Grasshopper

Jakub Rozalski

howling at the moon

Jakub Rozalski’s portfolio demonstrates one of the most important aspects of being a visual artist, and probably the most elusive aspect to teach. Its not color or form or subject matter or any particular hand skill. Those all have their own challenges when it comes to teaching, but they also have demonstrable solutions. And, to be fair, those feel hard enough most of the time, both for teachers and students. What Rozalski’s portfolio shows, on top of a huge amount of skill and talent, is quantity. He has put the time in to master his craft.

Even though the 10,000 hours of practice meme has been disputed and clarified (it's really about intentional practice rather than number of hours) it is still a useful and very true concept. You only get good by doing. For visual communication students, this means that they graduate with a solid set of entry level skills, and—probably important for their confidence as they begin their job search—very little idea how far they are from mastery. This is true even for the best portfolios presented by graduating seniors. There is always more to be learned and it can only be learned by doing.



When I teach a portfolio classes, a theme I return to again and again is that you need to prove you can create a certain sort of piece over and over again to solve different problems. If you want to be a packaging designer, you need to show a lot of packaging. UX folks aren't going to get a job without showing how they connected the experiences they create to their users in multiple types of jobs. Illustrators need to show that they can successfully solve visual problems in a consistent way. An illustration portfolio with one water color, one digital painting, one cartoon, one pen and ink piece, and so forth, isn't going to to be successful. They need show mastery of medium and problem solving. Mastery of multiple mediums runs a distant third if its important at all. A whole portfolio of digital paintings, in a consistent style, is way more powerful than showing a lot of one off pieces. You need to prove that the piece in your portfolio that is in the style your client wants wasn't a fluke. Potential clients want to see a whole portfolio in the style they want to hire you for.

On top of that, if you want to achieve mastery, you have to be in it for the long haul. Underneath all our efforts as educators and mentors as we focus our students’ efforts on skill building, problem solving, and audience driven work, is teaching sustainable practice. What is the process that will not only turn out quality work, but will adapt to work with other people and teams? How do you stay focused on the prize in a world where “entry level” means five years of experience and a bunch of shipped or published work?

“You get good by doing” sounds good, and everyone believes it, but students (and I suspect everyone trying to learn a new skill) struggle with how much of their lives need to be devoted to doing in order to reach their goals. This manifests in a lot of ways but the warning signs of not doing are like flares to those of us who teach. Not researching audience and competitors. Visual direction research that consists of a Pinterest board that is created and never looked at again. The grudging creation of the absolute minimum of thumbnails and preliminary sketches. Students see cutting these corners as good time management—they have a lot of other work to do. We know they are sabotaging the path their career will take as well as the ability to stay on that path until they are established.

Striving to master one thing doesn’t mean ignoring all the other things you could do. It is fun to play in different styles and that may be how you discover the next thing you want to master. But a portfolio that attracts clients shows big chunks of work in each area that you are strong. Look at Rozalski’s portfolio again. Do you have any doubt that he would be able to handle concept work for a military fantasy game or movie or book covers? Make sure your portfolio, no matter what you do, makes potential clients feel as confident in your mastery of your skills as his does for his clients.

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An Interview with Simon Stålenhag's

I love Simon Stålenhag's work and this is a great interview with him.

Simon Stålenhag Shows and Discusses his Fantastic New Sci-fi Paintings

Next Page " Step 1 Following our look at Simon Stålenhag's then-latest set of digital paintings, I got in touch with Simon to learn more about his art - and him as an artist - and between summer breaks I asked him about his influences, his approach to art and just what the hell is going on in his paintings.

Bear Hug Bakery—September Render 1

My first completed piece for September. I learned a lot about optimizing files for render with this one. I got the final render down from 2.5 hours a frame to only half an hour (with a lot of help from Tim Clapham's tutorial at Helloluxx) but the end result still had a flicker in the blurry reflections, so I see a stack of Mac minis in my future to create a render farm. Oh, and just fyi, you can buy a Bear Hug Bakery t-shirt at my t-shirt shop:

Bear Hug Bakery

Mmmm. Baked goods. ___ 100% jersey knit 6oz. fabric weight Pre-shrunk Seamless, double-need ⅞" collar Taped neck and shoulders Classic fit Your...

Title Cards

Very cool title cards, and they get better and better as the series goes on.

Community Post: All The Title Cards From "Batman: The Animated Series"

This post was created by a user and has not been vetted or endorsed by BuzzFeed's editorial staff. BuzzFeed Community is a place where anyone can post awesome lists and creations. Learn more or post your buzz!

Chrystal Goo

Chrystal Goo from Troy Johnson on Vimeo.

Normally I wouldn't post work that is a direct pick-up from a tutorial, but I was proud of this one since the tutorial was fast and complex and I was able to follow along in real time with just a few pauses to make esthetic decisions. The tutorial is over at Greyscalegorilla.

Motion Capture

Motion capture has gotten amazing. Gorgeous work by Method Design.

2016 AICP Sponsor Reel - Dir Cut

The Beauty of the Sun

Nothing I could say can compare with the beauty of these shots from the NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory.

Still from the NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory