Society6- You can buy prints from me even if I’m dead.

Hi!

Today I wanted to share my brand new Society6 store with you!

I’ve always wanted to offer prints of my work but I have been hesitant to invest more of my time, space, and equipment into creating a backlog of print inventory that might not sell. On top of this, cleaning glass, matting, framing, packaging, and shipping artwork is not really my strong suit. It’s a lot of running around just to ship one item to one person. Luckily, I’m not the only artist that was thinking all these things and over the last 5 years many print-on-demand services have developed online that will handle all the “other stuff” that goes along with selling artwork. I found Society6.com in one of my searches and haven’t looked back since. I can pretty much just make my artwork, upload it, set my prices, and let them handle everything else. It has been a joy. In the past 2-3 months, I’ve made more photographs than I have in 4 years of college (which I’ll post about later). Most of my new work and some of the older stuff is now available on my new Society6 store: www.society6.com/alexhawkphoto.

Right now I mainly just wanted to offer prints both framed and unframed but Society6 offers so many more products including mugs, clocks, bedspreads, pillows, beach towels, bath mats etc. I used to get kind of worried when people asked me about purchasing a print of my work because it usually meant jumping through several hoops on my end just to get a picture in their hands but now I don’t have to worry about any of that. I can just direct them to my Society6 store, they handle the money, they print my work, they frame my work, they package it, they ship it, and then they pay me my cut of the profits. I was also worried about print quality but it all gets printed on one of those huge large format Epson printers, according to their website it’s an Epson Stylus Pro 11880 “- the world’s most advanced 64-inch wide printer” which is good enough for me.

“well you could probably make more money if you did it yourself” 

That’s probably true, you’re probably right but I think it’s worth getting a little less money in order to have my own online store that basically runs itself without me touching or buying a thing. Heck, I could be dead and you could still buy a print from me and you’d get it in the same amount of time. That’s what I’m talking about. Society6’s tagline should be “this guy died but you literally won’t be able to tell the difference because we do everything for him except make the actual original artwork so you can totally still buy a print or whatever you want even though he’s dead”

Seriously I wish I had done this sooner.

 

-Alex

 

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How To Set Up Your Camera’s Diopter

I’m just going to leave this video here because it’s so helpful. Thanks, Mike.

 

Adjusting the focus of the camera’s diopter has always been a pretty big bugaboo of mine. It sounds dumb to say because it’s almost a no-brainer but I find that this little adjustment knob is easy to bump without realizing it. I have done this many times and it always takes me forever to pinpoint the issue. I always assume I’m just blind or my glasses are dirty.

 

-Alex

Octane Materials for Cinema 4D Vol 1

Hi there,

I just finished creating my first material pack for Octane inside Cinema 4D now available on my gumroad store HERE.

Let me share with you some of the preview images I rendered out for each of the materials in this pack. I photographed each image texture and created each material in C4D from scratch. Each material tiles with an image texture at 1000-3000ish pixels square depending on the material. I’ve set the displacement amount very low on materials that use displacement so you can turn it up to your liking. I’ve also included my Octane Material Preview scene with all the textures from pack already loaded. So if you have any issues you can manually copy the materials and tex folder from that project to your working project file and everything will copy over! For this material pack there aren’t any Octane Mix materials so everything should load normally from the included LIB4D preset file once you copy it over to your content browser folder. Let me know if you have any questions please message me on Gumroad or on Twitter at @Alexhawkphoto.

Free Stock Images

As a followup to my post about Gumroad I think it’s fitting to make a blogpost sharing some of the stock image websites I’ve found useful recently.

I made a running list of websites for free stock images here on my website that I’ll update as I find more websites but I’ll also put them here in this post for now.

Again, if you have a website that you like that’s not listed here then let me know and I’ll check it out.

 

Stock Images- some of my favorite resources for photobashing/digital art.

http://www.photobash.org/

https://gumroad.com/noahbradley

https://gumroad.com/joost

https://gumroad.com/wootha

https://gumroad.com/stijnwindig

https://gumroad.com/tomlopez

https://gumroad.com/jacekpilarski

https://gumroad.com/lyraina

https://gumroad.com/l/fLwyr

https://gumroad.com/guymandude

https://gumroad.com/samguayart

Emily Chen- Alaska

https://www.flickr.com/photos/tjframe/sets/72157605581901392/

https://reidsouthen.selz.com/

http://fotoscopy.com/

http://www.textures.com/

https://www.pexels.com/

http://fancycrave.com/

http://www.texturemate.com/

http://www.texturex.com/

http://freetextures.3dtotal.com/

http://www.splitshire.com/

https://stocksnap.io/

https://visualhunt.com/

http://getrefe.com/

http://barnimages.com/

 

Photo Reference- more geared towards drawing/art reference than for use in photomanipulations/photobashing

Old Master Artists collection by Dylan Safford

https://www.3d.sk/

http://mjranum-stock.deviantart.com/gallery/

http://hardsurface.tumblr.com/

https://www.pinterest.com/bryanwynia/

https://www.pinterest.com/katiepf/

https://www.pinterest.com/characterdesigh

New Digital Online Store

I’m very excited to officially announce the launch of my new digital online store through Gumroad. There are so many options for digital store platforms now it was kind of difficult to choose one over another but I was really just looking for something to help me share content with other artists. I haven’t planned out exactly what I want the store to be but I know I have a lot to offer. To start I’ve uploaded a few packs of images I’ve shot- skies, rocks, smoke- that hopefully other artists will find helpful in their own projects.

I’d like to take a second to put some emphasis on image quality. I’ve found a lot of good stock image websites (which I’ll make a post about later) but there’s nothing better than shooting something myself. I hate it when I find a stock image I like but the resolution is too low or the image quality is poor because the photographer has no idea what they’re doing. Honestly, I find that there’s still too many low-quality images on the web to choose from and I’d like to change that. However, I don’t feel like I need to completely reinvent the wheel here, there isn’t much I’m offering yet that’s really unique to my store other than all the images are shot by me personally so you can rest assured they’re not garbage. Right now, I’d just like to try and use my new online store to increase the number high-quality images available on the web for artists to use. If you can find something that works for you in my store, great, if not then I’m still sad to see you go. Bear in mind that I just started this store and I’ll be adding new content as regularly as possible.

My point is that I want to live in a world where image quality and resolution is a nonfactor when deciding what images or digital products to download and use. I’d like to raise the image quality level of artists’ work to a higher standard. I’m sick of seeing new artists online create a cool concept that falls apart because low-quality images were used and I want to help make a difference there if I can.

Again, I’m not sure exactly what the future of the store will be but I’ll gladly take suggestions. Check it out HERE.

-Alex

New Photo Retouching Page

Hi again, it’s been a while. I’ve added some new content to my website you might be interested in viewing. I created a retouching page to feature some of the editing work I’ve been doing the past few months.

Check it out here: http://www.alexhawkphotography.com/retouching

The format of this page is different from the others on my website because I wanted it to be more interactive. Each image on the page has a slider in the middle of it that you can drag back and forth to see the image before my editing and after.

There’s also a small description above each image where I talk a little bit about what needed to be done to each image that should help you to understand what you’re looking at in terms of edits and changes. Let me know what you think! I’ll be adding more content there as it gets completed.

Artists & Inspiration: Piper Thibodeau

I found this artist just the other day and I already forget how I came across her work but I love it. I think I had followed a concept artist on Twitter and Piper’s Twitter page came up on the related profiles to follow.

Piper is a freelance character designer/illustrator/artist that has worked for Nickelodeon, Dream Works and Intel.

 

I love how fleshed out her style is already. It’s easy to forget how many different styles of art there are within just one medium. For example, Piper’s work is very different from Pascal’s work even though they both use similar drawing and painting tools in Photoshop to represent 3D objects in a 2D space.

If you’d like to support Piper you can do so on her Patreon Page and also give her a follow on social media: DeviantART Tumblr Twitter Instagram
-Alex

Artists & Inspiration: Brandon Stanton- Humans of New York

I’ve been following Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York project for a while now but I had not made an Artists & Inspiration post on it yet. Instead of talking about Humans of New York and writing out a big block of text I have found an equally interesting Chase Jarvis Live video interview you can check out.

Chase Jarvis does occasional CJLive broadcasts featuring other creatives and he had Brandon on for an interview not too long ago.

I’ll leave you with the video available for viewing here:

Artists & Inspiration: Andreas Levers

The lovely people at diyphotography.net posted an article about photographer Andreas Levers who has started compositing CGI elements into his landscape photographs. Levers’ work falls right in line with the theme of the last few posts which focus on combining multiple mediums to create a piece of artwork.

I love how minimal Levers’ landscapes are even with the added CGI elements. I suppose you could argue that work like Levers’ isn’t photography anymore because it has CGI in it but really, who cares? As long as you can make what you want to make I don’t think it matters how you got from A to B.

You can check out more of Andreas Levers’ work here on Flickr or here on his website.

Artists & Inspiration: Rasmus Berggreen- Fall of Gods

Back in February I found the work of Rasmus Berggreen, a great concept artist who has worked on games like Hitman: Absolution. In September of 2014 Rasmus and his company MOOD launched a Kickstarter campaign for a book called Fall of Gods. The book is almost a cross between a graphic novel and an illustrated children’s book. It is filled with pages and pages of epic digital paintings by Rasmus which tell a grand story based off of Norse mythological tales of old.

What drew me to this book Fall of Gods was not only the epic story but also the concept art style of illustration. Rasmus combines drawing, painting, and photographs in photoshop to create entirely new images with a high level of detail and realism. This sort of technique, called “Digital Matte Painting” or just “Matte Painting” before the digital age, is often used in the film industry to replace skies and extend landscapes. If you’re a fan of Peter Jackson’s movie The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings Trilogy you’ve probably seen a lot of Matte Painting on screen without realizing it.

While there is no shortage of concept art on the web there is a smaller amount of concept art that is also combined with photographs and yet an even smaller amount of books that are illustrated in this fashion. I would even venture to say that Fall of Gods is one of a few, if not one of a kind, in terms of the book’s overall illustration style, layout, and storyline. It’s nice to see that concept art feel pushed to the forefront of a viewing medium like this book when so often the concept art itself does not make it through to the final presentation in a video game or feature film.

I’m very glad that Rasmus has a chance to shine in the spotlight a little bit with this book and also reveal a bit more of what a concept artist can really do. I think that professional titles get muddied during the credits of a game or movie and it’s sometimes hard to tell what one department really does that sets them apart from one another. This book really defines the concept artist department for me and makes things a little less murky. I feel like I could better describe what a concept artist does now that I’ve read this book which may be a good selling point for you if you’re thinking about picking up a copy.

And if that’s not enough, Eon Sounds, a “Music scoring, production and licensing company for TV, Films, Trailers and Games” contacted me on Twitter the other day and said that they had made an OST for Fall of Gods. This book has its own original soundtrack. That’s awesome!

 

To add even more awesomeness, 20th Century Fox is picking up Fall of Gods for a movie.

I think that is just the coolest thing that someone could:

1. Come up with an idea for a book
2. Write and Illustrate that book
3. Gain support for their book on Kickstarter and get their book published
4. Get an original soundtrack made for their book
5. Have a major TV/Film production company want to make their book into a movie.

I’m so psyched for the movie and also the sequel to this book if and when there is one. I’ll keep you posted if I hear anything else.

 

-Alex