Coming Soon: The Bacathlon!

Stay tuned for details on this great benefit event for childhood cancer patients…

Illustration Friday: Skinny

Video/Animation Projects

Samples of Video work I’ve done so far…

Title: Good Company
Role: Illustrator, Animator, Keying, Editing
Created Using: Adobe After Effects 7
Client: Media Partners

Title: SonSeeker Safari, Day 1
Role: Illustrator, Animator, Voices
Created Using: Adobe After Effects 7
Client: New Hope Free Will Baptist Church

Title: SonSeeker Safari, Day 3
Role: Illustrator, Animator, Voices
Created Using: Adobe After Effects 7
Client: New Hope Free Will Baptist Church

Title: Change and Innovation Through Brainstorming intro sequence
Role: Illustration, Animation
Created Using: Adobe After Effects 7
Client: Media Partners

Title: Change and Innovation Through Brainstorming copier battle sequence
Role: Illustration, Animation
Created Using: Adobe After Effects 7
Client: Media Partners

Title: Marlins Baseball Highlights
Role: Camera, Editing
Created Using: iMovie HD
Client: 2009 Marlins, Parks & Rec

Title: Heat Fastpitch Highlights
Role: Camera, Editing
Created Using: iMovie HD
Client: 2009 Heat, Parks & Rec

Craigslist Ad: Experienced Product Designer

Craigslist is one of the most popular sites on the Internet among people looking for something specific. Since it’s free to post ads, I’m taking advantage of this resource to post ads for my freelancing business. If you’re a freelance designer or illustrator as well, why not do the same? Here’s my recent ad:

I’m Rob, a freelance illustrator and graphic designer with over 10 years of professional agency/corporate design experience. I’ve worked with clients such as Microsoft, Cinnabon, Starbucks, Mrs. Fields Cookies and most recently, J&D Foods, makers of Bacon Salt ™ and Baconnaise ™!

ARE YOU LOOKING FOR CREATIVE, out-of-the-box solutions for your “in the box” products? Do you want a fun and fresh look that will help your products to JUMP off the shelf? Look no further!

Check out www.RobTheDesigner.com or email me at the address at the top of this ad today! Let’s get to work!

Rob Christianson
www.RobTheDesigner.com
253.217.2032

PS: Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!

Illustration Friday: FAST

Back when I worked in Seattle, I’d have to run for the commuter train almost every evening – the downside of being a perfectionist at work.

Clue Characters T-Shirts!

Due to a recent surge in popularity of my illustrations based on the board game Clue (or Cluedo), I’ve decided to create some t-shirts based on these pieces. So far, I have two shirt designs ready and hosted on my store over at Zazzle.com – Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlet. If you’d like to place an order, head over to http://www.zazzle.com/robthedesigner today! Affordable prices and great designs you won’t find anywhere else!

Illustrated Farm Maps

I’ve created two illustrated maps in the past for farm events, and thought this would be as good a time as any to show them off again – what with Halloween approaching and pumpkins and cornmazes on everyones minds…

The first was created for Freedom Fest, a Christian music festival held at Stocker Farms in Snohomish.

The second was created for Biringer Farms in Everett, WA.

Illustration Friday: FROZEN

Returning to The Wheel of Time…

Out of the blue, I received an inquiry about purchasing prints of my old Wheel of Time art. Always wanting to be the accomodating artist, I dug up my old files, downloaded a recent version of Bryce that would actually work is OS X, and got ready for disappointment. Unfortunately all my textures for my favorite image, “The Death of Kinslayer” were lost…

BUT the image they were asking for, The Seals Are Breaking, still worked fine (with a tiny bit of tweaking.) Here is the original piece:

Once I fixed the Aes Sedai symbol (looks like the Yin Yang thing with no dots) I did a few tweaks on things that had always bugged me with the original (directions of light beams, texture of ground, etc), and I fine tuned the environmental effects from what I could remember about the program. Here’s the new one:

I think I’m finally happy with it. After 13 or so years!

Building a Comp Old-School

If there are a few things I don’t miss about the early days of my design career, it was that icky feeling of spray adhesive landing in the hairs of my arms and the dangers of Xacto blade cuts… but I do enjoy the “craft” of getting down and physical with my design work now and then. I hope I never get to the point in my career where I think building a comp is “beneath me”, though I do know how time consuming it can be…

For example, here’s a box I’m working on. It will hold salad dressing packets on grocery store shelves, should the stores choose to use the box rather than putting the dressing mix in their spring-loaded shelf doohickies. First, I had it printed out and spray mounted to card stock.

Then I cut the dieline out with my Xacto and straight-edge, and scored it with my “homemade scoring tool” I learned to build back at HL2 (it’s a paperclip wrapped with electrical tape on one end).

Once I could fold it and assemble it, I added in some mockups of the Dressing Mix envelopes. My client wanted to see how the design would look peeking out of the box.

Voila! Now for another trick I learned back at HL2 (back then it was Horton Lantz Marocco) – I took a few photos in the grocery store where the product would be displayed. (This is a LOT easier now that cell-phones have cameras build in!) I later took a head-on shot of the box with the packets in it, and photoshopped it into an area on the store shelf photo to give an idea of how the product will look in the actual retail environment… And here you have it! BACON RANCH STRAIGHT FROM THE FUTURE!

What do you think? (My lesson learned is that I need to pick a brighter PMS color for the red of the box – it’s just too dark on the shelf, though it does pop the illustration!)