Brandon Pence

This was one of the hardest challenges I have ever faced as an artist. “Stray Bullet” has so many unique things about it that I’m not sure where to start. Let’s go back a few years… I’m not entirely sure on the exact time frame (2 years maybe?) but it was at night in Fountain Square in Downtown Fort Walton Beach. Steve Burrows, Brad Greek and myself were sitting out in front of the old Artesano Jewels (now the NWFLAA Art Lair) discussing art and artists.

Somehow we got onto the subject of what defines an artist; one of my favorite subjects to discuss, especially with those 2. As we discussed it, I threw myself to the dogs as to whether I was a “real” artist or not. Brad asked me if I had ever done a self portrait; I told him I had not, and he told me every artist has to challenge themselves with a self portrait. That just stuck in the back of my head for awhile… that I wanted to do one now that I had been challenged to do so. It’s just my rebellious nature.

I toyed with different ideas for awhile… as far back as March 11, 2010. That is when Jennifer and I did the photoshoot for my Alice in Wonderland pictures. I was toying with the idea of having one of my models slitting my throat as a clever little joke. We shot a few test pics but I just never liked the idea enough. Here’s one of the test shots:

Never ran with it. Just didn’t feel right to me so I sacked it.

The need to do a self portrait never solidified fully in my mind until I finished my piece, “Horizons:”

Allow me to explain…

Years ago when I first got fired from Cuppy’s Coffee and began doing art for fun, I posted my work on Deviant Art. For shits and giggles I decided to number my first print to separate my new work from my old work. I posted it on Deviant Art as “1 – Freedom” and continued the naming tradition with all of my prints. Sort of inspired by (or absolutely ripping off) the Nine Inch Nails Halo concept; that some works of a collective can be recognized as specific “canon” of sort. How does Horizons fit in? It was #49.

Yep. 49 pieces of art since January 14, 2008 (the date Freedom was posted on deviant art). Pretty cool. But now… fuck. I have to do a self portrait. Just cause.

I’m like that.

Anyways.

Now I had to come up with an idea… my next idea was a more space based theme. This was around September. It didn’t get far for me to realize the idea was shit. However I can embrace that some good ideas will encounter failure so here is the sample I did for that theme:

Sacked it. Hated it.

The next idea, since I was having a hard time defining a style for myself, was going to be a portrait of me made of words. I made a post on my Facebook asking people to describe me with one word. I fed all of the words into a PHP script and had the sizes and words randomly chosen. I did not use all of the words. There is a significance to the number of words I feel is personal and I don’t want to share it right now. If you submitted a word and yours didn’t get used, I appreciate your help, but I never indicated what this was for. I simply asked and you delivered and I appreciate you helping me; let’s leave it at that. =)

I will use all of the words for projects in the future, no worries.

When I noticed Tai Jun hadn’t responded to my FB post I asked him to describe me personally. His immediate response was “fuck.” This was also the response of my boss Kevin Almodovar, by the way…

Anyways TJ asked me why. I told him “no reason” and he said something to the effect of “if you’re thinking of doing one of those stupid portraits where the person is made out of words… don’t.”

Damnit.

Sacked it. Back to the drawing board.

A few weeks went by and I started toying with the idea of basing my self portrait on my personal favorite piece of mine: “Birth.”

“Birth” has always been my favorite piece. It’s not a popular one at all; it’s just my favorite. It’s with the model Sarah Ebear and I think I like it because it was one of the first times I trusted my heart completely with my art. Before that I would take criticism and sometimes alter too much. With “Birth” I did some samples of it to test the idea I had; to combine vector elements with a raster portrait. I did a test that in all honesty was absolutely dreadful…

I was originally going to use Azrael Nightmare for it. She is the model above. I did that test and I was so excited; I knew my idea would work. I remember emailing that to Tai Jun, one of my closest friends. I normally bounce ideas off of TJ when I’m excited so that he can crush my spirit and make me apathetic to the entire idea. I showed him that and I was like “Dude check it out. It will totally work.” He took one look at it and was like “…what the fuck is this?” I was like “IT’S FUCKING AWESOME AND IT’S EVIDENCE MY IDEA WILL WORK SHUT UP”

I just knew it would. I knew in my heart this idea would be cool. Even when I started “Birth” it was crap. It sucked for a long time.

Hard to look at that and stay motivated. I stuck with it though and it paid off. I have always been very proud of that piece and it remains my favorite.

Before I settled on the idea I actually called up Sarah Ebear. Sarah put herself in her artwork a lot so I wanted to get her perspective on the whole thing. Whether it’s vain or megalomaniacal or what have you.

We had a long conversation about it and she really opened my eyes to it. Sarah has always been someone I can turn to when I am creatively stuck and she will set me on the right track. I used to call her my muse for a reason.

During the conversation I told her why I was asking; that I wanted to do a self portrait and I couldn’t settle on a style. She said without hesitation, “you should do it like the one you did of me, Birth.”

I was like “…son of a bitch…”

Sarah has always been on my wavelength but it just felt like the final bit of closure I needed to run with the idea finally. That this was the one that would work.

I had a hard time accepting myself as the model. I have never put a man in my artwork at all, let alone myself! I also couldn’t just fuck off and come back to the idea later. I wanted it to be the 50th so I was stuck.

I must have retaken the pictures in my apartment 4 times. I did them all myself with my Canon 50D on a tripod. I felt asking one of my photographer friends to help would have been putting another artists touch on the overall thing. I respect my photographer friends so I don’t look at them as just “people pushing a button.” I didn’t want to have any of their artistic style in this so I did it myself.

It took awhile to really click but once it did, it just fit together effortlessly.

I did not save a lot of WIP’s (work in progress) while I was working on “Stray Bullet.” Not sure why. I don’t think I ever fully committed to the idea that it would work. In fact I accidentally saved over my “blank.psd” file, a file I use for each art piece, and never bothered renaming it. It still is named blank. Well, blank4a.psd.

Because of that I cannot show you it’s entire creation process.

I can tell you it involved 113 Adobe Illustrator files and 9 PSD’s totaling over 9.31 GB. This style has no tricks; it’s an absolute ton of layers. The video below, while it may seem like one layer, is actually a bunch of layers in an Adobe Illustrator file embedded inside Adobe Photoshop. Meaning each “step” could be one layer in Adobe Photoshop but contain 500 layers in Adobe Illustrator.

So while this is hardly a step by step video showing the creation of “Stray Bullet,” it is a layer by layer breakdown of my final PSD. It is still the most detailed video I have made showing my process from beginning to end.

Here are some pictures I took to send friends during it’s creation:

It’s been a project in the work for over 9 months and I am proud to have it finally finished. I hope you all enjoy it. My 50th piece, my first self portrait, the first time a man has been in my artwork… it has a lot of challenge to it but I am very proud of what I accomplished with it.

Thanks for reading.

Hello all!

For Halloween I decided to throw a pretty nifty little pic together and show you how to make it, which I have named “Vanished.” This Photoshop Tutorial or Photoshop Lesson isn’t meant completely for beginners. This photoshop tutorial really assumes you know your way around photoshop but I try to step by step it. However, this is not completely me holding your hand. =)

First things first: open the picture. You can download a zip file of the images we will be working with here. This also includes my PSD file so you can see what I masked in the sections where I give you creative control.

Now open the image of Jen and duplicate the original layer. You do this by going to Layer -> Duplicate Layer. If the option is grayed out, you may need to unlock your original layer. Double click on it and then click on and it will unlock it.

Rename your new duplicated layer “unsharp_mask” (to rename a layer, double click on it’s name). Then click Filter->Sharpen->Unsharp Mask and use the settings:

Amount: 99%

Radius: 56%

Threshold: 13 Levels

Now create a new layer (Layer->New Layer). Name the layer “eye” and then select the paintbrush tool (B on your keyboard) and with a white brush, paint over her eye. Then set this layers blending mode to Overlay.

Create another new layer and name it “hair.” Use a black brush to paint over the visible edges of her hair so it is all black. We don’t really want her to be seperated from the background.

Now hit Layer -> Merge Visible. This will flatten our image.

Now duplicate this layer and name it displacement. Click Filter -> Distort -> Displace. Leave the settings at their default and click OK and select the file displacement.psd included in the zip file. Set this layers blending mode to Hard Light and click Layer -> Layer Mask -> Reveal All and with a black brush, paint over her face and the edges of her shoulders.

Time to start coloring the image! Whenever possible, use adjustment layers to color an image. It’s a great non-destructive habit to get into.

So click Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Brightness and Contrast. Set the brightness to 28 and the contrast to 12.

Next, click Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Color Fill and fill it with color #23455e and set the blending mode to Exclusion.

Now click Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Levels and set the shadow input level to 65, the midtone level to 0.87 and the highlight to 147.

Now for my favorite coloring method, the Gradient Map! Click Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Gradient Map and at 0%, set a stop for #112236. At 20%, set a stop for #254760. At 80%, set a stop for #b9bbc7 and then finally at 100% set a stop for #e6eaf3.

For the next step, you are going to repeat this 3 times for each one of these boxes. Just first draw the rectangle similar to what I have, make a new layer and with a soft white brush, paint along the left side of the box. Then set the blending mode to overlay, add a mask and with a black brush, click at the bottom and the top of the line to make it get wider in the middle. Do this for each rectangle.

Now open the file bokeh.jpg, copy it into a new layer on your document and transform it to fill the canvas. Then hit filter -> Blur -> Motion Blur and set the angle to -45 and the distance to 398. Set this layer to Color Dodge and adjust it’s position to where you like it.

Open the file streaks.jpg and copy/paste it into a new layer on your document, make it fill the screen and set its blending mode to Screen. Then hit layer -> Add Layer Mask -> Reveal All and with a black brush, paint away the parts you don’t like.

Last step! Create a new layer and with a soft brush with a color of #ff36bf, paint around the edges of her body or face. Set the blending mode to Overlay and there you have it!

I hope you all enjoyed this. If you have any questions, feel free to add me on Facebook at http://facebook.com/ihateartists and hit me up.

Have a safe weekend, everyone.

First off, I just realized this is my 200th post on the website. Awesome! Woot. I have nothing planned and since it is 1AM… yeah… getcha next time, kid.

Tutorial time!

The other day a girl I know asked me to show her how to make a cool Halloween type font effect for a poster she was designing. So I figured why not, let’s share it with you lovely people! Happy Halloween and such!

First up you need a badass font. I am using “Frank Knows” from http://www.dafont.com

Launch Photoshop and hit File->New. Make the width 800px and the height 600px, resolution 72. Background color black.

Using the text tool, type your text and then right click the layer and hit blending options.

Apply the following Layer Styles with the listed settings:

Inner Glow

• Blending Mode: Overlay
• Opacity: 75%
• Noise: 0%
• Color: #ff0000
• Technique: Softer
• Source: Edge
• Choke: 0%
• Size: 10%

Bevel and Emboss

Set the gloss contour to have the U shaped contour and set the shadow opacity to 0%

Satin

• Blending Mode: Overlay
• Opacity: 32%
• Angle: 19
• Distance: 11px
• Size: 14px

Color Overlay

• Blend mode: Normal
• Color: #fbaf5d

Anyways you should be good to go after that!

If you need any help, hit me up on my Facebook or download the PSD file here.

So yeah, check it out. I decided to write a Photoshop tutorial. Isn’t that awesome? I know!

Today I’m going to show you how to take a nice beach photo and just give it a little dimension. I’ve always loved the colors of old California style surfer photos. I’m sure my photographer friends are going to crucify me for not being able to describe that with real terms (“PRETTY THINGS!” doesn’t count) but what can I do. Polaroids maybe? I don’t know.

Anyways.

I’m going to assume you have at least a basic understanding of photoshop for this. One cool thing about this tutorial is it is going to be 100% non-destructive. What that means is we are not going to destroy a single pixel.

So first off, head on over to SXC.HU and download the image here: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/986619

Open it up in Photoshop and let’s get cracking.

This entire photoshop will consist of adjustment layers (and one noise layer at the end). Adjustment layers are layers that adjust various properties of everything below it. They stack and blend like normal layers.

To access adjustment layers, just click right here.

It’s a little half black, half white circle.

So okay. Open up the image in Photoshop and crop it if you want.

The first adjustment layer we are going to make is a color fill adjustment layer. The color fill adjustment layer simply fills the layer with a solid color. Set the color to hex value f7d9ad and set it’s blending mode to Multiply. If you don’t know what a blending mode is, it’s the little drop down on your layers palette.

Next, add a curves adjustment layer. Set the green output to 44 and the input to 43 then set the blue output to 128 and the input to 105.

Add a levels adjustment layer and set the midtone to 1.33 and the highlight to 236.

Add a brightness and contrast layer and set the brightness to -18, the contrast to 28 and check the use legacy box.

Add another curves adjustment layer and set the RGB output to 168 and the input to 184.

Add another curves adjustment layer and set the red output to 187 and the input to 163. On the green curve we are going to make 2 points, one at 87,94 and one at 184, 186.

Add another brightness and contrast adjustment layer and set the brightness to -29 and the contrast to 32 and click the use legacy box.

Add another curves adjustment layer and set the red curve to 206, 194.

Add a hue and saturation adjustment layer and set the saturation to -41 and the lightness to -28.

Add a brightness and contrast layer and set the brightness to 16 and the contrast to 38. Click use legacy.

Add our last curves adjustment layer and set the green to 163, 153.

Add an exposure adjustment layer and set the offset to +0.0445.

Create a new layer, click edit -> Fill and fill it with black. Click noise, add noise, and set the settings to their maximum with monochrome selected. Set this layers blending mode to soft light and its opacity to 16%.

And there you have it.

If you want the gradient effect I had in the preview, simply group all of the adjustment layers together and add a gradient mask to them.

Thanks for reading. If you’ve ever seen an effect you wanted to know how to do in Photoshop, please feel free to email me at brandonpence@gmail.com and I’ll see if I can sort it out. =)

Dosvidanija.