Tips & Tricks Category:

Chopping Block Saved the Date

Monday, 11.16.09 at 10:04 am
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Chopping Block first worked with Phish back around the late 90’s on a number of projects including (but not limited to) Farmhouse, Trampled by the Lamb, The It Festival, Phish 2.0 and later Phish 3.0. Depending on the nature of the project, Phish has always leaned heavily toward the absurd and often messing with conceptual […]

Photoshop: Prep & Color Scanned Drawings

Monday, 10.26.09 at 12:48 pm
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For years now, we have been using and teaching a slightly more powerful approach to digitally coloring scanned sketches/drawings/artwork (art) in Adobe Photoshop. The de-facto technique for coloring scanned art in Photoshop is to switch the document color mode to ‘RGB Color,’ set the blending mode of the layer containing your artwork to ‘Multiply’, and […]

Chop: Fall Flash Classes at SVA

Wednesday, 09.16.09 at 5:53 pm
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Fall is here and you know what that means, back to school time. This fall, Tim and I will both be teaching at School of Visual Arts. Tim will be teaching Basic and Advanced Flash Weekend workshop classes and I (Matthew) will be teaching an Advanced Flash Independent Project Actionscript class. The Independent projects class […]

Chop Shop: Obama in The Sea of Hope

Thursday, 04.02.09 at 12:42 pm
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After 8 long years lost in the Sea of Holes, we emerge into The Sea of Hope with Barack Obama at the helm. Join the first family as they battle the Green Meanies of recession and plant a blue flower square on the nose of Rush Limbaugh. Wear your HOPE on your sleeves, literally. New […]

Generative Art in Illustrator: Scriptographer

Wednesday, 03.25.09 at 2:07 pm
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They say the devils’ in the details, and while working with vectors can be fast and freeing, it can also cause a designer to obsess over every last point.  A good way to counteract this is to inject some randomness into your design. That’s where the illustrator plugin Scriptographer comes and saves you. Scriptographer is […]

Illustrator CS3 & CS4: Reflection Templates

Thursday, 03.19.09 at 4:40 pm
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A while back we released a few pin striping inspired tshirt designs. As I watched the designer study and practice the craft of freehand pin striping (with a brush & exceptionally steady hand), I couldn’t help but wonder if the reflection part of the design could be automated within Illustrator. Emulating the fidelity of a […]