Dra Studio.com - Design & Illustration

IF : Vacant (uploaded by DRA Studio)

This guy started out with some free-form Rita line goodness, then slight coloring in ye ole Photoshop, then finished it off with a light paper texture and some noisy noise. And done.

IF : Repair (uploaded by DRA Studio)

Here is my entry for this week’s Illustration Friday theme of “repair”.

I was thinking a lot about doing something with Anberlin’s great song “Dismantle. Repair.”, but when pencil went to paper, this is what came out. Could’a been because I was watching an episode of “That 70’s Show” while drawing it, but I doubt that had any effect. I guess I don’t really have any particular reason that it is about a broken robot … though, last week I did find an old illustration I had done last year that had another robot with a dismembered arm. It is some where on my Flickr page … you can look for it.

Portfolio Updates (uploaded by DRA Studio)

The last 48 hours or so, I have been chucking a whole pile of new web, logo, illustration and t-shirt projects at the Illustrative Portfolio section. Even took some time to rewrite the CodeIgniter PHP files to optimize their indexing and output. Now, instead of having to manually add each thumbnail and larger image reference by hand, I can simply upload new examples to specified folders and magically, new samples show up on the Portfolio page. Yummy.

There are some other updates I am planning to unleash very soon, including several project case studies that will contain in-depth details, initial sketches and design iterations. There will also be a bit of an update to the layout of the contact form to improve its overall functionality/appearance.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

Note: If you happen to be one of those cool people using the fantastic Cooliris Firefox plugin, I went ahead implemented their technology on the Illustrative portfolio page to improve your experience. Yay!

Special thanks to:

Joe Schneider (Long time friend and Mac-ist) for continually fixing my contact form, even thought I continually keep breaking it with my attempts at being cool.

Josh Bloom (new Course Director at Full Sail) for helping to improve my JavaScript functions and string parsing, so that instead my having to spend time writing alternate text tags and image links, I can just work on getting more designs to you, the people.

Joshua Kendall (Twitter follower) for fixing a CodeIgniter 1.7.1 path issue. Now all of those “random design” banners are loading up just as intended.

Seeking release,
he stands upon a self-made precepice.
Digging his heels
into a soft-set sand that never fits.

Here is a boy,
not striving and nor is his aim for “man”;
there is not a sway
and rare a concern in way of your plan

His goal not ready,
nor can it be found or called to be steady.
Disappointed by many
and frankly has lost all care and love for them or any.

His remorse is as it be;
swift and fleeting and say fair to call heady.
The anger that stirs
is quick to rear and quicker still to be found petty.

Courtney and I were able to sneak in a couple more trailers tonight … hope you enjoy (err … or as close to enjoying as you can … some of these are really just cinema poots):

Delgo
Oscar – Total animated crap.

Pray the Devil back to Hell
Courtney – I can’t make fun of this …

W.
Oscar – Based on a true story? Really?

Talento de Barrio
Courtney – Aren’t there any words?
Jodie – No, because it is a hip-hop-umentary … or a cumbia-mentary. What is that type of music called again?
Oscar – Crap.

Courtney – Thanks goodness that it isn’t coming to a town near me.

The Matador
Oscar – They should have just called it “The tight pants bullfighter”.

Sunshine Cleaning
Oscar – Looks so fun!
Courtney – And I liked “Little Miss Sunshine”.
Oscar – This is the same thing.
Courtney – Just with out the little … miss … sunshine … pageant.

Christmas On Mars
Courtney – A “made for Mystery Science Theater” movie!

Note: If you have ever wanted a glimpse into the off-kilter and corrugated psyche that leads to all of the illustrations you see here, never has there been more of an opportunity. I hope you enjoy.

Recently I have been doing a lot of reading, which has included the fair share of books on technology (i.e. Ruby, AJAX, CSS, etc.), classic literature (Don Quixote, Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist) and even some of my childhood favorites (Maniac Magee, A Wrinkle in Time, etc.).

Of all of these, the ones I have enjoyed the most are most definitely the latter, which bring back so many memories and emotions of when I first turned their pages. The only real problem of going back and reading these, I am finding, is that with their literary reminiscings, I have begun to feel a longing for other books from my childhood. Books, quite frankly, that I can no longer remember any distinguishing details of. All I have are faint recollections of themes and minute details.

If you are asking, yes, I have tried using the glorious macrocosm that is the Google search database to help me, but it can only do so much to piece together the unravelling threads that currently occupy my head (though, I was able to recently find one childhood book, but I want more!).

This is where you and your brain come in. No, no … I have no need to harvest your smarty cerebral flesh like a zombie; I simply want to toss some inklings and ideas at YOUR memories and see if anything emerges. If I am really really lucky, you might just remember the book/short story I am searching for. Exciting, I know!

Ok … ready?

The story continues, click to read more...

I am a little late to the game on this, but recently I was creating an iPhone screen optimized version of a site for my personal usage and thought I would share some of my findings.

The Initial

Though Apple recommends through the expansive information in its iPhone Developer Connection to implement CSS3 conditional statements to effectively achieve alternate style-sheets for personal computers and for the iPhone, I wasn’t satisfied with the resulting functionality. Yes, it did allow me to provide a 480px wide version of my design to the iPhone, but strictly using Apple’s sample code left me without a style-sheet for older browsers to fall back on.

Apparently, the “recommended” conditional statements of CSS3 do not degrade to older browsers that don’t support them yet. Sure that is not a major issue, but if I still wanted to provide any kind of design for users of IE 6, I would have had to segment out my CSS rules into 3 separate style-sheets. One would be attached to the page using the traditional link tag (for the older browsers) and the other two (to be loaded using the previously mentioned conditional statements) would have to be comprised mainly of descendant selectors to cascade over the previous stylesheet’s presentation changes. Not to difficult to initiate, but I felt it would be a big pain to continue to maintain … especially for the needs of this particular “project”. Ehem. Moving on …

The Desired

What I found extremely helpful, in the way of an alternate approach, was this article over at Jeremy Flint’s blog, which properly demonstrated how to utilize PHP to “sniff” the User Agent of the browser and once determined whether it was an iPhone or not, provide the appropriate style-sheet.

While Apple does technically suggest not using a sniffing Agent to provide the presentation aspects of your website, I kinda feel their non-backwards-compatible recommendation has a much larger hole in it than the one I am creating by reading the User Agent. And frankly, the fact that I can switch my User Agent on the fly (using the ‘Develop’ menu item in Safari 3.0, this is the method I am going to stick with for now.

Any thoughts or other findings you want to share? I’m all ears. Well … an iPhone too.

Jodie, Courtney and I got a chance tonight to catch up on some much needed movie-trailer watching. Apple has made some great improvements to the Quicktime Trailer site and that plus Unsanity’s WSX made for a simply wonderful time. There are alot that we watched, so you better get yourself a snack first. ;)

The World Unseen
Jodie – Oh! I couldn’t tell if they were Latin, Indian or lesbians.

Valkyrie
Oscar – I mean, I like Tom Cruise.
Courtney – He kinda creeps me about a little bit.

Changeling
Oscar – That does actually look … except for John Malkovich, that is. Can’t stand his work.

The Pleasure of Being Robbed
Courtney – I wish I could read what those people wrote … then I could know what they thought about the movie.

Just Buried
All – What a funny concept for a movie! But also, gross.

Shiver
Oscar – This movie looks like it was shot by people that make car commercials!
Courtney – And did they spell shiver wrong?

The story continues, click to read more...

IF : Sugary (uploaded by DRA Studio)

Oh the joy of yummy treats and sugary candy eats! Here is my deliciously evil entry for yesterday’s Illustration Friday theme of “sugary”.

The gritty paper background is courtesy of a Google search and a great resource called CG Textures and the scrumptious scary font was the feature download this month from Nate Piekos and his amazingness.

Candy, candy, candy …. aaghg!

IF : Packed (uploaded by DRA Studio)

Here is my entry for this week’s Illustration Friday theme of “packed”. What started out as just a backpack sitting on the floor, filled with fun things, quickly became this cute multi-handed alien guy looking to fit in at school. Yay!