Photoshop Archives - Brian Piana

RGB iPhone Screen Designs

Brian — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 18:03:36 +0000

These iPhone screen designs came about because I decided I wanted to explore the NFT (non-fungible token) space in the summer of 2021. Digital Art and NFTs seem like a very natural pairing, yet I wanted to make something that was not just a stand-alone artwork. I settled on iPhone screens, which could be enjoyed more regularly in everyday life.

NFTs allow artists to market digital works directly, which is really convenient. Previously, I would have made prints or paintings from works that begin as Photoshop renderings in hopes of selling them. When an artwork exists as an NFT, however, the blockchain provides an undisputed claim (and potential trail) of ownership, which is pretty exciting. Moreover, whenever an NFT is resold, the original creator can get a small percentage of all future sales.

The process of “minting” a digital work or artifact as an NFT comes with a very real cost, however, and ultimately I didn’t want to invest that level of money into an experiment. So here are my three “Almost NFT” designs, available to anyone and everyone as a free download. Scroll down below the triptych to access the high-res versions. Note: these are designed at the larger iPhone 10 screen size (1125 x 2436px), but can be used on most any version.

Like my other RGB and Sometimes Y work, these screens begin with a screenshot from the ongoing RGB feed, which you can view here. The feed presents tweets in near realtime from the Twitter public timeline that mention to words red, green, blue, and yellow (in any context). From left to right, the backgrounds above were captured:

June 6, 2021 at 6:43pm CST
June 25, 2021 at 10:52pm CST
June 28, 2021 at 3:19pm CST

From there, I added an RGB star, gradients, shadows, and the transparent cube pattern for additional texture.

Free to Download!

Grab any or all of the individual designs below for use on your own phone:

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Star Wars Destiny Alt-Art: Maul

Brian — Sat, 18 Aug 2018 05:50:14 +0000

I started playing Star Wars: Destiny at the beginning of 2018. My son enjoys the game, and I needed a distraction from the politics of the day. There’s a community within the game that creates their own “alternate” art versions of the cards. Wanting to stretch my illustration game, I decided to tackle a redesign of the card art for one of my favorite Star Wars villains – Maul. Full card art below:

I later offered up the design to the Golden Dice Podcast as a reward for their Patreon subscribers. They printed out my card, and now it’s sprinkled in Destiny collections throughout the country. Here’s a photo comparing my design with the original:

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Superhero Poster Illustration

Brian — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 16:38:31 +0000

I was commissioned by long-time friend to create a poster depicting his three young nephews as a superhero tandem. The resulting image was drawn entirely in Photoshop using a tablet and delivered to the client as a 24″ x 18″ print. I really enjoyed the opportunity to explore the comic book aesthetic I so readily embraced as a youth.

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Daddy Camp Badges

Brian — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 14:27:24 +0000

Hoping to keep my kids entertained during the week between the end of school and the kickoff of various summer camps, we came up various “badges” they could earn. I have started illustrating them in Photoshop and will eventually print them out as stickers. That way – as with scouting merit badges – my kids will have physical artifacts in recognition of their summer achievements. A selection of badges are shown below.

Aquarium Badge –Visit the Moody Gardens Aquarium in Galveston, and then draw and/or color a picture of a favorite fish that you saw.

Haircut Badge – Get a haircut during the first week of summer vacation.

Ice Cream Badge – Eat ice cream or frozen yogurt in three different cities.

Reading Badge – Read five books from your Summer Reading list.

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Political Bowl Season – 2012 Primaries: Designs, Stickers, and Bunting

Brian — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:42:54 +0000

Political Bowl Season began with an idea to merge political parties and campaign races with the fanaticism and pageantry of american football. During the primaries of the 2012 presidential campaign, I developed helmet designs using the logos of each of the remaining candidates. Click on each thumbnail below for a larger view.

[envira-gallery id=”173″]

Next, in wanting to turn these designs into a more tangible piece of campaign collateral, I designed “team” stickers and had them printed for distribution.

[envira-gallery id=”197″]

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Houston Art Fairs website

Brian — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 03:40:40 +0000

Two separate art fairs debuted in Houston in the fall of 2011. Houston Fine Art Fair happened in September, whileTexas Contemporary – the result of a disgruntled spinoff from the former – touched down in October, both at the same venue. Glasstire has a thorough article on the origin of these two fairs and the subsequent drama.

I wanted to have a bit of fun with these two entities and created a webpage that portrays the two fairs in a competitive manner. Each fair is represented by a floating construction of its site’s favicon logo atop a background of the Houston skyline. (Information on favicons and my sculptural rendering of them is provided below.) Clicking on each of these will allow you to “favify” the page, creating a swarm of smaller red and yellow icons, as show here:

About Favicons and Favify

Favicons are the 16×16 pixel icons that appear in the address bar or tabs of most browsers. Using Google’s Sketchup, I developed a process to extrude each pixel into a height, based on a its luminosity. In the examples below, for example, the black pixels are pulled to the tallest height, while the brighter pixels remain at a shallower depth.

Favify is a made-up term for allowing users to deploy multiple favicon renderings directly into their browser, as with this project. Use the red link in the sidebar to visit the project, then start clicking on either large favicon.

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