The Saddle Creek Apple Store finally struck out with me. Why is it that when I want to make a large purchase in this store, I get ignored or I only get help from people of color? Ooh, maybe I’m invisible. Perhaps I look like I don’t want to spend money. Excuses all.

I’m not about to beg you to take my money & I won’t be shopping there again any time soon.

Moving on.

I’m OK with the fact that I decided to take four personal days, a floating holiday & nine vacation days all in one month, especially if it means I get to travel and write for long periods of time. That said, Ohio & New Orleans, I’m coming for you. ATL, you’re next. I have a whole bunch of people to see, babies to hug & new houses to visit before the year is through.

Being normal is nice, n’est ce pas?

Next month, I’m jumping into National Novel Writing Month. It’s going to be like running a marathon without working my way up to it. I’m scared, but dumb excited at the same time. Plus, I’m pretty sure my writing will suck and I’m OK with that. I’m even going to take the City of New Orleans and go visit my people, and I plan to write the whole way. It’s going to be marvelous!

I'm a zombie, baby. So why don't you kill me?

I used to be a creative.

Then I got a full-time job as a phone-answering, email-replying, newsletter-designing zombie.

It’s not that the job is bad, but I let the job take over.

I lost connections to people.

I stopped making things.

I didn’t write or design unless it was for work.

In other words, I lost me.

I did not  survive the zombie apocalypse.

What do I do?

How do I come back to life?

If only life gave out instant answers. That would be the shit.

Earn your spot on the ‘Nice’ list this year. And don’t make me call Santa’s evil elves to drag you to the polling place by the hand. Go vote already!

These guys attended Memphis Urban League Young Professionals’ annual Spooktacular Costume Party. The pair are dressed up as Prince Akeem of Zamunda  in his McDowell’s uniform (check the pompom on his hat) and Darryl Jenks, Prince of Soul Glo, in his buppie douche uniform (complete with two tickets for the Jets game and a strawberry milkshake).

This is why I *heart* Halloween. It brings out the best in people.

Me with the Spooktacular poster I designed.

Who was I? An ’80s aerobics instructor. I had fun putting on all that blue eyeshadow. Then I had a hell of a time taking it off!

Endymion: he's not a Great Dane, but he could play one on TV.

OK, so there are only six days left in October, the most glorious month of the year, but you still have time to adopt a shelter pet. The little one in the picture above followed me home one day, so I guess he adopted us. Nonetheless, there are hundreds of dogs and cats available for adoption in your local shelter, so do a fur baby a solid, and bring one home today!

There are more than 1,000,001 reasons to adopt an animal, but for time’s sake I’ll only give you a few:

• In spite of disabilities, pets still accomplish amazing things (Gracie | Faith)
• They like to dance as much as we do
• They’re unbearably cute
• They are full of grace (watch only if you want to cry)
• Pets inspire musical expression (about a cat: “Mean Kitty Song” by SMP Films | about a dog: “Brandy (I Really Miss You” by the O’Jays)
• They can pretend to be a World War I flying ace
• They’re just freaking awesome

Inspired to adopt a fur ball of your own? Please visit The Humane Society of the United States, the ASPCA or Petfinder to find a local shelter and for more information about adopting a shelter dog or cat.

This is my latest design for Memphis Urban League Young Professionals. The flyer is for their upcoming Spooktacular costume benefit, and looks nothing like what I first envisioned for this project. I took on the assignment on Friday, and it had to be completed by Sunday, so I had to ruthlessly abandon some of the concepts I had in mind if they weren’t working as well as I hoped or would take longer than the time allotted.

I sketched out a few ideas Friday night and found a couple of photos to get me started. Don’t hold your breath for those sketches.  I’ll save myself the embarrassment.

In the beginning, I wanted to do a play on the Dirty Martini cover above using legs in witch stockings. I found the pair below, but with all that exposed thigh (yeah, I know I could crop it out, and did so), the image felt too sexy for a civic organization fundraiser.

Later Friday night I was told the colors for the party were orange, fuschia, green and turquoise, so I had my palette, and most of the decor would be skeletons. Good thing that I’d already started playing with the idea of using x-rays or bones in some capacity. One of the first bony images I swiped was this:

With the help of the pen tool and the Glowing Outlines filter in Photoshop,  that turned into this:

On Saturday, I felt kind of meh about the whole x-ray/bones thing until I found this:

Still a bit on the sexy side, I cropped out the rest of this x-rayed pin-ups body from the mid-thigh up, added a turquoise neon glow and a martini glass, and ended up with these:

As you can see, there’s a lot wrong with the placement of the legs. It’s really evident in the last two. It could’ve worked if one leg had been lower than the other, or higher, in the case of the original. This was one of the ideas I’m going to have to revisit at some point. Maybe for an after hours med school mixer.

On Sunday, I scrapped everything. Sure the other ideas were fun, bony and ghoulish, but nothing said “costume party”. In an effort to try something new, stumbled across this dude:

Edited out his scythe:

Then put a drink in his hand:

My effort to make him more festive kinda failed:

Still, I liked the result I got from cutting out and painting the harlequin mask, and the lip and stem of the martini glass were transparent so I knew I could put it against any background and it would render correctly. Instead of going with a character, I took those two elements which clearly conveyed cocktails and costumes, and put them together (altering the perspective on the mask of course).

After that decision was made, everything else fell into place. Kind of. The logos took a ton of time, and I hadn’t anticipated that. I had to cut some of them out, hunt for others online, size them all, then figure out how to place them evenly (the alignment tool is my new best friend). Oh and that last stripe on the page changed from a 70% gray (taken from the ‘THE’ at the top of the page) to white since some of the logos were better suited for it:

The other thing that took a ton of time was figuring out how to work around shapes that went outside the bounding box on the art board in Illustrator. The angles in the orange and black stripes were achieved by rotating the black stripe and fooling around with the arrangement. All three stripes went out beyond the art board, so saving as a JPG inside Illustrator was a no-go. In order to constrain the final JPG to the art board, I had to save the file as a PDF, then open the PDF in Photoshop and save it as a JPG from there. I didn’t figure that out until after I tried to cover what was outside the lines with white rectangles and trying to place a frame around the art board that never quite lined up no matter how much I dialed down the nudge value.

At the end of the day, I’m pleased with the way it turned out, and from what I can tell the client is, too. I also designed some tickets for the event, but I’ll hold off on posting them since I haven’t added a watermark yet. Besides, those are a post of their own.

Once again, back is the incredible. OK, maybe not so incredible. I’m working it out. Here’s monster practice project #2, a dude I call That Blue Sucka. I worked on the winged ghost monster, but I need more practice with Bezier curves before I debut it. A lot more.

In the mean time, I’ll stick with twerking stroke size, playing with the pathfinder tool and element arrangements. To make your own blue sucka, follow along with the tutorial at Spoon Graphics.

Working on your own fun practice projects? Know of one I should try (bonus points if I get to use my Intuos4)? Leave it in the comments.