Lady Logo

I would like to take a moment of your time to brag about tell you what I've been up to this week. It requires a bit of a back story.

Last October, I hired a graphic designer to make a logo for my salon. The idea was to have some flyers done and out by Christmas, so I could take advantage of that extremely busy time of year. But the guy dragged his feet on it, and a week into December, he confessed he hadn't even begun thinking about it. I realized I would need to throw something together myself if I wanted a piece of the holiday money pie.

In my salon, there is a beautiful bust of a woman with long hair. I decided to use her as my logo image for the time being. So I put her on a chair, took a picture of her, and blindly clicked on random Photoshop options until she looked digitized so I could make my OWN dang flyers thankyouverymuch.


Nothing professional looking, but workable. Several people who responded were delighted when they came in, saw the statue and recognized her as the image from the flyer. It was a great conversation starter and I decided to keep her as my logo image indefinitely. I emailed what I had done along with pictures of the rest of my decor to the graphic designer I had hired, and told him to use these to create my look. I was really excited to see him improve on my amateur attempt.

He finally started sending me things. I have NO idea why he went the direction he did. I saw nothing of my salon in his images. And nothing of my statue. It became clear after several attempts that he wasn't getting my vision, so I paid him for his time, and sulked for about a month. Jonathan, my champion of logic and clarity, gently pointed something out to me that gave me the motivation to take the next steps.

He said, "Melain, you're an artist. Most people hire an artist to give them a design because they don't have the vision to make one themselves. You need a DATA ENTRY artist to read your mind and make your vision a reality, because you don't have the skills to do it yourself. That's never going to happen. Their artistic vision is always going to find its way into their work. You've got to either let go of your vision a bit, or get the skills to do it yourself."

As always, he was right. So I set out to get me some skillz yo!

Now bear in mind, this is NOT what I do. I have a great eye for aesthetics and enough skill to pick up a charcoal pencil and make a pretty detailed sketch. But I've never tried to draw with a MOUSE before. I knew it would be hard. I didn't expect it to be as challenging as it was.

It took me DAYS my friends, but I DID IT. I am ridiculously proud and I simply HAVE to fish for compliments show you my design! I'm not showing the whole logo, just the image I worked so hard on.

I started by painstakingly smoothing every pixel of that picture using the few methods I am familiar with. I'm sure there are quick, easy ways to do what I did, but I don't know what the hell I'm doing, so I went the slowest, most agonizing way possible.

Once I was satisfied with her texture. I decided I didn't want her to look exactly like a statue, but more like a drawing of herself. I found a filter that made a basic sketch outline and converted her. As you will see below, the sketch was pretty rough. I wanted her to be MUCH more detailed than I could figure out how to make her with Photoshop's filters.

So, from that sketch ladies and gentleman, I DREW her details by hand. Or rather, by MOUSE. I used the pencil tool, the dodge/ burn tool, and the clone tool. Look at my masterpiece!





Reconstructing the her face and ear took for EVER and I'm delighted with how they turned out. But I am particularly proud of the hand! I used my own hand as a model. I just held it up next to the screen and layered in the shading as best as I could. Can you freaking believe how good it looks?!!! I'm so full of hot air over this I could just FLOAT!

I was on a role! I didn't want to be limited to just a sketch. What if I DID want her to look more like a statue at one point? I went back to the second image I created and spent a few hours improving upon her color and texture. From that I made an image that looked like a painting. I was happy with the results, until I noticed the hands. I had done my beautiful hand in the sketch!!! I should have done it in the ORIGINAL!!! BIG FAT SLAP TO THE FOREHEAD!

A normal person would have walked away at that point. There was no copy and pasting, the textures were too different. And because I was making everything up as I went, I couldn't repeat the steps I had made to the images. So what did I do? I redrew the hand on both images. I'm pretty good at drawing hands with a mouse now!



So there she is boys and girls. The woman who has been keeping me awake at night, giving me severe neck and shoulder tension, and keeping me from blogging. What do you think?!