The Art Alive invitation package for The San Diego Museum of Art is printed and will drop in the mail this Thursday. The Museum and patrons loved last year’s award-winning design so much – they wanted to use the same concept. Since repeating a design is boring both for the designer and the viewers, our challenge was to improve on the idea. Last year, Kelly shot the brush parts as giant, macro pieces. This year we shot the brush parts close-up to get a different look and feel. This project was started with a sketch of a full page ad (see Image 1.) with three brushes. Once we had an idea of the three brush shapes to be produced, we then did photography of the paintbrush parts.

Here are some of the steps to producing the red brush. Images 2., 3., and 4. show the raw photographs of what were used for the paintbrush handle, brush tip and petals. In Photoshop, I made selections of the elements using paths to drop out the backgrounds. Image 5. shows the five pieces that make up the entire brush. Image 6. is the composite of all the parts with a little more work done on the handle to make it fuller through the center like a real paintbrush. All the elements are on separate layers in Photoshop and work together to create the paint stroke and the brush. This modular approach to the paintbrush production allows the art to be manipulated to fit the many different layouts (image 7.) required during the Art Alive show at The San Diego Museum of Art. What do you think of the results?