I’ve been producing a lot of WordPress web sites lately. They are an excellent solution for small businesses who want to be able to write blog posts and make occasional updates to their website themselves.

The Tavdi.com website shown above is a good case in point. Personnel at Tavdi can edit the existing pages, add new pages, and write blog posts using the very user-friendly WordPress Dashboard interface. The Tavdi site utilizes the Thesis framework which features unmatched SEO, cross-browser compatibility, and top-notch HTML + CSS architecture.

Another recent WordPress site is the one I produced for CANEpress.org, the publishing arm of the Classical Association of New England.  In this case I developed a customized design using the K2 theme to give CANE Press a web site and blog that matched the look of their Zen Cart store that I had produced for them previously.

To learn more about how a WordPress website can be customized for your business, please contact me using the contact form on this website.

Although I was trained at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Kansas City Art Institute to create art with traditional materials and techniques, I have always enjoyed exploring new media and am now at the point where all of my work is created with digital tools.

Here’s a simplified description of the 3D digital process:

The figure is modeled in the computer using a 3D mesh, as if it is being sculpted out of clay. A skeleton is built for the figure so that it can be posed. Clothing, furniture, backgrounds and other props are also created as 3D meshes. Textures, both handpainted and photographic, are painstakingly applied to the 3D meshes. All of the elements are positioned and lighting is set up as if they were on a movie set. Camera angles are chosen and and image is rendered. Frequently more than one image of a scene is rendered, composited with others, retouched, and sometimes manipulated to add special effects in a digital paint program to create the final image. The final image can be saved in a variety of formats depending upon the medium in which it will be used, whether it be in print or on the Internet.

In the case of animation another layer of complexity is added. Movement must be specified for the figure, camera, lights, and anything else in the scene that moves during the length of the animation. For every second of animation 24 or more images must be created, so despite the fact that the computer speeds up the process, it still tends to be very time-consuming work.

Several software programs are used for the different stages in this process, for 3D modeling, texturing, posing, animating, and post-production. Often commercially available 3D meshes and textures can be utilized and modified for specific projects to streamline production.

CANE Press, the publishing arm of the Classical Association of New England, commissioned several black and white illustrations for their new edition of Navigatio Sancti Brendani, (Navigation of Saint Brendan) a textbook for second year Latin students.

The story of a seven-year voyage on the North Atlantic of a band of sixth-century Irish monks was prepared for reading with vocabularies and notes by Thomas M. Hayes, and edited by Ruth Breindel.

All the illustrations were created using 3D meshes with post-production work in Adobe Photoshop. The illustrations were then inserted into the book’s pages using Adobe InDesign.