Last Christmas I designed a custom notebook skin for my niece Isabell
and had it created by skinit.com.

I’m visiting the family in Denver so this is the first time that I’ve had the chance to actually see it on her notebook.

It looks really great & she loves it! It’s been on her notebook for 7 months and shows no sign of wear or peeling, the color is really accurate, I highly recommend skinit.com!

I haven’t been working on it continuously, but it has taken me nearly 2.5 years to feel like it’s done….or, at least, good enough.

It is an abstract oil painting and is 36″x60″. It was created using a combination of my three favorite creative tools: camera, computer and paintbrush.

The concept: escape via bicycle

This piece started when my Dad asked me to create a piece of art for him to go on the large wall over his mantle in the living room. He is an avid bike rider (both motorized and peddle), and as I’m sure anyone who rides knows, he finds peace and escape from the hustle and bustle of everyday life out on the trails and in nature.

I photographed my own bicycle, brought the images into my computer and played around with different filters and cropping in Photoshop and Illustrator until I found some ideas that I liked. I took those ideas to pencil and paper and after finding the composition that I liked – transferred it to canvas using oil paint.

I wanted the painting to feel dynamic and have a sense of movement, so I chose to use complimentary colors (colors that are across the color wheel from each other) and to place the two main subjects diagonally across from each other. The abstraction of the elements also adds to the feeling of movement.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, the abstracted elements in the painting are the hub of the front wheel (lower left) and the chain guard (upper right), there is also a series of over-lying boxes that I use to suggest being outside of constraints (outside of the box).

The title “Celestial Ride” is the combination of the idea of getting outside of ones everyday life (off the planet) and the fact that several people had remarked that the painting looked like a couple of celestial bodies to them.

Here a SimpleViewer Flash gallery should be displayed. Click here to open the post in your browser to see the gallery.

In December on my visit to see my family in Denver my niece Isabell asked me if there was a “skin” available for the Dell notebook that I had gotten her. I figured there was, and set out to find one.

She had expressed a love for the fleur-de-lis while I was there and I was excited to find that skinit.com had a skin with a fleur-di-lis pattern! But I wasn’t excited about their design…just a bunch of fleur-de-lis duplicated across the image, in either black with white, white with black or pink with white….not so great.

Then – I saw the “create your own” button! You can use their images, add text and shapes or do what I did – create your entire design in Illustrator (or whatever design program you prefer) and upload it!

I was pretty pleased with the result – it’s a very glossy vinyl skin.

This image is just an approximation of what the design looks like on her Dell….I’ll have to have her send me a photo when she has it applied.