Graphic Artist, combining photoshop, illustration and photos
I grew up in a family of artists and from a very young age was well established as the kid who could draw stuff. Over time, I became a pretty good sketch artist, but didn’t pursue art as a vocation until 2003 when I co-founded my first photography company, called Land Run Productions along with my friend and mentor Dr Jeremy Cook.
As I got more into photography, I fell more and more in love with photoshop as an artistic tool. Over the years, as the software and my skillset improved, it became more and more inseparable from my style. The thing about photoshop is it’s a great tool in moderation, and that’s where people misuse it, overcooking their work and overlooking basic artistic principles of composition, color grading, perspective, lighting consistency etc. These are all things that I pride myself on as a graphic artist.
My photoshop creations are a blend of photography, licensed stock images and my own illustrations. The resulting art is stylistically identifiable as mine.
This page is primarily just to show off my favorite photoshop projects. Some are my own. Some are from various portrait and branding projects, and some are collaborations with models and makeup artists for themed scenes – pirates, vampires etc. When time allows, it is always a fun project to work with other creatives to build unique content for ourselves – much of which has been featured in magazines and advertising.
I hope you enjoy the gallery. Another reason I put it together is to let curious clients know the upper end ability we have at Shipman Photography to do photo editing. Not every image needs this obviously and the most important skill in photoshop is knowing when to stop. But I’ve always been of the opinion that even if you only need a little bit of editing, why wouldn’t you want to work with a commercial photographer who isn’t also a graphic artist, capable of doing in-house photo editing at the very highest levels?
It’s really one of the unique things about us and I am extremely proud of the work we are capable of doing here.
It took me awhile to embrace the term, “graphic artist” because it seems kind of self important, as do most titles with the word “artist” in them. But it’s the best way to describe what we can do with photoshop here at Shipman Photography, and we are always up to the challenge when our customers have an idea for some cool themed graphic art creation. Visit our commercial portfolio and our senior portfolio to see many more examples of photoshop art within the more mainstream photography portfolios on our site. Some of the photoshop work is purposely surreal and will be easy to spot, but much of it is photorealistic and I think will be harder to pick out from the photography.
I am also available for personal photoshop tutorial and private lessons. Contact us through our booking information to inquire.
