Canadian Veteran Freedom Riders Motorcycle Riding Club: “Thunder in your Shorts!”

In early December 2011, I was contacted by Col. James Gludo (Canadian Armed Forces, Ret.). James Gludo in civilian life is a technology strategist with IBM’s global business services in Calgary. Col. Gludo finished his military career spending over a year in Kabul, working as a senior mentor to the Afghan National Army, as a part of Operation Enduring Freedom. In his civilian capacity, James also is the President of the Canadian Veteran FreedomRiders Motorcycle Riding Club. It is a great organization that brings veterans and supporters together to ride motorcycles and work towards helping veterans and serving members. CVFR is becoming national and Calgary is the first unit out West. One of the endeavors the club is about to undertake is to create a ride in 2013. They are calling it "Thunder in your Shorts!" The premise is based upon helping Veterans.  It is known that clothing assistance is provided by many organizations, which supply gently used clothes and jackets. Food is also being addressed through food banks and such. James then started thinking about undergarments. The problem was that nobody donates “gently used” underwear.  To address that concern, James’s thought was to organize a motorcycle run to collect donations in a form of new unused underwear or cash donations, which would be used to purchase such underwear items, thus the name – “Thunder in your Shorts!” James continued that one of the features of these types of rallies or rides is pins and patches that motorcyclists attach to their leather vest to commemorate their participation. There is also a demand for t-shirts, hoodies and the like. James’s request was for me to design a logo that would demonstrate the name "Thunder in your Shorts!" and could be used for posters, advertising, pins, patches, hats, hoodies, t-shirts, etc. He would also like to see the logo having a spot where the year could be added as well. That way the logo remains consistent but the patches/pins become collectable based on the year. There was also the following image attached, which illustrated a general idea for the logo design.  

As soon as I saw the aforementioned image, I instantly came to realization that these great guys definitely need all the artistic help they could possibly get. This was the type of project that I value the most, the type of work that has a deep personal meaning for me, the type of a cause that I am always happy to support. I gladly agreed to help. From the very start, the project presented multiple challenges. First and foremost - there was no concept. Another major challenge on hand was that at some point I had to incorporate a piece of underwear into my design – something I never had a chance to do up until this moment…  Furthermore, the design had to somehow be linked to Canadian veterans as well as to a motorcycle club culture. Quite a task, I have to admit… After brainstorming the concept and going through multiple “trial and error sketches, I came to several conclusions: a) the job was way more difficult than I anticipated and a) the only type of underwear that would look good on a biker jacket should be one made of shiny steel… Then it was thunder… Bike wheel… Maple leaf… Shield… The concept was born.  The rest was history. By January 1^st, 2012 the final draft was ready. You be the judge…

1SG Wray Gabelmann: Coat of Arms

Sometime ago, I was contacted by US Army Sergeant Wray Gabelmann. This was right before his deployment to Afghanistan with the 5th Infantry. The nature of his request was similar to many other requests I would usually get: he was asking if I could enhance an image of his family coat of arms, and turn it into one of my 3D-images, and create a necklace’s for him and the kids. What made this particular request to stand out was the fact that only available image Wray had in his possession was a black-and-white copy of document given to his father in 1974. The document contained a very schematic black-and-white image of the coat of arms, which you can see below, accompanied by a brief description of the coat-or-arms given in classic heraldic terms. All the colors were indicated by dotted and striped patterns, which were used in heraldry for B&W images. Below you will find copy of the document.  You can see the obvious challenge here. First off, I had to extract the image, to be able to create a base image for the design. Secondly, I had to decipher the color scheme, based on the cryptic and somewhat vague description. And last but not least – I had to turn all of this mess into a beautiful 3-dimensional work of art, full of color and texture. As always, the challenging nature of this project made it more interesting. Also, my motivation was to finish the project on time before Wray’s  deployment. And so I got to work.

First step was to extract the image out of the PDF, which wasn’t all that hard. After that, I have created my base vector image, changing a few elements of the original, which in my opinion, looked dull or out of place. As soon as the base vector was ready, it was brought into Photoshop where main work has begun.  As with most of my creations, I was utilizing my very own unique method, which I dubbed “Multi-Layer Enhancement & Texturizing Technique 3D” (or “M-LETT 3D” for short). Mind you these are not true 3D images in its classic sense.  They rather are 2-dimensional images, made look like 3D objects, made of various materials, such as metals, enamels, precious stones, woods and ivory, to name just a few. The result of this effort can be found below.

Rev B Anthony Hathaway-Taylor: Coat of Arms and Flag

One of my earlier out-of-scope projects came to life in response to request from my dear friend, Rev B Anthony Hathaway-Taylor. He is a truly remarkable human being. Everyone who has a privilege to know him, knows exactly what I am talking about. He also happens to be a driving force behind a huge scale project called “Empire to Commonwealth”. This Project is a collection of over 31,000  researched heraldry images of British Commonwealth that were donated by Defence Forces, Internet Authors, Experts in their particular fields and Collecting Enthusiasts. 

He asked me if I could bring to life an image of his coat of arms, and also try and create a full-size flag based on the image. The only images I had to work with were the two images of his father’s and his own coats of arms hand drawn by Anthony himself, which you can see below at their actual size. From the very start, it promised to be an interesting and quite challenging process... 

I instantly realized that I had quite a chunk of work cut out for me. Having images of such quality and resolution to work with could only mean one thing – starting entirely from scratch. Also, the timeline was not in my favor, because ideally, everything had to ready just in time for Anthony’s 50th birthday, which was less than a month away. This is exactly what made this project to become one of the more challenging ones, and also one of my favorite.  Below you can see the metallic version and the final white enamel version of the coat of arms.

Also, Anthony was wondering if it would be possible to create a flag, based on the coat of arms’ theme, which was quite a challenge of its own. The result of this exercise can be found below. Due to the size requirements for the final output file, which was expected to be no less than 60”x36”, I had to use a reverse process, compared to what I would normally do. This image was originally created in Photoshop, and later vectoriezed, so that it could be blown up to any size to be printed on fabric.  I also created a huge full-size 60”x36” PNG, which eventually they ended up using  to print the fill-size flag… Just on time for Anthony’s birthday…