Jeff Finley » Personal Work

Experimental Work #1

Jeff Finley — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 05:22:31 +0000

The past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with different techniques. I don’t have a ton of time when I’m at home, but I try to keep the creative juices flowing. I lumped these three images together into this post because they are simply just experiments. As you know, I’m extremely inspired by film, and for the longest time I’ve found it difficult to channel that influence into my work. I think mostly because my drawings never do justice to the emotions I feel in my head. I feel photography captures those emotions more effectively.

The image above came out of reading one of my favorite film bloggers Kim Nicolini. She writes an amazing blog with extremely inspiring and in-depth opinions on the films she sees. One great thing about it, is that it’s on Live Journal and not some fancy WordPress (I love WordPress no doubt). It literally is a personal blog of someone who happens to have great taste in film. She occasionally posts her inspirations, art, photography and other life happenings. She posted some simple pictures of some awe-inspiring clouds, and I immediately felt that buzz and wanted to work with her photos. So I took her raw, untreated cloud photos and created something like this out of it. She was called her clouds fantastic, so I carefully added the type into the image.

The zebra image was actually a photo I shot myself while at this ridiculously absurd Safari in northwest Ohio back in 2006. I added a line of type I heard from talk radio that seemed to fit in with what I was feeling at the time.

The “Less than the Air” piece was a little more elaborate. My band Parachute Journalists covers a song by the same name originally written by David Dondero. This could eventually be a record cover, album art, or whatever. It will likely live on digitally and never be printed, but I just thought I’d share it.

Revival House Vintage

Jeff Finley — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:00:32 +0000

This was a collaboration with Chelsea First of Revival House Vintage. She is underappreciated in her photography – I think she takes great stuff. Very simple subjects and they have an innocent charm to them. She says she just dabbles in photography but I see them as more than just snapshots. She let me work with her photos and here are a few things I came up with. I added type, color, and other treatments to get this specific look I wanted.

Chelsea collects vintage clothing and customizes them. She sells her stuff on Etsy and you should check it out. Sorry, no men’s clothes yet!

In fact, I’m looking to collaborate a lot more with photographers. I’ll be showing more of my work and experiments with them on this blog.

I’d Rather be Eaten Poster

Jeff Finley — Fri, 15 May 2009 00:45:42 +0000

I was experimenting with a few different techniques the other night and I created this image. Most of the photos are stock photos I found on Deviant Art. The words are from a longer poem written by fellow designer and band mate @Adam_Wagner. I just loved how the words were so powerful by themselves and they add a great texture to the piece.

Funkrush – 3D Typography Fun

Jeff Finley — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:29:50 +0000

Pete Harrison of the fashion brand Funkrush asked me to do a few tee designs for him. This was in 2007, and I had been doing a lot of 3D typography experiments. So I thought it would be cool to try something out for Pete. Most of the work was done in 3DS Max and some post production done in Photoshop. Here is some detail:

Rebuild – 3D Typography Experiment

Jeff Finley — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 04:05:21 +0000

This design was done, I think in 2007. I was just tinkering around with some 3D lettering for a new Go Media poster. The poster was actually going to be a collab between myself, Bill, Dave, and Oliver (most of the designers at Go Media at the time). We were each assigned a corner of the poster and we had to trick-out one of the words in “Rebuild the Aesthetic.” Some may have seen this coming, but each designer went nuts and make a crazy piece of art. And when we put them together it looked like hell! Needless to say, we scrapped the idea. So now this piece of history lives in my portfolio.

Depthcore – Frozen Empire

Jeff Finley — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 03:52:44 +0000

I used to be a contributing member for the elite design group Depthcore. I haven’t posted there in quite sometime, but this was one of my contributions to their “Empire” release. The object was just to create a compelling image that gave off the vibe of a great Empire. It could be anything I wanted, and at the time I was enjoying mixing typography and 3D. In this particular design, I created some custom vector lettering in Illustrator and then extruded the text in 3DS Max and arranged my scene. The textures and snow effects were added in After Effects.

Tough or Suffer Ornate Lettering

Jeff Finley — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 03:34:20 +0000

An old client of mine, Brandon Wesson, had asked me to design him a tattoo based on the words “Tough or Suffer”. He wanted something ornate and scripty. I was up for the challenge so I showed him this. While he loved the design itself, he decided to not get the tattoo (which he had planned to get across his chest). It’s too bad, I would have love to have seen this in the real world. However, I would never want someone to get a tattoo of something they didn’t 100% believe should be on their body for life. So maybe it’s better he never did get it, it was a pretty large tattoo after all. But alas, it lives here in my portfolio instead.