OddballGreg - Halloween 2014 Theme

Scary skull face. Check. Eery red glow. Check. Carved pumpkin with a candle inside. Check. We've got the making of a Halloween theme here.

With exactly 7 days to go to Halloween, it's time for the first ever TCSA event theme, complete with some ridiculous looking caricatures and a lot of photo editing to get just the right degree of ghastly humor for this Halloween, despite the fact that South African's don't typically celebrate Halloween. Lets talk about the design process behind the theme.

Firstly... There was not really a design process. I have a habit of being fairly one shot with my works and leaping before I look. Not because I'm too lazy to do planning, but simply because this allows me to simply start exploring ideas from the get go. It's a habit I've had all my life and something I even did for with my old school projects. It was hardly always a do and forget thing, as my work would usually see a few more iterations if I was not satisfied with the initial result.

In the case of the Halloween theme however, my lengthy experience with Photoshop as a result of my hobby based designs, as well as the endless graphical edits for this blog and it's header images, meant that for the most part, getting what I wanted was a simple as having an idea and tinkering with bits of source photography until the right effect was attained.

Above is my famous OddballGreg silhouette, (Pffft. Famous. Riiight. But it is the one I'm most well known for), edited into a rather ghastly flaming skeleton and colored in blood. While I hadn't really thought of ghost rider as an influence, the similarities are there in hindsight. How I had originally envisioned the Halloween version of my caricature involved a very horror movie-esque skull being layered onto my face as you would see in the horrible ancient movies where the man's possession was revealed with lightning and thunderclap showing this ghastly apparition.

Realizing that looked somewhat terrible and cliched, I looked to my brother for inspiration who promptly yelled out "Zombie Brand", with reference to a the flaming green zombie skin for Brand in the popular online game League Of Legends. Having learnt from past experiences that editing the human body and face that extensively was a lot more work than it would probably be worth, I opted to combine the skull and flames of both ideas to make the rather macabre character you see above.

 In JovialJman's case, my first idea was, strangely enough, to give him a pumpkin head, possibly due to a subconscious thought of Pumpkin Jack, or that fun pumpkin headed boss from the Undead Island of Dr Ned DLC for Borderlands. Maybe it's just because people like Jack o' Lanterns. Regardless, the initial iterations were somewhat underwhelming when compared to the flaming skull thing above. My Solution: Tentacles. (Because that's an absolutely legitimate train of thought. Please, nobody send anyone wearing white coats to my house.)

While the Jack o Jovialman is somewhat amusing, Jerome didn't find it quite as awesome as the flaming skull. (In his opinion of course.) And after playing with sizing and lighting a little, I decided to try again the next day to produce something he might enjoy more. This time asking my lovely girlfriend for an idea, the first thing that came to mind for her was Silent Hill and a certain iconic character that still gives people nightmares.

And so, with a bit of source gathering, I had the makings of a rather frightening and yet equally badass JovialJman. (The moment my brother saw it, it earned what can only be called his seal of approval.) Not wanting it to look too much like a shoddy rip-off, I promptly added some blood effects and added in a sleepy looking version of the eyes used in the JovialJman logo to give it a somewhat amusing but equally macabre appeal.

Once that was done, the creation of the header images and the background image for the blog, (seen above), was as simple as combining these silhouettes into a single image with their own individual elements or each other, adding in a suitably gloomy background, and adding some lighting/colour adjustments to remove the disbelief caused by different lighting solutions showing how obvious the photoshopping is. And thus the Halloween theme for 2014 came to be. (Obviously, the logo remains unchanged since that is still representative of the blog.)

In any case, if you think the special graphics are awesome/terrible, or simply want to ask how I produced certain effects in the images, feel free to ask down in the comments below, or via Facebook/Twitter as we here at TCSA love to hear from you. Of course, if you have any Halloween or Photoshop enthusiast friends, consider sharing this post with them. They may find the upcoming Halloween themed posts amusing as well. Of course, if you yourself would like to read said Halloween themed posts, consider perhaps liking the Official TCSA Facebook page and/or following us on Twitter to get all the latest posts, as they're published. Regardless of what you do, I thank you for having taken the time to read this post; hope that you have/had an absolutely FANTASTIC day, and I will speak again soon.

Happy Halloween my friends.