The Letterville BullBoard: THE WINNERS ARE....

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Posted by roger bailey (Member # 556) on :

We have put up a web site that shows all of the entrys & the three winners!
http://www.rapidtac.net/

Click on "Rapid Tac Contest"

Congradulations to the winners! Everyone will be contacted shortly.
This was fun, we will do it again.

Roger

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Roger Bailey
Rapid Tac Incorporated
Waikoloa, Hawaii

Posted by Mike Estep (Member # 318) on :

Those are some good designs, would have hated to judge that contest. Hey Roger, do I win anything for posting first, like a shirt. Great contest and product!

Marc

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Marc & Mike Estep
SignCrafters of London
202 E. 4th St
London Ky
mestep@kih.net
606-862-0003

Posted by Adrienne Pereira (Member # 1046) on :

WOWWWWWWW!!! There are some AMAZING entries there.....great designs..

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Adrienne Morgan
Splash Signs
www.splashsigns.com
"Rainkatt'on chat

Benicia, CA
707-550-4553
adrienne@splashsigns.com

Posted by roger bailey (Member # 556) on :

BUMP

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Roger Bailey
Rapid Tac Incorporated
Waikoloa, Hawaii

Posted by Kathy Joiner (Member # 1814) on :

Beautiful designs! Congrats to the winners and same to Rapid Tac as they will have some awesome shirts to go along with an awesome product.

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Kathy Joiner
River Road Graphics
41628 River Road
Ponchatoula, La.70454
PH. (504)386-3313
casey@i-55.com

Old enough to know better...Too young to resist.

Posted by roger bailey (Member # 556) on :

Very nice thing to say !!

I thank you on behalf of all entrants and the products !

Roger

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Roger Bailey
Rapid Tac Incorporated
Waikoloa, Hawaii

Posted by Neil D. Butler (Member # 661) on :

geez, who do you choose... although I love bob's design.. he do deserve to win the first prize... but then again...naw! he deserves it...hmmm...
Neil

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"Keep Positive"

SIGNS1st.
Neil Butler
Paradise, NF

Posted by David Fisher (Member # 107) on :

Congrats Fellas, well deserved.
Always great to see other peoples artwork, keeps the juices flowing.
David

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D.A. & P.M. Fisher Signwriting
Brisbane Australia
da_pmf@yahoo.com

Posted by Mark Matyjakowski (Member # 294) on :

oohhhhh aaaahhhhh
been waiting impatiently for this eye candy ... now I'm gonna have to go brush my eyes ... too sweet
you people never disappoint

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Designing... it's like an itch in the brain... an itch you can't scratch, that if you can figure out how to scratch it, it just itchs more

http://www.slamgraphics.com
Rochester, N.Y.
mark@slamgraphics.com

[This message has been edited by Mark Matyjakowski (edited March 13, 2001).]

Posted by Bob Darnell (Member # 27) on :

Wow. I'm so happy! I'd like to thank Roger and the Rapid Tac Academy... and my producers - Mom & Dad... and...

Seriously, thanks to Roger for putting on the contest, and congratulations to the other winners! I should also mention that I thought it was very generous for Rapid Tac to offer a second & third place award after the fact. Pretty classy if you ask me.

There are some really good designs there, with a lot of time and effort put into all of them. Whether they agree with the decision or not, I hope the other entrants had the same mindset I did when entering: "I could very well lose to some guy who just types "Rapid Tac" out in Helvetica, but I'll give it a shot." Meaning - the best doesn't necessarily win in a design contest - it all depends on what appeals to a select group of judges. I feel extremely fortunate that mine was chosen.

Thank-you.

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Bob Darnell
London, Ontario, Canada
_______________________

Personal portfolio: www.members.home.net/bob.darnell
Where I work: Excellent Signs and Displays Inc.
_______________________

Posted by John Deaton (Member # 925) on :

What Bob said. I'm very happy about being picked one of the winners. I wouldn't have wanted to judge this contest. All the entries were great, and I am proud to be in the same contest with all of them. This was a great contest which happened to be about a really great product that I use every day. We sure do have some talented people here on Letterville. Just think if they had all entered the contest. Whewwwwww! WHat a job for the judges. Thanks to Roger and his crew and my dad, for giving me the confidence to push in my drawing skills. YAY!

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John Deaton III
Deaton Design
109 N. Cumberland Ave.,Harlan, Ky. 40831 606-573-9101

john@deatondesigns.com
www.deatondesigns.com

Posted by Janette Balogh (Member # 192) on :

Applause! Applause!
Terrific entries ... great choices for winners!

Congratulations guys ... wonderful stuff!

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"When Love and Skill Work Together ... Expect a Masterpiece"

Janette Balogh
Sign Studio
in Sunny Florida
jbalogh@earthlink.net
Start packing and move in! It's just too easy to be a Resident!
Location, Location, Location! It's all right here!
[URLhttp://www.letterhead.com/supporters[/url}

Posted by Pierre St.Marie (Member # 1462) on :

Aw, geez..............My Brush Script shadowed red and black "RapidTac must not have made it through. A sure winner...............oh, well.

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St.Marie Graphics
& Makin' Tracks Sound Studio
Kalispell, Montana
stmariegraphics@centurytel.net http://www.stmariegraphics.com
800 735-8026
We're chiseling every day of the week! :^)

Posted by roger bailey (Member # 556) on :

I offered this a while back, maybe I'll try again !
Heres the deal(not offical yet);
suppose Rapid Tac was to pay $500.00 for the best 10 minute video(maybe photos)of a vinyl application, something unusually large or different(maybe applying to the tail of a 747) or vehicle graphics, who knows??

Roger

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Roger Bailey
Rapid Tac Incorporated
Waikoloa, Hawaii

Posted by roger bailey (Member # 556) on :

Feedback, what do you think??
Would anyone be interested, or am I just crazy for tryin ? ha ha ha ha ha !

Roger

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Roger Bailey
Rapid Tac Incorporated
Waikoloa, Hawaii

Posted by Henry Barker (Member # 174) on :

Hi there!

I second the above comments! It was fun to have a go, even being restricted on time due to workloads here. Congratulations to the winners!!

It was fun to participate in.

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Henry Barker #1924
akaKaftan
SignCraft AB
Stockholm, Sweden.
A little bit of England in a corner of Stockholm
www.signcraft.se
info@signcraft.se

Posted by Suelynn Sedor (Member # 442) on :

Wow, those designs are something else. Thanks Roger for putting on this contest. Not only have you provided cash and prizes for all participating, you have provided a great learning forum for those of us that are striving to improve our design skills.

I would love to know more details on how some of these designs where put together. Particularly Bob's winning design. Are those bottles of rapid tac bitmaps or jpgs, or did you actually create them in corel? In your second design, did you draw the cowboy and scan it into your design software, or did you modify some clipart? Did you download the rapidtac label for the bottle in his hand, or did you create it by hand?

I just can't imagine the hours that so many of these designs had to have taken. I only hope that someday I can make my new corel program do what you guys can make it do.

wow wow wow,
Suelynn

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"It is never too late to be what you might have been." -George Eliot

Suelynn Sedor
Sedor Signs
Carnduff, Sk Canada

Posted by roger bailey (Member # 556) on :

Come on now, all you folks that didn't enter this contest,how about doing the 10 minute video thing ????

Roger

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Roger Bailey
Rapid Tac Incorporated
Waikoloa, Hawaii

Posted by Stephen Deveau (Member # 1305) on :

I have to say that my computer was in the shop for the last 4 days and I got it back this evening.
I was hoping to see the posts done on the contest...
I would like to say power to the people as all entries are (Amazing)..There is some very fine talent out there in "Never Never Land!"
Why to go Roger a very nice job on your part!!!!

Raven

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Raven/2001
Airbrushed by Raven
Lower Sackville N.S.
deveausdiscovery@sprint.ca

Posted by Bob Darnell (Member # 27) on :

Ok, Suelynn, I'm going to try to answer your questions clearly, but I'm kind of rushed right now, so I hope this makes some sense.

The first thing I did was trace the Rapid Tac logo I snagged from the website. So I had a clean vector logo that I could extrude into 3D and could basically do anything with it once I had a clean file.

About the bottles, are they bitmaps? They are, but initially they started out as vector lines. I used a 3D modelling program to create them with vector type lines and points, only it works in three dimensions. So after I'm finished the modelling stage, it looks like a wire cage that defines the objects. I'm sure you've seen that type of thing before. You can rotate the objects into any viewpoint you want, and that's basically what I did to the five different bottles. So then you apply material characteristics to the objects, such as colour, opacity, glossiness and about a million other options. I had created bitmaps of the Rapid Tac labels (with the coloured backgrounds) previously, and set the material of the labels to be those bitmaps. The computer does all the calculations for how it wraps around the objects. Set up your objects in the scene, add some light sources, and then render the file to a bitmap (tiff). This is when it starts to look realistic. So I took that file and imported into CorelDraw.

I drew the cowboy guy by hand, scanned it and opened it in Corel Painter which came with the graphics tablet I bought for Christmas. That program is amazing for simulating a lot of different real world media, but for what I did, I really could have used any paint program, because I didn't really use anything too special. Anyway, I set up all the black outlines on a layer above the background, so that on the top layer, the black lines were there and everything else on that layer was transparent. Then I activated the layer below and started filling in colour and shading with the graphics tablet. The black outlines stayed perfectly black- it's sort of like drawing large blobs of colour on a piece of paper and then laying a piece of an overhead transparency with the outlines over top of it. Then I created a mask around the whole thing, made the background transparent and imported it into CorelDraw. I don't have much talent for cartooning. It took me a lot of time to refine it to this point, and I think in the end you can see that it still looks a little forced.

Now John Deaton's stuff- besides the obvious cartooning talent, it's much more fluid. I wouldn't mind hearing how he works. I suspect he draws it on paper, scans it, and then redraws over the scanned "guide". Maybe he just freehands it all on the computer... Care to share your methods, John?

Posted by John Deaton (Member # 925) on :

That was great Bob! Nice to know how you turn out such great looking work. Mine aint so glamourous though. I do a pencil sketch, without much refining, cause once I see it in my head, I usually draw it that way and stay with it. I then ink in the pencil sketch with a papermate fine point felt tip pen. I usually use a hunt crow quill tip with black ink, but lately I use the felt pen more. I scan that in at a 300dpi resolution into photoshop and get ready to color. I work straight on the scanned in drawing, using the fill feature to fill areas of color first, then using masks in areas where I want a graduated fill. I usually zoom in on those areas to make sure the mask covers the area I want to color, and not the outline. After that, I use the airbrush feature to either freehand some shading and highlights in, and again using the masks to keep it within a certain area.
The lettering usually comes last. I design that in Freehand, save as an eps, and place it within the artwork, sizing it before placing. Then I can add highlights to that also with the airbrush and various brushes available in photoshop. That's basically it. Just like taking a real brush or airbrush and applying the color, only a little faster and lots of fun.

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John Deaton III
Deaton Design
109 N. Cumberland Ave.,Harlan, Ky. 40831 606-573-9101

john@deatondesigns.com
www.deatondesigns.com

Posted by Ron Percell (Member # 399) on :

Hey Roger, you've some fine work there, great contest, thanks for sharing here!

Keep up the good work

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Ron Percell
Percell Signs
707-769-0639
Petaluma, California

Home of the MicroMeet!

percell@percellsigns.com

Percell Signs Web Site

Posted by Mike Pipes [in a cubicle] (Member # 1841) on :

Bob, what 3D modeling program are ya using over there?
I'm a seasoned veteran with 3D Studio MAX, just wish I could afford the latest and greatest version.. until then just gotta live with v1.. =) I havent had the time to use it much lately though... I used to do alot of this stuff.. used to lock myself in a room for days on end and just kick out animation after animation.

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Mike Pipes
-----trapped in a box with a computer and a slice of cheese-----

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