About Rodney Pike
Rodney Pike is a Photoshop professional, originally from Baton Rouge Louisiana specializing in photo manipulation, caricatures, humorous illustration, portraits and political satire. He is a long time member of the ISCA & NAPP, also a Social Media enthusiast. His clients include companies such as FHM Magazine, Tennis Magazine, The Village Voice Magazine, Corbis Imaging, The Sun, Caters News Agency, The Huffington Post, Bauer Media, Bauer Excel Media, Mashable, EMagazine, Global News, Metro World News, Miller Publishing Group, WeedMaps, marijuana.com, New Coast Productions and Catchphrase Entertainment among others.
Bean The Gladiator
Nov 11, 2011
Tonight I’m posting a regular photo manipulation of Rowan Atkinson as “Been The Gladiator”. It seems that no matter what I do, Mr. Bean is still the most popular character I have. Now with the official retirement of Mr. Bean, I’m going to make it my mission to bring him back to life with a small series of manipulations. Standard photo manipulations without caricatures are really fun and relaxing and great for practicing blending, textures etc. I’ve posted the source image below as well as a video of the Bean in action. I have another Rock Band group caricature planned so I’ll hopefully have that up in a few days.
Thanks for stopping by. Have a great day and be inspired!
Thom Yorke ~ A Study in Grayscale
Nov 8, 2011
Tonight I’m posting the finished Thom Yorke of Radiohead I’ve been working on in grayscale, well not actually grayscale. It’s RGB desaturated. I’m not sure about it. This one was tough. There a lot of extreme exaggerations in the body and that’s hard to do and maintain / create detail. I don’t know, it just looks stiff to me. I always had that problem when I painted. The sketch always captured the feeling I wanted and the final painting ended up stiff. I think when I start incorporating digital painting into my work it will get better. I really think I like the sketch better. Oh well, it is what it is and I’m done. On to the next project. I did learn a few things. That’s the important part. I’ve posted the rest of the project below. I’m going back to concentrating on the face. Faces are what I do best and if I get that right the rest follows.
Thanks for stopping by. Have a great day and be inspired!
Over 200,000 Blog Views Year One
Nov 4, 2011
Tonight I want to thank all of my followers and visitors as I hit yet another milestone in an extremely short period of time. I launched this blog in October of 2010. In June of this year I reached a milestone and announced reaching 100,000 blog pageviews since it was launched. It seems like that was just a couple of months ago and in fact it has been only a few months. In barely over a year and with the support of a thousands awesome people like yourselves, my blog rolled over 200,000 pageviews this morning. Thanks to all of you who follow my blog as a public follower, a NetworkedBlogs follower, as well as RSS subscribers, and thanks to those of you who may bookmark or simply drop by from time to time. It is much appreciated. At this rate, I look forward to the day when it hits seven digits, and it will. I didn’t do a fancy graphic for this post because I’m busy working to get some great stuff posted. Thanks so much for your support once again. The future looks bright from here!
Thanks for stopping by. Have a great day and be inspired!
Thom Yorke ~ A Grayscale Caricature Study (WIP)
Nov 3, 2011
Tonight I’m posting a work in progress of Thom Yorke of Radiohead. This is a very small, rough, quick study done mostly in liquify except for the head. It’s what I call a “liquify sketch”. I had this image of Thom Yorke which is very small, poor detail, grayscale and just not a good image… except for the pose, or at least it has potential. I love that pose and decided to do a little experimenting and see if I can bring this thing to life. When I saw this pose, I thought of Norman Rockwell and those awkward spindly bodies he painted, so that’s kind of the feel I’m going for here. I’m starting with an all grayscale study to get the values right. I’ve caricatured the body to close to what I’m after and the face was an unfinished one I had laying around. Again, this is a very quick conceptual sketch that I will use for reference on the final image. I’m not positively sure I will use this head. It was just convenient at this stage to get an idea if this will even be worth my time. I will ultimately use some techniques I’ve been working on to increase the size of the body considerably while enhancing and adding detail, texture and in the end full color. This is going to be a real test of all the hard work I’ve put in this past year. It will definitely be my biggest challenge. The two source images are below as well as the head which is in a very unfinished state and only sort of blocked in as far as the shape of the head. Much will change before the final product. Well, there you go. That’s what I’ll be doing for the next two or three days around a commission I’m working on. Hopefully my next Thom Yorke post will be a cool one. Goodnight folks!
Thom Yorke posing for a magazine shoot:
Thanks for stopping by. Have a great day and be inspired!
Search my Site
Recent Posts
Tag Cloud
art
artist
atkinson
Barack
Bean
California
caricature
celebrity
commission
contest
exaggeration
facebook
feature
FHM
Freaking News
Freak Show
funny
google+
humorous
illustration
illustrator
Interview
Jason
Magazine
manipulation
Marijuana
Media
mr bean
new
Obama
painting
photo
photo-manipulation
photograph
Photoshop
Pike
political
portrait
President
Rodney
rowan
satire
Seiler
study
Weed