Dusty Ghost Blog

For the pub games company Sovereign Games I created a number of new logos.

This is the only one I have permission to show right now, but there will be more when they have finished re-branding and updating their website.

My wife and myself are having another baby! Woo hoo!

At the time of writing this, Katie is 24 weeks pregnant and we are 99% sure it’s to be a boy!

However, over the last few weeks, Katie has been suffering with dizzy spells and heart rhythm problems.

She was fitted with a 24 our mobile heart monitor and after handing the unit in she got a call 3 hours later and was rushed to hospital!!

There she was told her heart was suffering from a heart block, and part of her heart was stopping for up to 3.5 seconds on at least 2 or 3 occasions through out the day!!

She was then told she would have to be fitted with a pace maker and would have to have it for the rest of her life!

At 31 years old you can imagine this was quite a shock for her! However, Katie has now had the device for nearly a week and is recovering well. She has had a few teary  moments, but mostly she has been an absolute trooper!!

Obviously this has scared us both badly, but it has also given us both a new perspective on life and we thank God for watching out for her. There really was only a small chance this would be detected, but the monitor picked up the heart block and now Katie’s life has essentially been saved, and we have a second chance at life!

For anyone who is reading this that supported us over the last week, THANK YOU!! We have been overwhelmed by the support and care of all of you!

Bless you all!

Peace,

Mark and Katie

It’s been a looooooong time since I had a chance to post anything!

So here is my last peace of work. I decided my skills in 2D painting are lacking again, so I needed to have a go at a portrait.

So here he is, Mr Jack Nicholson!…. ok so I know there’s some improvement needed…. but it’s not bad for me! LOL

I totally forgot to post this when it happend!!

On 6th June 09, a number of the congregation of Narbourough Congregational Church went to Bristal to perform a sponsored Abseil for the charity CAP (Christians Against Poverty).

Weather forecasts told us that we would have torrential rains all day, and this had a number of us worried that the event would be called off.

Well we all prayed, and God blessed us with small rains in the morning and clear skies for the rest of the day!!

That was wonderful for us as we from Narborough Congregational Church managed to raise over £600 for CAP!!

Sarah, myself, Andy and Elaine all made the climb down.

Click to View

It should be noted here that all climbers showed great bravery on the day, and we saw a wide range of people, from all backgrounds and all ages! We saw many young, and some old, some able, and some not so able. Yet all of them made it from top to bottom!

Congratulations to everyone involved and thanks to the people from CAP for your great works.

And just to show off, here is the cliff we climbed down, it was higher than this looks!

Here is a new image I created in Photoshop. The whole thing was made only using one texture, and the rest was painted using some of the tools and brushes in Photoshop. Click for a larger view.

It looks pretty cool, even if I do say so myself, but I have to give credit to the tutorial that helped me create this.

For a brilliant Stars Tutorial click here

And for a planet tutorial by the same guy click here

If you have Photoshop then give these a go, they really are amazing results!!

I was contacted a while ago by my brother asking if I could create a website for his boss.

My brother works at a wonderful place in Norwood Green (near Halifax in the UK) called The Old White Beare .

My brother actually works there as a Sous Chef, and the whole place is REALLY nice, with both excellent food, excellent wines and just generally a great place to go. And best of all it’s high quality food at a VERY reasonable price!

Honestly I’m not just saying this because my brohter works there, it really is a great place to go out.

I made a site for my Mother, now I make one for my Father! It’s only fair!

TheStrategicOption.com is a re-design of my Dad’s website for his consultancy company.

Actually for anyone looking for a business strategist for small or large co-orporations, from all around the world, my father Andrew Johnson has several decades of experience.

The site really is just a quicky, but it looks allot better than his old one.

It’s also the first one I used Spry code on… not that you probably  care… but I thought I’d mention it.

Check it out.

Yup that’s right! Finally after all this time, we have a new company mascot!

Dusty Ghost himself!

As you can see, he’s just a cute little ghost who’ll be popping up all over the Dusty Ghost website, this Blog, any invoices and contracts we send out, and of course any promotional material we may be sending out later!

Again, I must say thanks to Craig Thomson (cst-art.com) for the initial idea and concept.

In case you’re wondering, I made him in ZBrush using a toon material.

Expect to see a lot more of this little fella!

Well! It’s certainly been hectic here recently!!

I’m slowly catching up with the website work I have on my list, woo hoo!

Learning a new work flow using Adobe CS4 has been really fun and now I’m confident that producing websites is going to be a ton faster and be all the better for it!

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I’m still pulling together areas for the Dustyghost.com website right now, including portfolio of websites, graphics, 3D and other bits and bobs.

I have a rather unique way I want to do this, and although it’s going to involve allot of work, it’ll be worth it if I can pull it off.

The DustyGhost.com website will, with a little bit of elbow grease, be the flagship for all the websites I have created so far!

For the first time all my different hobbies and skill sets will come together and will hopefully, finally, be worth all the frantic learning, investment and practising in both website design, 3D rendering, digital art and animation!

The best thing is others who are involved in getting DustyGhost.com off the ground are contributing too!

When the site goes live, more details about the creation process will be revealed, and just who did what bits.

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In the mean time I’ve eased back a bit from all the work I’ve been putting in, to take some much deserved time to go back to one of the things I love most… ART!!

Or, more specifically, the right way to create art!

I started Sketching a long time ago, about 9 years, and have never really taken the time over that near decade to learn how to do it properly! I’m not bad at drawing, but I’m by no means a pro!

I really used to get depressed about what I had sketched and then give up for days on end. Now, for the first time ever, I seem to say, “OK how can I make it better!?” then I draw some more and go “Look! I learnt something new!!”

I’m getting addicted to this as I seem to be improving in just this one short week of trying to re-learn to draw again! It’s still amateur stuff to be honest (I’m REALLY rusty!), but it’s getting better, FAST!!

For the first time EVER I realise that if you don’t give a crap about how bad it looks, nor how others will look at it, you can achieve sooooo much!!! It’s all about attitude and confidence when learning, I guess!

It’s addictive when you’re like this, I never knew that before. I always wanted to sketch because I thought it would be cool to be able to. Now I just love doing it for the love of it! I actually feel real enjoyment, even on the really rough stuff!

And best of all, learning to sketch again seems to be improving my digital work! It’s odd but developing a good sketching technique can be passed right through to what I do in Corel Painter when sketching there! Cool!

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So, all in all the Balance is coming back into my life!

And I’m really happy and excited at the same time!

Yours,

Dusty

So after a looooong Christmas break, I have been working on a new site for my mother.

CraftyCruising.com is a new site for my mother. She specialises in paper craft and now teaches it on cruise ships!

On the site are many images from her recent cruise classes, and plenty of pictures from her own personal collection of work.

I’ve had real fun making this one, as it’s the first site I have got the chance to use the amazing CS4 with. My only issue is that I didn’t get to create any flash on this one, but i have plenty of time to get a nice Flash presentation on there later on.