The Weeknd Concert Poster by Lee Millard

Tonight at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, The Weeknd will take the stage as part of his After Hours Til Dawn Tour (named after his latest two albums). I’m a fan of The Weeknd and wish I could be there. But since I can’t, I decided to make a gig poster instead.

Taking a cue from his name, I decided to do a mashup with my favorite Pennsylvania snack, Middleswarth potato chips. For those outside of their distribution region and who have never had the pleasure of knowing or trying them, Middleswarth offers a certain size bag of these chips dubbed “The Weekender.” Well, it really made a no-brainer idea to create this. Sadly, Middelswarth chips are not sold in Philly, but it’s the closest stop on his tour to the distribution region.

With dimensions the same size as “The Weekender” bag (10” x 16.5”) and two variants (Regular and Bar-B-Q). I intend to do a small edition of these, so please reach out to me if you are interested. Price to be determined.

Regular variant

Bar-B-Q variant

Detail

Detail

Happy Star Wars Day by Lee Millard

Happy Star Wars Day!

To celebrate, here's a throwback from 1999 when I painted Darth Maul on a closet door. 23 years later I still think it looks decent. The door was eventually auctioned off to benefit the Bloomsburg Children's Museum. Additionally, here are two articles from Bloomsburg's Press Enterprise and Bloomsburg University's student paper, The Voice.

The Press Enterprise, August 30, 1999

Bloomsburg University’s The Voice, September 30, 1999

Moon Knight Icon by Lee Millard

Welcome to the MCU Moon Knight. Pretty excited about this series. Episode 4 was a trip! Here's the new icon for the set. Nothing groundbreaking. No original design on my behalf. Just the classic logo stylized to fit alongside the others.

And yes, I know, mcuchronology.com has not been updated for a long time. I have been doing some updates on the back end, but to be honest, it hasn't been my top priority as I have other projects that need more of my attention.

Hope you’re having a great weekend and as always, thanks for visiting!

Trying Out Adobe Dimension by Lee Millard

Well, hello there and happy new year! I hope everyone will have a healthy and prosperous 2022! For one of my projects I’m working on, I decided to try constructing a mockup using Adobe Dimension. It’s an application from Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite that has been around for a few years, but I have only opened it up and never really attempted anything in it. 3D modeling is something that I’ve wanted to dive into but have always had other things come up to distract me from learning it. I actually made a resolution last year that I would learn ZBrush, but that never happened.

So, for my mockup, I wanted to create a nice image to show off a custom card game. Simple enough and it’s something I can already find pre-made mockups of online, but I wanted to try and create my own using Dimension. The software itself is not hard at all to get accustomed to; maybe just the 3D space controls is all if you’re not already familiar with such tools. I started out playing around with the plane and rectangle shapes. The plane shape worked well for a table surface and it was nice that I could control the corner radius like you can in Illustrator and Photoshop. But to add depth, I used the rectangle shape. The downside to this was that I could bevel the edges but it did not have a simple corner radius control like the plane shape did. This was a bummer as I wanted my cards to have rounded corners. I did however find another pre-loaded shape of a rectangle with rounded corners but could not find how to adjust the radius of them. This could very well be because I was a noob to this software.

I then found a free 3D asset of a pile of cards on Adobe Stock. After downloading it and playing around (I still have not found out how to control the corner radius of a rectangle), I discovered that the base color property of the card had a PSD file that essentially was a single image that wrapped around the object (see the screenshot attached to this post). I played around with this for a little bit and tried researching if there were any templates out there or articles explaining how one sets one of these mapped PSDs up but I found nothing. It’s one of those things where it’s a challenge just to type in search words.

All-in-all, Dimension is an easy program to get started with and achieve quick, cool results, but like other applications, I found the difficulty of what I was trying to learn and do challenging and me thinking that maybe I just needed to go into a more advanced 3D modeling program. I mean, a mockup should not be that difficult to make.

2021 SANS Security Awareness Holiday Jingle by Lee Millard

My company put together this new security awareness holiday jingle. The message wrapped in this fabulous new jingle is very important all year, but especially this particular time. Scammers like to scam. My mother-in-law was recently the recipient of a phishing attack. As G.I Joe would say, “Knowing is half the battle.” Do yourself and others a favor and be vigilant in looking for clues for cyber attacks. Happy holidays everyone and stay safe this holiday season (health and security-wise) .