MATTHEW M. LASKOWSKI
   plastic shards studio, Iilustrator & designer, all around good-guy

  PRIMARY CONTACT:


  EDUCATION:





  OBJECTIVE & STYLE:




















  AREAS OF EXPERTISE:

 

orianstudio@me.com

 

Currently a student at the Art Institute of Boston. [website]
Has completed three years in full-time enrollment toward a BFA degree in illustration.

 

I'm a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, but my true focus lies within Illustration and Graphic Design. My illustration has been advancing in leaps and bounds over the past nine to ten years I've been drawing seriously, the most drastic changes occuring in my last three years in college.

My illustration centers around conceptual art design, as I love to think about how to create new things or redesign old things in a new light to potentially thrive in a story or game. I enjoy creating characters, vehicles, and environments alike. My style tends to lean much more toward the techinical side over organic. My mind loves to think about mechanical things, gadgetry, and urban life.

To help boost myself as an artist, I also take photography as a fairly serious hobby. Over the past few years I've invested into an EOS 40D and several different kinds of lenses. I believe that photography can help an artist learn the effects of depth, field of view, composition, and lighting. I've become rather knowledgeable in photography over the past couple years, and the library of reference material I've built up is more valuable than I initially thought.


I'm highly skilled in the use of Adobe Creative Suite software.
I use computer software for almost all of my projects in some way or another. Whether it be color correcting a scan or photo, or creating a full artwork from scratch directly on the computer, I aim to combine all of my available tools to create the best work I can. If I can't get something done right the way I want, I search for a way to get it done even if it's something I don't know how to do. I'm never adove admitting there's always something to learn. I'll either study up on the subject, or mess around until I find it out on my own. I'm a bit of a perfectionist in that


I would rank my knowledge of Creatve Suite apps as follows:

Adobe Photoshop: Extremely Proficient
             Notably Proficient Sub-Categories:
                                Tablet Drawing / CG Painting / Digital Art
                                Vector Graphics
                                Image compositing
                                Typography
                                All tools & Pallettes
                                Post-Processing / Color Correction / Clean-up
                                Adobe Lightroom 2 / Adobe Camera RAW
                                Digital Printing / Large-Format Printing
                                Experimental Formats (such as 32-bit HDR)

Adobe InDesign: Highly Proficient
                                Typography
                                Designing documents for print or PDF
                                All tools and most pallette windows

Adobe Illustrator: Highly Proficient
                                Tablet Drawing / Vector-based Line Art
                                Typography
                                Designing documents for print or PDF
                                All tools and most pallette windows

Adobe Dreamweaver: Proficient
                                HTML
                                CSS
                                Interface design using CSS and DIV layers
                                Manually inspecting / optimizing code

Adobe Flash: Learning, but Proficient
                                Sequencing animation
                                Tweening
                                Basic actionscript & interactivity
                                Exporting for video or web

Other Software:

Corel Painter X: Highly Proficient
                                Tablet Drawing / Sketching
                                Tablet Painting / CG Art

Maxon Cinema 4D: Learning, interested
                                Simple scene construction
                                Simple Rendering
 PLASTIC SHARDS  
  It's not really a studio, (not yet, anyway.) Just a place on the web I call home.
THE NAME: Plastic Shards was coined from my background as a gamer at heart. In the masterpiece game Half-Life 2, primary antagonist Dr. Breen says over a telecast in one particular part: "Are all the accomplishments of humanity fated to be nothing more than a layer of broken plastic shards thinly strewn across a fossil bed, sandwiched between the Burgess shale and an eon's worth of mud?" He says this in reference to the extinction of the human race. The term plastic shards used in the statement sounded interesting and had a nice ring to it. So I picked it up!
THE HOST:

Plastic Shards is hosted on a multi-purpose server known as Xenostarz started by web-designer Justin Fuhrer.



Xenostarz has tranformed a bit from a portfolio site for Justin's work to hosting webspace for some unique artists.
Website: Xenostarz

 

Xenostarz is hosted on a Media Temple Grid-Server.



"(mt) Media Temple, Inc. is an industry-leading, privately held, profitable web hosting and software application services company based in California. Since 1998, our company has provided businesses worldwide with reliable, professional-class network environments to host websites, email, business applications, and other rich media content. "
Website: Media Temple Hosting
THE FONT:

Plastic Shards uses the shareware typeface Alte Haas Grotesk.



Alte Haas is based off of Helvetica and/or Akzidenz Grotesk. It's designed as though it has previously been printed and scanned. Alte Haas has a more welcoming look over the standard typeface, with rounded corners, overall feeling less "institutional."

The typeface was created/modified by Yann Le Coroller, a Parisian designer and motion graphics artist.

Yann Le Coroller's Website
Alte Haas Grotesk DaFont page