Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Kwanza.

This year's holiday card created by Alyssa

Old Stuff

6" x 9"

Compressed Charcoal

As I was cleaning my room today/packing to go home, I found this old sketchbook from high school.  This was a quick homework assignment to draw our greatest fear: obviously for me it is the dark. (Although I am also equally terrified of Aliens; perhaps I will do an illustration of that next)

Anyway it just makes me laugh.

Hand Bound Alphabet Book

4.5" x 5.5" x 1.5"

Our Final project in Type I was to create a collaborative Alphabet book.  Each student in the major (c/o 2012) was assigned a letter, number or symbol and had to create a 4 page spread about it.  We had to create it using analog methods, and then make 45 photocopies (so that each student could assemble their own book).  If we wanted to use color in our spread, it had to be done with color pencil on all 45 copies; same for cutouts.

The TA designed the inside title page.

I had the letter J.  This is my first page on the right.

Type as pattern.

Inside spread.

Type as Image.

Back page

We were told to work our name into our design somewhere.

After we made our individual spreads, we assembled them all into one, thick book.  It was hand-sewn which was a new and fun process for me.

I am taking a book arts class over winter session, so I look forward to doing more projects like this.

My first A from Robyn!

Each Frame 3" x 5"

Ink and Watercolor

This was the sequence project.  Our goal was to tell a unique story in 5-10 frames using a sequence of either magnification, position change, direction change, metamorphosis, distortion/destruction, or additive/subtractive.  I did magnification by zooming in.

UPDATE:
This piece was featured in the 2010 Not Yet Famous Artists Revealed UD Undergrad juried Art Show

Word Compositions

7" x 7"

Black Plaka and Micron Pen

To begin this project, we brought in packaging with type on it.  We wrote down everything our package said, then the teacher chose one of our sheets and chose some of the words randomly.

Then we went to Raven Press and used old lead and wood type to hand press our words in assigned fonts.

Then we used these sheets with everyone's words and used those words to create experimental compositions.  Important things to think about were composition, movement, color (the weight of the black on the page), contrast.

After our composition/while we were working on it, we had to also draw the visual mass of the letters.  This could be drawing rectangles that resembled the shape and weight of the letters, using inkwash to mimic the values, etc.  Just be experimental.  I used inkwash with a paintbrush and splattered it onto the page to repeat the value structure of the initial composition.  It helped to work on this WHILE working on the 1st part because it helped with color and compostion.

7" x 7"

Black India Ink and Inkwash

1 Year Ago Today...

This is part of a post from exactly 1 year ago. 11/29/08  It's just the photos, they were from when I was working on my stop motion video.

I think I'd really like to do another stop motion video. Maybe it will be one of my winter projects that I never get around to.

Collaborative Poster

History Of Type Poster II

Analog/Digital/Analog

11" x 17"

The final part of the History of Type project was to pair up with the other students in our class with the same typeface to make a poster together.  There were two other students in my class who researched Akzidenz Grotesk.  They were Katherine Borah and Kristen Rogness.

We were required to work with analog and digital processes.  She really pushed us to play with both, saying to do something analog, digitize it, then do more analog, which is why I lableled the medium that way.

For the initial workshop, we brought in random pictures, textures, objects, etc. as well as a quote from our type designer.  A lot of this, we ended up using in the final poster.

With watercolor, I painted Katherines agenda cover, which had birds and decorative swirls.  This was scanned into the computer and used digitally.  We also layered other digital images of things that were ornate, and fancy, to contrast our plain, sturdy typeface.  You should easily see the black lace in the backround and if you look carefully, you can see false eyelashes at the top.  Kristen painted blue splatters with a loofah; that was also incorporated into the poster and blends in perfectly with the watercolor illustration.

Our Typeface had to be visible in the poster, so we put it very small at the bottom.

The final analog part we did was to physically cut out a quote by our type designer, Gunther Gerhard Lange.  It said

            "type is not everything, because type without an application is like a flower without aroma, an uncorked bottle and a girl who has never been kissed."  

The way we interpreted this was that type should not always be the focus, rather image should be most visible, and type solely used to portray words.  Akzidenz Grotesk has very little personality, so it works perfectly in this way.  That's why we cut it out, to further remove the type from the poster.

UPDATE:

This piece was featured in the 2010 Not Yet Famous Artists Revealed UD Undergrad juried Art Show

The 100 part of the 101 project

100 Ideas of a Cherry

Ink, Colored Pencil, and

Cough Syrup on Illustration Board

Each Frame is 1.25" x 1.5"

Here are my 100 ideas of how to draw a cherry.  Sorry, it's not the best photograph, but its been raining all week, and thus, difficult to photograph in good light.

Click on the image to zoom.

101 REDO

Cherry Pi

3.75" x 4.5"

Colored Pencil, Technical Pen,

and Black Plaka on Bristol

Robyn basically wanted everyone to choose a different final solution to the 101 Project.  My initial solution was cherry bombers (below), but this is what I have chosen for my redo.  I hope it doesn't need explaining, but it is a Pi (π) symbol with cherry filling.  Cherry Pie!

My initial, final solution.  I still like it...

I got my board with all 100 back, I'll upload it eventually, but it's hangin out in the studio right now.

Logo/New Blog Layout

Our latest project in Typography was to create a logo from 2 initials (these could be from our name, or not)  They were meant to say something about our personality, since it is a logo about ourself.
This is a good opportunity for me to describe the amount of process that goes into each of our projects.

First, we were given a set of letters that we traced with a broad, flat edged pen.  There were 4 sets of letters, Roman serif, italic serif, roman sans-serif, and italic sans serif.  We traced all 4 of these sets about 5 times with the flat edge pen, adjusting the angle of the pen each time to achieve a different result.

Next, we chose our best letter set, and traced that with a pencil, interpreting each rough letter with more precision, adjusting weights of the thicks and thins of each letter, as well as adding personality to them.

Then, we took these letters and started drawing logos with them.  Each one is about an inch big.  I made about 30.  For the next class, we needed to have our 5 best drawn and colored in on 5"x7" paper.  In class, we chose our best one, and worked on making it better, again adjusting thicks and thins, negative space, looking at the visual weight of each letter to make sure it wasn't to heavy.

We were to have two final versions of this logo painted for the next class, 5"x7".  They were both the same logo, one was just a variation of the other.  I sketched each one about 10-20 times before doing the final.  Here are the two I brought in to class:

This was the first one I did.

And this was the variation I made:

I liked the first one better, and thought it was more of a statement of me.

Some people agreed, but a lot of people preferred the second one, the teacher argued was more "me".

So I decided to use that for my final.  The final is at the next class, and we had to work on fixing it even further.  People said that the m isn't that  legible as an m, so I had to work on fixing that.  Again, I drew about 20 sketches of this until I got the right look.  And here it is:

7" x 5"

Black Gouache

I liked it and decided to add it into my blog design.  I needed a redesign anyway.  The old template I used wasted a lot of space on the left side of the page.  That meant that extra wide images had to be really small, or they would get cut off on the right.  this new template has a lot more usable space.

The logo at the top, I drew in illustrator from the hand drawn one.

To explain the new blog title:

I'm on a bit of a typography kick right now.  I have really been liking it and look forward to studying it a lot more in the future.  We have had to learn a lot of terms pertaining to typography and on of them was "em space" which originally referred to the width of the capitol M, the widest letter.  It is now just defined as a the width of a typeface, so for example, in a 12 pt font, the M would be 12 points wide.

So that's where I got the am_space name from.

Package Design

Our latest assignment was to create a box for a product design.

I used illustrator and made a spaghetti Box.

I made a fake spaghetti company that makes whole wheat pasta.  To make the name, I looked up the translation of various words in italian.  My favorite was intero grano, which means "whole wheat".  I varied that to make up the word Granneterro, my pasta company.

The imagery on the box is wheat, and it has very natural, robust, earthy colors to go along with the tone of the product.  The box comes complete with cooking directions and nutritional facts.

I really enjoyed doing this project. :)

I love his work

Graphic Designer Mikey Burton

Cherry Bombers

3.75" x 4.5" with 1" Border

Colored Pencil and Ink

This is the image from my 101 Project that I decided to enlarge.  I thought it was my best one, but she wants everyone to pick a new one.  We haven't gotten the projects back, so I don't have a picture of all one hundred designs right now, but when I do, I will post it.

Life & Death

Colored Pencil

9.75" x 10" Frame

Each Illustration: 3.5" x 8"

Our fifth project in Form and Communication was to illustrate something in life, and then in death.  Obviously we were pushed to think beyond obvious ideas like Fish vs. Sushi.

Specifically, we could choose to illustrate something from on of the following categories:

Animal

Vegetable

Mineral

Industrial Object

We were not allowed to have ANY human elements.

The dimensions of the designs are odd, but she made it that to push the difficulty of the composition. Also, they had to be vertical.

Hopefully I don't need to explain my concept, but I drew a Giraffe peeking its head through a window, then getting chopped off by a ceiling fan.  I illustrated it in an African style of drawing.

New Blog

Forgive my stubbornness in an earlier post.


I decided to give Tumblr a try and found that it has its perks.


For the most part, everything at the new blog will be here as well.  Actually this blog should have more postings and more information compared to the new one.  The new blog has a better image sharing service; their images are more saturated and are a higher resolution.


If I end up getting more into photography for photography's sake, perhaps that is when the new blog will feature items not shown here.  Keep checking this blog for posts about school work, but please check out the new one as well.

 

haylook.tumblr.com

The Tricia Fold Book

Ahhhh.  The book is finally finished.  Or is it?  Well, I came to what I think for now is the inevitable design, and printed and folded it.  There are a few things I could go back and change a bit, but it's pretty much where I want it to be.  I'm not sure how well you can read it in these pictures, but that's not as important as the layout anyway.

The whole thing is printed on one 11" x 17" sheet of paper, then folded with a slit in the middle. The pictures are in order of how you would flip through the book.

This is the poster that is printed on the back of the sheet, so if you unfold the book, and flip it over, this is what you see.  Its actually the same design of the book, minus the text.  I designed the book as a whole, rather than just designing each spread on its own.  I apologize, this is not a photograph of the poster, it's the digital file.  I was having trouble photographing the poster with the bad lighting in my bedroom.

An Old One...

Untouched Snow

P.S. @Alyssa In Red, I am not switching to Tumblr. It is too much work for what I see as not much gain.  I don't think the images really look all that better on that site, and it seems a bit more difficult/more work to post there.  Maybe I'm just used to blogger so I see it as easier, but I'm just gonna stay put for now.  I am following both blogs now though.

Maybe I'll use it in another fashion, but I post quite a bit, so blogger is useful for that.

UPDATE:

Yeah, I made a tumblr.

God I hate Blogger's lack of colors

11" x 17"

This is the sixth assignment for Maclab.  Make a poster about a band using Photoshop by layering several photos/textures together.  I made mine about Royksopp, a norwegian electronic duo who use classical elements like violin.

Here are some links to some of their songs:

The Girl and the Robot [feat. Robyn]
Royksopp Forever
It's What I Want

I also used Illustrator to make the type.  I sketched it first on paper, but then drew it from scratch on the computer.

Update:

After class today,I decided to work some more on my poster.  This is what I got to.  I'm not sure if it's better or worse. Whatever.

Also, my teacher liked the font I created and told me he'd like to have seen more of it.  This made me want to continue making the full font, so I'm slowly working on that.

"Tricia Fold" Book

Our next project is to create a Book about our typeface.  We all call this a "tricia fold book" because of the way that the single sheet of paper is folded to create a book.  On one side, all of the pages are printed and on the other side is a poster that I'm still in the process of designing.  The design of the book could change too, but I've already changed it a lot and I like what I have come to so here it is.

By the way, it will printed on an 11" x 17" sheet of paper.

Front Cover

First Spread (pages 1 &2)

Second Spread

3rd Spread

Back Cover

Full Sheet

I came up with the idea of this poster first, then started on the book.  The book evolved, now the poster needs to do the same.  But here is what I had.

Update:

I made a compromise with the original idea and the new "look"