Sunday, November 29, 2009

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.













Wednesday, November 25, 2009

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.

Monday, November 23, 2009

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.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

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.

Friday, November 20, 2009

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. :)

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

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.

Monday, November 9, 2009

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.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

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.


Tuesday, November 3, 2009

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.