All my exams are done and I’m heading out for spring break in a few hours. I haven’t had much time to get any design work done recently, but I’ve been doing a lot of drawing for my introduction to drawing class. Our final project had to be a series of at least 3 drawings (other than that the assignment was pretty open). I decided to do some figure ‘drawings’ in watercolor (which for some reason was included in the course as a drawing medium)

Here’s all four pieces together:

Here’s the studio to give some perspective:

And here’s a detail of the torso:

Click any of them to get a larger view.

My desire to procrastinate writing a ten page paper has lead me to design a new banner for the site. I created the octopus entirely in Photoshop, using the pen tool and the paintbrush (I’m in observational drawing now but its a slow learning process so I prefer Photoshop). Anyway, I’m still not sure about it. I don’t think its  as sophisticated as my last banner (which was a picture from a train station in Amsterdam) but maybe that’s not a bad thing. I would love to hear people’s opinions, good or bad.

Update: the header has been changed again. Here was the one I was referring to in this post:

My six week winter break went surprisingly quickly and somehow it is already the second week of winter term. I finally found time to put up some photos from break (The first week of term was especially hectic for some unknown reason). I spent the last two weeks of break hiking in New Zealand with my family and my boyfriend, Scott. We flew into Auckland on the North Island but then went straight to Christchurch on the South Island. We spent the trip traveling around the South Island (significantly less populated but called the mainland). I was not really prepared for the amount of hiking (or rain) we experienced. Nonetheless New Zealand is beautiful (although lacking in the wildlife department, in my opinion). Every time we would turn a corner there would be another beautiful mountain. I took over 600 pictures while we were there and I just wanted to share a few of my favorites.

I think the next few really showcase the landscape of New Zealand:

We were taken over to the start of one of our many hikes in a tiny plane. We saw some of the most incredible views from above  the river and the mountains (although the whole thing made me a bit nauseous).

This was a the view from the parking lot of a restaurant in Milford Sound, one of the most famous hiking locations in the world.

Mt. Cook was beautiful the day we arrived and the day we left but the day we were hiking in the area it poured rain harder than I have ever seen (the basement in the visitor center flooded). This picture was taken on the way in, however.

We took a cruise on the Milford Sound and the weather started off a little gloomy but nothing serious. By the time we were halfway through the cruise, the winds were blowing so badly that you had to hold on to the railing or hug the floor if you wanted to step outside. My mum pointed out to me that this photo looks like it was taken with black and white film which I think really captures the storminess of the day. Unfortunately raindrops kept attacking my lens.

This too was taken on the cruise. Our guide said he had once see a photo from a famous New Zealand landscape photographer of a waterfall being blown back upwards in the wind. He had never seen it happen himself until our Milford cruise.

Ok, this one is actually in black and white. The tops of the mountains were always covered in a layer of clouds, making them look quite mysterious.

New Zealand has these amazing ferns that started curled in a brown ball and then slowly unravel to reveal green fern leaves. I must have taken over 50 pictures of them. They were everywhere and often used as logos on gift shop products.

With the lack of native wildlife, I took advantage of every animal spotting I had. I really wanted to play with a sheep but none ever seemed interested. New Zealanders also have taken to domesticating deer. Its a very weird site to see 50 male bucks all snuggling together in an enclosed pastour.

The next three pictures I really like for their graphic quality, more than anything else.

I think this is actually my favorite of the trip. Mostly because it is just so graphic. I love the mixture of geometric shape and organic shape.

With the term just about to finished up, I have more time to post work I did over the course of the fall. This is another project from my graphic design class. The assignment was to redesign a classic book for a modern edition re-publishing. I re-designed Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’.  The image seen through the birds and on the spin is a map of the Galapagos Islands where Darwin did much of his research (and I chose to use images of birds since Darwin’s early research centered around Finches).

I just had my final intro to sculpture critique yesterday. Although I’m not really sure if its my medium, I really enjoyed the class and working on all the projects. We worked with plaster, metal, and wood (I did very little in metal since I really fell in love with wood working). What I found most surprising was how much time it took to do the simplest things. I did a lot of work with boxes; just cutting and gluing them together took most of my time. Anyway, here’s my three projects I did over the course of the term:

Project 1. Assignment: pick an object (I picked my boyfriend’s wisdom teeth he had removed and has kept in his car– in a baggie, but still gross– since he had them removed a few years ago). Create small models exploring the physical features of the object. Then create a large sculpture in plaster exploring one of these models.

Project 2. Assignment: Using at least two different materials, depict a gerund through sculpture. My gerund was ‘feeding’. I worked in wood and plaster.

Project 3. Assignment: Pick a architectural element– this was very loosely defined as anything man-made–and examine connections within or outside of this object. I chose an umbrella but my project strayed far from my original conception. Just to give you an idea of proportion the box was roughly 2′x2′x2′.

.

While we were working on the typography unit in graphic design, we were assigned to graffiti the campus (with chalk, of course). We all agreed to use the word ‘type’ somehow in our designs. I think everyone’s turned out really well. One group decorated Sayles, the campus center, with different types of students and another group played with the phrase ‘blood type’ outside the wellness center.

My phrase reads “You won’t make typos if you draw.” I drew it where the path divides between the CMC (center for mathematics and computing) and Boliou (the art building). I spent a while printing and cutting out the stencils for the main part of the sentence and then just free-handed ‘draw.’

I’ve been taking a graphic design class this fall. We’re about to move onto magazine layout but I thought I’d share some of my poster work I’ve done before I’ve completely forgotten about it. Our first real assignment was to design a poster using the quote “If you can’t make it good, make it big. If you can’t make it big, make it red.” I played around with some grunge spread ideas but I didn’t really like what I came up with. Finally, I decided to try something clean and simply and I really liked what I got out of it.

Our second big assignment was to design a typography poster centered around a cinematographic quote of our choice. My quote was about the end of a film and so I thought that I might create a murder crime scene to portray it. When I was googling ‘chalk bodies,’ I came across the famous Anatomy of a Murder film poster by Saul Bass. I ended up taking my inspiration from the classic design.

Interestingly, I discovered later that I wasn’t the only one inspired by the original film poster. Apparently the Clockers movie poster got caught up in a large controversy over its extreme similarity to Saul Bass’ design. This gave me the idea for a final project for another one of my CAMS classes, innovation and creativity in mass media. I decided to do a research/graphic design project on the fine line between inspiration and piracy in graphic design (focusing on film posters as the case study). For the project I hope to make three designs based around the poster for Dial M for Murder or the Vertigo film poster, also done by Saul Bass. We’ll see how it goes.

For the final project in the BU web design class we all had to find a major website that we thought could use a re-design. American Airlines wasn’t a hard choice. The website felt like a big pop-up ad (much like Ryanair’s actual service– the airline, which flies cheap throughout Europe, has ads for discount fare along the overhead bins and announces fare opportunities over the PA system.) Anyway, we spent the whole term working up to the re-design. We created competitive analyses, creative analyses, wire frames, site maps and mood boards.

Just for reference, this is the existing site that I was working with (www.aa.com):

We each created two versions and this is the one with which I am most satisfied:

This summer I’ve been taking classes at BU that aren’t offered at Carleton. In the web design class, we’ve just finished our unit on flash. Flash has been pretty challenging to learn. However, I’m pretty proud of the simple flash personal page that I created. The only link that works right now is the ‘contact me’ (I hope to update soon, though) Take a look and tell me what you think: Flash Page

This doc was the first project in my non-fiction video production class. I went through several idea phasing and finally decided on profiling people who have pets at Carleton (legal pets, of course). I got some pretty funny (and sometimes sad) stories from them. check it out, A Fish Out of Water

I’m thinking now that the fish in the intro and credits is a bit over the top but it is what it is.