Portraits from Type

One of our final projects in my Typography design class was to create two portraits using only letters numbers and symbols from the keyboard.  This was a fun project, but also a very time consuming one and I was not able to do all that I would have liked to or experiment much.

My first choice was to do the face of Chris Evens a.k.a. Steve Rogers a.k.a. Captain America.  This was partly due to the fact that I had just watched Captain America: The winter solider(awesome movie btw ;)).

Using only the words "On your left" (a quote in the movie) this is what i created.

Not fabulous, but it got the job done. :)

Our second portrait had to be of ourselves. Not nearly as good or as interesting, but here you go...

If you can recognize it's me, I'm happy.

Graphic Design 1: Self Promotional Projects: Part 1

I'm taking four classes this semester and one of them is called (whad'ya know?) Graphic Design 1.   For this class we have mainly focused on self promotional projects, each one stacking on top of the other.  My choice was to work on my imaginary freelance design business, hoping that maybe one day I could put what I've made to a good use.

We started out by making ourselves a logo for our business, company, idea, whatever.  Now the design process is more complicated then I'll explain here, but basically you start out with some thoughts and "thumbnails" ideas for where you project will go and what it will look like.  Then you must work on actually bringing that to life.  But are you done when that part is done?  Not a chance! ;)  All projects could use a critique or two (or a couple million in my teachers case) and there is always something that can be fixed or tweaked.

Here below is my first go at designing my logo design.  It looked very similar to my flowy scripted sketch, but me and my teacher decided that this was not the right style for this project and to save it for later.

These are various other variations to my design.

After setting this design aside, I took a totally different turn and started from scratch on another style.  
This is what I got.

I wasn't very happy with what I got, and my teacher had quite a few things about it that she thought I should change so I decided to just go ahead and scratch this one too! ;P

This is what I finally came up with, and I'm pretty happy with it. :) 

(sorry, the picture is a little dark, not sure why...) 













So, there you have it, my journey to create my Logo Design!  :) 


I will post about creating my business card and other projects in Graphic Design Part 2.  

How to not Blog

Ok, so....I'm terrible at writing and great at procrastinating.  Thus the absence of blogging on this blog.  My lack of writing patience as well as my scarcity of extra time have not been beneficial either, but I hope that whoever reads this will understand and hang in there with me.

Thank you. :)

Photo Credit: Big Mac computers from my school. 

To anyone who reads this:

Hey!  Please comment!  It makes the blogger's job so much more interesting and fun!  
                        Not to mention it's encouraging too. ;)  

Thanks,
Maria~

2D Art Class; Project Review

Yesterday was the last official day of my 2D art class.  I had a lot of fun designing my projects in that class and I really appreciated and enjoyed my teacher, Blu Smith, as well.  If I take any art classes again I will be sure to take them with her, she makes art interesting and fun! :)  

In honor of finishing this class I'm going to "try" to post all the projects from the class that I can.  
So, here we go!  2D Art class project marathon! (I apologize ahead of time for any sloppy or blurry images,  I took them all quickly before hand in not-so-good lighting.)   

First up, my self portrait collage.  This project was supposed to help us learn the steps in the design process.

  I made it using construction paper and magazine cutouts and scraps.  


















Up next, my unity project, used to help us...you guessed it...learn about unity in design!  
This isn't one of my favorite designs I've ever created, but I think it's pretty good given the supplies I had to work with.  This is made out of pre-designed shapes that I cut out and arranged to form a type of unity.  










Another black shape project, my emphasis project, where the goal was to create a focal point using design elements such as: contrast, isolation, and/or placement.  I started with a plain sheet of black paper and came out with this.  I'm pretty proud of myself. :)  

And next, Project Scale (no, it's not about snakes or lizards). In this project I was supposed to be emphasizing greater scale to smaller scale in a way that made it interesting (i.e. surrealism).  I really, really like how this one turned out.  Thanks a ton to my wonderful sis Elisabeth, who put up with my pickiness and kindly agreed to pose for my project. ;)    

So, in case you can't tell, it's a giant lightbulb in a dark hallway and a little girl is reading a ginormous blue book with (ironically) a blue bird on the cover.  She also has blue flip flops on the ground beside her.















My balance project was supposed to be inspired by my scale project, and I chose to integrate the color blue as well as the flips flops.   The goal of this project was to make a 2"x 2" motif square and flip it over accordingly to create a larger put-together design.  Ta-da! :)  

And then there was the rhythm project.  We were allowed to use either a sound, a taste, and smell, or a touch/feeling as inspiration for this design.  I chose the sound "Echo,..Echo..echo...echo...echo".  :)  I drew with sharpie marker on white bristol board to create this design.  

Project Line was quite an undertaking.  The objective was to draw a head portrait of some character using different line techniques.  I divided the 8"x 8" portrait into 16 squares and used a different technique on each one.  The drawing was supposed to be with sharpie marker so I had a very hard time figuring out how to get the shading right.  Now, I'm not going to tell you who the portrait is of, cause I want you to guess. ;)  I'll post the answer at the bottom of this post.   

I'm sorry to say that I do not currently have a picture of my shape project, which is really sad cause I think it's one of my best. :(  I will try to take a picture as soon as I can and post it on here.  Hopefully you'll survive till then. ;)  

This is going to sound really bad, but I actually don't have a picture of my next project, texture, either! :X  I'm really sorry and I will post the missing pictures as soon as I can! 

Finally!  I have a picture! :D  This project is my illusion of space project.  The theme of this project was supposed to be Halloween (since it was done at that time of year), but I changed it into "Some of the things I like about fall." :)  The guideline for my project was to use the colors orange and black. 

  


















I've actually already posted my illusion of motion project, but I'll just post it here again.  

I think that this is one of my favorite projects, partly cause it was so easy to make(aka. non stressful), partly cause I LOVE the colors, and partly cause it's a design that's really my style: crazy, flowing, abstract, elegant, mysterious, sparkly, beautiful, cozy, refreshing. :)  There you go, me all summed up! Haha! :D  








We're gettin' there!  My next to last project, Project Value.  On this one I came up with an interesting concept of using food items to make a landscape and then converted it to black and white and worked with value and tones to create an illusion of distance.  Pretty nifty, huh? ;)  

And...drum roll please..my last project, Color! :)  
This project took FOREVER (or at least it seemed like it), but now it's finally done and over with.  I'm pretty happy with the results.  

This isn't the final matting job, but I don't have a picture of it so this will have to do.  The aim of this design was to create three different pictures that had their own color schemes and could stand alone, but yet went together as well.  The inspiration for this project was supposed to come from our self portrait collage.  


I'm sorry, I know you can't see the separate pictures very well, but if I ever have extra time maybe I'll post them individually. ;)  










There you go!  That enough post for you? ;)  Hope so, cause I'm all used up and blogged out for today!  


I will try to get those missing pictures up when I can.  Hope I didn't forget anything else.  

Oh, and in case you're wondering if I'd forgotten to say who the person in the line portrait picture is...I have. :)  




It's M.K. from Epic.  

Oh where, are the posts?

To anyone who ever reads this at all, you're probably wondering if I'm dead or something...well, I'm not. ;)  College fruits take time to produce as well as post so I haven't had a lot of spare time on my hands to do much blogging.

But here I am! Posting again!  Maybe I'll have some more free time now that the semester is ending...woot, woot! :)

On that note...Merry Christmas Everyone! (Nope, this isn't my wreath, we do have one though)

Project from my 2 Dimensional Art Class

I couldn't decide how to put my projects on here, but I wanted to post something so I decided to post my "recentest" project.  I just finished it yesterday and I'm really happy with how it turned out. 

So, it's supposed to be depicting motion.  The three main ways I depicted the illusion of motion in this picture are: anticipated motion, figure repeated, and blurred outlines.  

I created it in Adobe Photoshop using gradients, filters, the brush and pen tool.  Plus a dozen other little tweaks. 

Anyway, there it is! Hope you like it! ;)