Portraits

These portraits are of my lovely friend Becky. For the project, we were supposed to take portraits with composition in mind. We also had to tell something about the person. I tried to capture the kind nature of her while also trying to show that she isn't all sunshine and lollipops. I edited all of the photos in Adobe Photoshop.

This photo had an empty cigarette pack in the pile of leaves where the bench makes a corner. YAY Clone Stamp!

Long Post is Loooooong

Alright so this week I am going to be posting my Lani Kai stuff. This was for my GRD 200 Class. We choose a topic out at random and I got "Watersports". Water skiing, Fishing, Surfing....Things of that nature. I was originally going to go with fishing but later decided to go with SURFING! I figured that I could have more fun with that. Next came the name of our business. I wanted to go with something that had some surf lingo or something that had some significance to where my business was based...Hawaii. It came down to two separate names

LANI KAI or HANG TEN

Hang Ten was chosen for obvious reasons. Lani Kai however, is Hawaiian. It means "Heavenly Ocean". When it came down to it I chose the less obvious Lani Kai. Now I had a name and a direction, BUT I still needed a logo. That came next, I wanted to reflect the Hawaiian culture so I started with Hibiscus flowers, Tribal doodles, and animals like sea turtles. I eventually narrowed it down to the two designs here...

I liked the two designs a lot, the one on the left had a cute-ness about it, but the other seemed to evoke that tribal theme that I wanted. I choose the right hand logo because it was more of what I wanted for this business. Then came color choices. I really wanted to have a fun, bright option; a warm, sunset-y option; and an ocean inspired option. Well when it came down to it I eliminated the ocean inspired one because I got feedback that it was looking too feminine. Then, I eliminated the really Bright Yellow, Purple and Red Choice. I thought that the colors were so bright that they would detract some people from comming into the store. That left me with...

THE SUNSET ONE!

And the tag line eludes to the other name choice.

The next thing we had to work on was the Stationary Set. Business Card, Letterhead, and Envelope

This is the business card I came up with. I used the triangle pattern I had created for the turtle to make a edge for the card. I placed the Telephone number, and the other information so it mimicked the angle of the triangles.

The letterhead also has that triangle border on it. and it has the Lani Kai logo in a transparency across the bottom of the page.  I think I could have made the logo light and then made the address on the bottom more organized so that it doesn't look like it was just plopped on.

The envelope also follows that triangle pattern. The full logo is missing though. The envelope was the most annoying part and i think it looks too plain. but to fit USPS regulations most of them have to be rather plain.

This is my Invitation. We had to create an invitation to get people to come to our opening. I made two one to be mailed out to people as sort of a formal invitation, and one that could be similar to a business card.

Ukiyo-e, Pictures of a Floating World

Usually the word ukiyo is literally translated as "floating world" in English, referring to a concept of an evanescent world, and impermanent, fleeting beauty. "Pictures of the floating world", or ukiyo-e, are considered a genre all their own. This is the art style I knew I wanted to do the minute Nancy assigned this project. The details of the project were that we were to choose an art master and one of their pieces. We were told that we were going to create a poster for a museum that would show our master.

Here we have my piece in it's final state and the original Sparrow, Moon, and Peach Blossoms by Ando Hiroshige is above. I wanted to use a museum located in Japan for my poster, so I chose the Ukiyo-e Ota Memorial Museum of Art. I even translated it into Japanese and recreated the white flower seal that they use for their logo. I chose the brown background color and the white because those are the colors that the museum uses on their website. I mostly used the pen tool and the eyedropper to get the colors just right. I tried to apply almost a canvas texture to it. The texture is a little hard to see, but it's there.  I think my favorite part of this design are the birds. They are just so freakin adorable.

Dada.

Dada. What can you say about Dada. I think I captured it very well in this brochure design. This was for my Typography class and we had to pick an art style and do a research paper on that style. Then we had to create a "brochure" using colors, type, and layout that reflected our style. I chose Dada which is also know as the anti-art. They did things like the picture in the center of my design. It is a 1919 alteration to Da Vinci's Mona Lisa by Marcel DuChamp.

In the second and third decades of the twentieth century, a new kind of artistic movement swept Europe and America. Its very name, "Dada"--two identical syllables without the obligatory "-ism"--distinguished it from the long line of avant-gardes which have determined the history of the arts in the last 200 years. Its proponents came from all parts of Europe and the United States at a time when their native countries were battling one another in the deadliest war ever known. They did not restrict themselves to being painters, writers, dancers, or musicians; most of them were involved in several art forms and in breaking down the boundaries which kept the arts distinct from one another. Indeed, the Dadaists were not content to make art. They wanted to affect all aspects of Western civilization, to take part in the revolutionary changes which were the inevitable result of the chaos of the First World War. They were not interested in writing books and painting pictures which a public would admire in an uninvolved manner; rather, they aimed to provoke the public into reacting to their activities: to the Dadaists, a violently negative reaction was better that a passive acceptance. The Dada movement was perhaps the most decisive single influence on the development of twentieth-century art, and its innovations are so pervasive as to be virtually taken for granted today.- an excerpt from an essay by Timothy Shipe

Full essay can be found here: http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/archive.html

Explorations in Typography!

Featuring: The 23rd letter of the Greek Alphabet.

PSI!

Okay, for this assignment we had to pick on of the letters from either the Greek or Phoenician Alphabets. I chose the Letter Psi. We were then given the task of writing a one paragraph about the origins of the letter as well as if it has any significance in modern society.  The following is what I wrote and is on all of the designs:

"Psi is the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet and it represents the sound /ps/ like the English lapse.Psi was adopted in the Runic alphabet , and also into Cyrillic alphabets. the letter Psi is also used in physics to represent a wave function in quantum mechanics. Psi has many different meanings depending on the topic. In Biochemistry, it represents a rare nucleotide called Pseudouridillic Acid. Yet when talking about Astronomy, Psi represents the planet Neptune. Psi is also used to denote paranormal phenomena and is now a premier term in Parapsychology."

I used the paranormal as a jumping point for my design and it is why in two of the designs the letter for Psi is feathered almost all the way out. For this design series we needed to also create a visual Hierarchy using our body copy, our letter form, and our letter's name. I believe that my second design is the most effective.

Global Awareness Poster #1

This design was made for Muskegon Community College's 2010 Global Awareness Festival Poster Contest. For this design, I was very heavily inspired by stained glass windows used in Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture.
Example:

I pared down the complexity of the window and gave the frame of the poster its basic geometry. Unfortunately, I did not win the contest, but I still got a really nice piece. I used the Pen tool to make the Countries and the trees. I set the trees to a 74% Opacity, to give the countries a neat, almost shaded effect. I chose to use only black, white and green in the color palette because the theme that year was "Living Green".  I used the Water Paper effect in the Sketch section of the Effects panel.