Car Design

Alright, so I happen to have a profound love of cars. That's what happenes when you've been around them since you were a baby. To improve something that hasn't already been done, while keeping the car completely drivable is hard to come across considering technology advances so quickly, and with every year more and more things are added to make the cars into super machines.

So with mine, I decided to improve on one car in particular that I love, which is the BMW Z4, it already has lots of interesting trinkets, and a touch screen gps and all that jazz. So when i read the touch screen thing, I said, why not make the whole dash tactile, which engages not only the driver furthur into the experience, and also reduce accidents and drunk driving with special sensors in the wheel.

I was inspired by the pamphlets you would get at the dealer to give information on new projects. It was quite a difficult task. So I made an ad for the front, using vector work which i thoughrolly enjoy. Then a type of introduction, plus some of the features, and a closing statement. Since it was the final projects I tried to use everything we learned throughout the course such as TYPE, COLOUR, LINE, RYTHEM and TEXTURE, through the whole thing.

Drawings

Yes, so the great pressure of end of semester first year of university has desended on me, and my blog entries are suffering! So here's my drawings from a while back where we had to draw an object we interact with on a daily basis. So I decided to use my ipod, music keeps me going especially in the morning, or when working on projects, or in the car listening to music my parents like and I don't. We had to draw three different views, after the critique, joey had mentioned a good point, that it would have been interesting drawing how I interact with it.

More collages!

Well unfortunitaly I was pretty ill on wednesday. I really wanted to present my collages, so I guess you guys will only be seeing them on my blog, that is if anyone checks these things:) Anyways as always when you make something traditionally first, at least with me, I end up liking my hand done pieces more. The digital ones are well...lacking a personal touch, and the chopiness of hand done collages. My favorite one has to be hunger, mostly because it's not the type that people usually think off, usually people think hunger, and its related to food. I wanted to portray the hunger for passion, I really liked the dolce and gabanna ad, because the two look absolutely infatuated with one another.

More collage.

Alright so this time around we had to make our own collages on random subjects. The first one I made was called self portrait. Using my fashion magazines I chose pictures of things I like, for example fashion houses that I love, Joey sugested I cut up the designer logos to make it more dynamic, which I found was a good advice, the self portrait collage has more movement because of it.

The next one is a piece called 34>12, which is supposed to represent inequality. My piece demonstrates the women represented in the magazines which happen to be "ideal" at least when it comes to the media. So I took pictures that may not be the ideal media woman, and cut into them and added some words to show what kinda of improvments, or surgery they would need to look more like the woman who is centered on the page.

I have to admit the next one I had much more trouble with, it's simply called monkey. So I said to myself, what do I think of instantaneously when I hear that word...and then it came to me....monkeys are hairballs...I don't particularily like the animal, I'm more of a feline lover, so I basically took tuffs of hair and glued them on a page. Then I thought, and the word goofy came into mind. So this is the result of my thought process to the word monkey:

The last one was called "I want to fly". So I cut up the sky in many pictures and glued them all together to attempt at a layering effect. The eye is there because to want to fly, you have to look up at it first. I also used some sparkling white paper that had a different texture, it reminded me of the fluffy clouds.

Collage research.

Alright so at some point in pretty much every artists life...well at least I think, we have had to do a collage. It started of with just experiments of all kinds of things that a person could use to create one. At first they were just aimless creations to see how certain elements interacted with each other. In college though, one of my assignments was to express a question through a collage. So I chose "what is passion?", this time it couldn't just be many different pictures all mashed into one thing. They all had to have a common theme, and colour scheme, or else the message wouldn't really get through. This collage work showed me that a person doesn't necessarily have to make a great painting or drawing to get their message across, and that a collage could get it's point across just as successfully. It's gonna be interesting working with this kind of artwork again. I haven't done one since my first year in college, and that was two years ago.

When I think of collage, I just thought of, alright, choose the right pictures and place them in interesting ways to make it as visually appealing and interesting. I hadn't really thought of where it came from, when it started, or which regions of the world used it first. Th articles brought a new light on my view of this artform, I didn't even think of making a collage with wood. There are soo many different ways to make a collage. Recently for my web in sites class, we made a montage. Which is technically a branch of the many things a collage can be.

This kind of artwork gives people the liberty to show whatever they want, and manipulate images that may mean something at first and then, just by the way a person places them, can mean something completely different, that what's so amazing about the versitility of this means. Who knew that something so simple could be so amazingly complex and branch out so much. That artists could be famous for their type of collage. What we could do with collage is endless, and has become extremely simplified with the likes of photoshop, flash and well anything to do with the computer.

However tommorrow's class we're going to have to work by traditional means, which is pretty great, because I love being hands on, although I'm in a computer emphasized program, I started of with traditional roots and appreciate that it's an important factor for the whole basis of all artwork. So the challenge is on for us to make something that can be so open, but being constrained with the materials we bring, because after all we can't constantly press undo. Once it's on..it's on.


Here are some of the collage examples I found, the last one is from an artist who's last name is hoelscher, and is the one I like the most. It's the most colourful one and the one that caught my eye first.

The Map

This week we had to make a map that somehow represented ourselves, it could have been about anything, so I decided to map out my nightlife, what I do and how often. The colours represent what day of the week they happen, and depending what type of line is on the stroke of colour, it means how often I go there. I love vector work, so I guess you could say I attempted to recreate it traditionall with trying to keep the lines the least sketchy as possible.

I actually enjoyed this very much, because we got to apply all the techniques we have learned with Pata into an open project where I got to choose at what angle we wanted to approach the presentation of the project.



Forgive me for the poor quality of the photo, however the flatbed scanner was not available so I had to take a photo of it. I will try again tomorrow to scan it, but, it is up nonetheless.

COLOURS!!!!

So this weeks class consisted of colour theory, which i actually happen to like. Colour usually ends up being a very important factor in all the art I do. Well at least the pieces that are done for me. Especially since in college my painting teacher put such an emphasis on learning how to properly use colour. So in college she made us do the whole colour wheel using the three basic colours: red, Blue, annnndd yellow! Yah it was a challenge, she also made us add white to all of the colours and black. Oh and we can't forget the greyscale, here it is freshly done for cart 254:

And here is my monochromatic scheme for red:

Now with all the newly, or refreshed colour theory we just ingested we were asked to make our own compositions using complementary colours, monochromatic, and a choice of warm or cool colours.(i chose cool)

FONTS

So this week was all about text fonts and how to make them. Once again I underestimated how much work went into making these things. The fact that you could make one letter really nicely doesn't exactly mean that you could make the whole alphabet. So it's a whole process of looking at the letters as a whole, and if the different combinations we use to make words will look good together. So I the one I made in class was organic, I used curved lines instead of linear ones. Then when I got home I thought of a extremely complex one to do. For now I'm posting the ones I did in class and a quick version of a word, that means princess in italian. I intend on making a better one later on tonight.

Symbols

Well last class, was interupted by a fire drill or something along those line, however before that in class we were working on making our own personal representative symbols. So what I decided to do is make symbols of what I do in the morning...or things girls do and stuff like that, like blow drying hair, putting on mascara, drinking water, taking a shower. Traditionally it's much harder to get those sharp clean lines like the actual ones people use to indicate the bathroom for example. (pictures will be up once my scanner is connected.)

Squares and Textures.

Well last class we did some technical exercises that allowed us to challenge or design skills into representing certain words. I found the first task more difficult than the other. It consisted of using squares to represent the given words. Only using traditional means made it time consuming.

However, at home we were encouraged to redo them in a digital imaging program to see the difference, which is strikingly apparent.

The exercise was to make certain textures to represent the same words. This to me as much simpler since we were not restricted to using a geometrical shape, and had much more freedom to come up with an appropriate concept that represents the words.

This allowed me to think outside the box, and use my creativity in a new way.

Self Portraits

The first picture I chose of myself is one that was randomly snapped while at a friends BBQ, this is the one I see more as being representative. It's straight forward, I'm looking directly at the camera, and the background has minimal content: a poster, and a mirror that has Fashion on it, it just so happens that I like fashion. The mirror being in the picture was not intentional, just a fun coincidence and me goofing around.

The second image has more content to interpret considering there's more of a background, I'm in the center cutting what's behind me in half, the left side being shrouded in darkness, and the right being in the light. My eyes are looking towards the back, almost as if im looking over my shoulder because I felt a threat from behind. Or it could be that i'm trying to choose which path to take, and the direction my eyes are looking i'm probably favoring the dark side(Little Star Wars influence). I guess it's up to the others to come up with their own little stories. Or maybe their is no story...hmm.

Also I noticed after I took the picture that in the light side theirs the bathroom door wide open, and in the middle of the brightest part...the toilet bowl...it made me chuckle.