#10 Magazine

For this assignment, I decided to create a magazine cover that revolved around festivals because I had a couple good photos from festivals and thought I could write a lot about it. I settled on the name "Mainstage" because every festival I have been to so far has had a main stage, a place where everything revolved around. I chose to feature other kind of festivals, such as Burning Man and Renaisance festivals to show that its an all inclusive magazine. And lastly, I settled on the ad in the back because I had a big collection of Ray Bans, a staple of festival eyewear. I think it turned out pretty well, and I could even see it being on a magazine stand somewhere. I will not, however, be rushing to use inDesign again. It was too different from everything else and too restrictive.

#9 Beer Label

This was my original decision for this project. I thought it captured the essence of art nouveau and I could make it into three different varieties. Looking back on my sketches, however, made me decide to change gears and go for this one. 

I chose this one because I could think of a lot of good description that would make it sound appealing. I also though there could be the opportunity for some interesting illustrator work, as by this point, I have gotten used to it. I threw in some interesting gradients and kept everything as clean and professional looking as possible. The description is full of references to a game called Pokemon. Ninetails is a fire Pokemon, which inspired the color scheme. 

#8 Rotoscope

When we were asked to go gather footage for this assignment, I immediately thought hooping would be an interesting motion to animate. We spent about 10 minutes in an alley behind my house getting different shots of her hooping. I liked the standing, spinning motion and gathered a few seconds of it for the animation. I tried a few different techniques, but then I saw this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9slkeFXogU

I was inspired by the grittiness of the animation and decided to go for the same kind of feel. I used some bright neon colors and decided to make her fade away towards the end with the intention of having the hoop float on its own for a second, but I ran out of frames and time. I chose a photograph of the Carina Nebula from NASA to use as the background and added a track from a free public domain track called Wizard by Tchami. This was the result.

#7 Multiplicity

I was at the Hillsborough County Courthouse to get my passport renewed and I noticed a neat little garden area that I thought would make an interesting scene for a film. When we got this assignment, I thought of it again, called my friend Jayne, and went back for a photoshoot. I thought the end result was fantastic. Not only did I learn how easy it was to do this kind of thing and do it convincingly, but its introduced me to other uses for the mask that I will use in photoshop in the future. I thought the composition came out really well, as there's a strong inward dynamic all the way to the back palm tree.

#6 Photo Restoration

When given this assignment, I immediately texted my grandma (yes, she's hip) because I thought for sure she'd have something that had significant damage to the subject. Unfortunately, she only had a few older photos that she was willing to part with, including a picture of her aunt which she invited me to destroy.

I found this project to be kind of excitingly easy. Doing this got me interested in bettering my skills and possibly utilizing it somehow. I was always a fan of puzzles, and I found this to be rather like that. Though this one isn't perfect, I think I did a rather good job considering the amound of damage I had to work through.

#5 Propaganda Poster

For me, this project started with a couple doodles of mushrooms that I had made as a warm up for my sketches. I chose one in particular and developed it into an anti-drug propaganda about psychedelic mushrooms. I wanted to make it militaristic and exaggerated, as if the mushrooms were some malevolent force like some of the US propaganda about Nazis.

I began putting everything together in Illustrator, beginning with a radiating spiral, of which I based the color scheme on. The mushrooms were fun to work on because I decided to use some of the more psychedelic looking patterns on Illustrator to vary the mushroom tops. I also clipped out some nazi bodies and added a half-tone effect to create some goose stepping mushrooms. This is the result...

Project #3 Logos

This project was actually quite a bit more fun and interesting from the last one, if only because I'm interested in the practical uses of graphic arts and this sort of thing couldn't be more practical. I've actually been approached before about creating logos for a company and its great that I get to now learn the tools to do so and put it into application.

This project (like many creative assignments) started as a brainstorm. On a rainy day, I sat in my roommate's room for a few hours and just rambled off possible companies. We ended up getting quite a few ideas and I began putting them to paper. The result was a medley of random logos.

I then began to work on three ideas. The Taco Tuesday's, Bean mattresses, and Xavier's salon went on to this next level because I thought they'd allow for the most Illustrator possibilities. I started with the Xavier's Salon:

The main element of this one that I wanted to express was the clean and elegant nature of the salon. In addition I wanted to utilize the use of the scissors as a letter. I experimented with several different color choices and font types.

Taco Tuesdays was the one that I wanted to experiment with 3d rendering. I started with a flat image and made it 3d, from there, I knew what I had to do to clean it up and make it look nice.

This one originally started out as "Bed" because I thought the word bed looked like a bed and could make it interesting and multi-meaning. I used some vector manipulation and brush kits to achieve this look. The colors, however, continued to be a problem for me. I'm unable to find exactly the right combination of colors.

Here is the final result:

As you can see, I cleaned up and finalized the logos, resulting in what I thought was a set of pretty successful pieces. The Taco Tuesdays was able to finally become as bold and playful as I was hoping. I finally decided on a good color scheme for Bean and cleaned up the figure. And Xavier's salon took on a whole new, much cleaner look. Overall, I'm pretty proud of my work. I could definitely see these on an advertisement or a billboard. However, during our class critique, I began to feel a little less confident simply because everyone else's logos were far more elaborate. As a commercial designer, I understand that less is more and that's what I went for with these three designs. I do recognize though, that I could have come up with more complex ideas to really show what I know. Looks like this was yet another learning experience.