Sketches and Notes Continued: After Effects, Wine Design and Rubbish

After Effects
These are notes from Edgar's lecture on after effects. It may be somewhat disorganized, but I wrote down pretty much every step in as much detail as I had time to write. I've inverted the color for better legibility. Hope this helps some of you who are already jumping into the AE project.

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Wine Re-Design: La Crema is the wine of choice for the moment being (See post below for images of La Crema and other Russian Valley Wines). However, still checking possibilities so this could change at any moment.








...and the rest is just plain Rubbish. Having mucho fun with my new Japanese Pentel brush pen..as I should be, considering it cost me $16! It's really a great pen, apparently popular with comic/cartoon artists. Below is an image of the pen with an article from KK.org's "Cool Tools" Archive (http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001445.php) If you enjoy drawing experimentation, it is a must-have! The girl at Binder's let me play around with her's (The pen comes in a package at the store, so you can't test it out). She's the dirty-blondish girl who drives the crazily painted van that's always outside, if you're interested...







....from KK.org's "Cool Tools" Archive (http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001445.php):

"Leave it to the Japanese to create a brush pen. This pocketable pen has a super fine brush tip of actual bristles, perfect for tiny Kanji characters, or of course, doodling in your journal, or sketching in your Moleskine. While it's hugely popular with comic book folks and cartoonists, artists of all stripes have picked one up for their paper work. The feel is incredibly tactile and lovely. It works like a fountain pen, with replaceable rich ink cartridges. Once capped it doesn't leak as far as I can tell. (There's a moment of panic when you first assemble it since the instructions are 100% in Japanese, but just insert the ball-bearing end of the ink capsule into the tip.) You can purchase other color inks as well."

Project 4: Wine Re-design

La Crema Pinot Noir + Chardonnay




Wine design from the Russian River Valley=BLAND, BORING









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Sketch Update

Some of my recent 'sketchings' which are relevant to class assignments in one way or another...


Medeski, Martin + Wood Tour Poster/T-shirt Design











13-month Calendar Design













Just for Fun

Inspirations Part III: Josh Cochran

I was exposed to Cochran in my illustration class last week by a class mate who gave a presentation on his work and I haven't been able to stop looking at it. His unique illustration style and limited color palette feels very nostalgic, comforting & interesting to me. When I look at some of his work for the first time, I feel as though I have seen it before in a past time or on a cartoon when I was a child...it just feels very nostalgic and right. These images are from his website at: JoshCochran.net

Inspirations Part II: Salvador Dali

I have always been inspired by Salvador Dali. He's definitely in my top five all time favorite artists and I find his biography and personal character to be very intriguing. Known mostly for his paintings, he was also involved in the planning, designing and creation of stage sets, jewelry, photography, lithography (+other printmaking techniques), and, obviously, the art of the mustaching, hehe. I have been fortunate enough to travel around the world to many museums (my mom is a flight attendant for Delta) so I have actually had the opportunity to see much of his work firsthand and, as many of you probably already know, his paintings are enormous with detail work that creates a visual window into his surreal, disturbing world. It was really hard to walk away from gazing into his canvas work. Anyway, here are a few of his artworks which I photographed in Manhattan earlier this year (European museums don't seem to be quite as keen on allowing photographs to be taken)


Amazing sketch-work



Layers of paneled glass, each painted to create a cohesive scene when you look through all of them lined up. The installation was quite small (maybe 1 ft. x 1.5 ft.) and was built into the wall at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) I believe...



An amazing sur-REALIST!



I found this one to be one of the more interesting Dali paintings because it seems so different than most of his work. A Half-tone pattern of intermingling circles create 2 things at once: When you stand really close, all you see is Madonna and Child; When you step back to a distance, an enormous ear appears. The floating envelopes cast a shadow upon the underlying painting and appear so realistic that you feel you can reach out and grab them...Unreal

Calendar Draft 1

It's late so I'm going to be short...Doing my calendar on old toys/games like Slinky, Lincoln Logs, Rubik's Cube, Simon Says, etc, etc. It is going to be an accordian style calendar which, on one side, displays all of these toys in chronological order from when they arrived on the market throughout the twentieth century. On this image side, the entire span of the accordian fold will appear as a shelf, with each page containing one of the items with a hint to the next page (for example, the Mr. Potatohead shown below might be holding a 'barrel of monkeys' monkey from the hand he waves with which would drape down to the next page containing all the other monkeys, and the monkeys might be heading into a Lincoln Log Cabin or climbing a Jenga stack on the edge of their page...or perhaps holding onto one end of the slinky, stretching it back with all of their might to destroy a band of GI Joes or PlayMobile communities on the next page...Anyway, I think you get the point, when you stretch the accordian fold out to it's full flat length, it's pretty much going to be a long panoramic view of a shelf containing all of these old games/toys which interact with each other in a chronological line of typographic madness. On the flip side will be the calendar part which contains historical/biographical information on each item as well as the typeface used to construct the particular image. The typefaces used will also be old, historical typefaces used in sequence of chronological order in regards to their date of creation.

Creative brief in a nutshell: This composition/calendar will stand to show how typefaces have influenced and interacted with other typefaces throughout the continuous evolution of typography while providing a nostalgic, recognizable, fun composition of vintage toys which mirror this evolutionary process.

This is my rough, rough, rough draft for Mr.PotatoHead...much of it is just outlines I created as guidelines for the composition. Below it is the photograph I took of my very own Potatoman from my childhood. He's not quite dead and feeling better :)

Damn, so much for being short...