I didn't even know they gave A+ at Michigan.

Well all the grades are in. It was a hell of a semester. I am way better for it and much smarter than 5 months ago. I ended with a Pass, B-, B, B+, and the elusive A+. Heck yeah, Designer Bootcamp! Worked my butt off and it payed off big time.

I'm working at Terra Trike for a month and a half before the wedding June 19th. I'm really thankful to have the job with the way the economy is. I'm both glad and annoyed that I have 2 more years of school left. I've got 5 under my belt already thanks to the engineering to art/design transfer. I am so incredibly ready to be done with school, my younger sister even graduates this weekend. I am really happy for her and really wish I was graduating too. I've had my college experience, I don't care about parties and how much you drank last night one bit. It gets old sometimes having classes with people who were in middle school when I was graduating high school. Most people I have meet at Michigan A&D are great, mature, creative people who I'm very glad I know. But man oh man, there are some exceptions. Thanks to all the good ones.

On the other hand, I'm kinda glad I'm not graduating right now. The economy is in the toilet, it's trying to climb out, and is making progress, but it's certainly not in a good state right now. I'm glad that I don't have to start my career right now and have two more years of school for the economy to right itself. I have friends who graduated last year and this year who are still looking for jobs in their fields. I don't envy them right now.

Anyways, if I do anything A&D related over the summer, I'll post it. Such as, when I get a free moment (read after the wedding) I'll post pictures of the finished ABS plastic salt and pepper grinders. They are awesome.

Thanks for reading!

The Semester From Hell

Well grades are rolling in one by one. So far I've got a B, a B+ and a Pass. I'm waiting for my last two classes. 

My sophomore review went pretty well, Ed West (a professor) only called me lazy 3 times, he has a bit of a rep for being a jerk and he lived up to it. I'll update on that when I get all my grades back and give a big semester run down. I'm so relieved to be done with that semester, it was really hell and shall from here on be referred to as the "Semester From Hell". Yep, crafted by the devil himself (OK, maybe not that bad, but I didn't sleep much that's for sure). 

On a good note, I'm done with the CFC series! They are a poorly conceived series of classes on Concept, Form and Context. Michigan could do so much with these classes, but really squanders the opportunity. Like so much at Michigan, your experience with a course is so heavily biased by which professor you get, each one runs what is supposed to be the same course, differently by section. It's really just luck if you get a good section. I got a good one for CFC 3, and that made the class better, but these classes  could be so much more! 

I am back home at my parents now (Grand Rapids, Mi) and working at Terra Trike again for a few months before the wedding on June 19th. It's really nice to be back, I can ride my bike, see my fiancee (the best part by far), and not constantly think about school. 

Thanks for reading!

No laser cutter even? Wow.

I had mentioned a month or so back that I was looking into the Columbus College of Art & Design (CCAD) as an option to transfer to from Michigan. I was unhappy but more than anything just unsure about the quality of the education I was receiving in industrial design. Chiefly I was concerned about the perceived lack of product design experience and basic design skills at Michigan because of the openness of the A&D curriculum (after our core courses, there are a whole selection of advanced studios we can take, some offered regularly, some not).

This was until I got a closer look at the advanced studios pertaining to I.D. and had talked closer with professors. But just to be safe, and make sure I was making the correct choice, I visited CCAD, which was my top alternative to Michigan. They have a pretty well known ID group, but after visiting today, I have no clue why.

I was unimpressed with the facilities for industrial design for one, paltry and small at best. Also, after coming from a school like Michigan, where things can be hectic and unorganized, this school was a bit off (it was a college day type event, I was impressed by how poor everything was set up, tours before information sessions, not showing you any work spaces in the tour only showing you what some students have done). I was able to talk with the head of the industrial design department there for a bit and came away underwhelmed about the school. It seemed that while there was definitely a course structure set up for you, it seemed very rigid, with little opportunity to try different techniques. Also, being a small private art school, they had no possibility of minoring in anything other than art history or fine arts. I'm interested in a psych minor focusing on how people interact with objects to complement my B.F.A in industrial design I'm getting and my 3 year concentration on mechanical engineering. That's out the window at CCAD.

Oh and the kicker, here I am worried that Michigan won't be able to teach me the technical skills of design and model making and CCAD doesn't even have a freaking laser cutter, M has two. Or vacuum former, M has 2, one large one smaller. Or 3-d mill, M has 2 I think. Or rapid prototyping, M has one. I was amazed. How can you make really intricate designs look really really professionally cutting all by hand? Those CCAD ID grads must be wizards with a good ol' exacto knife!

Plus I'd lose a year in transferring schools, so it would take me 8 years to graduate. Nope, now way at all.

So yeah, I'm staying put at Michigan. If looking at other schools has shown me anything about M A&D, it's that we have some pretty cool technologies available to us and to be thankful for all the extra interesting opportunities that Michigan gives you.
Oh and I love Michigan football so that's a big plus. Columbus is kinda a sucky city anyway. Ann Arbor rules.

Thanks for reading! Go Blue!

Video Pieces

Roughly one month ago I said I was going to update that weekend. That weekend is happening now, it will be glorious.

I've done some work with video this semester for my TMP III (time based media) class. We're using Final Cut and started super simple. Text and still images. We had to tell a story (that's kinda another part of the class, story telling using these mediums).

This was my first video, The Story of The Film (So Far), using text and found images.
It moves quickly to heighten the sense of pointlessness of a mid film summing up. It's also an homage to Monty Python's Flying Circus. I also realized I had previously posted about this movie, but it's nice to have all my video work in one post for easy viewing.



My second video is a stop motion type. I took lots of images of myself and sequenced them together (it's like a video flip book, or stop motion if you want to get all technical). It's called Pocketed Words. I made it for my fiancee, Kara Mia.



The third video I've done this year is actually a video, like the real movin' pictures like in Hollywood! It's an expansion on the ideas I explored in Pocketed Words. My professor (Tirtza Even) encouraged me to explore where on my body I took the words from and play around with the deeper meaning of of "i love you". I'll explain a bit after the jump/video (I only wanted to use the term 'after the jump' because I see it all the time on websites now and I wanted to be in vouge too!) This is called, Close To The Vest. Again, for Kara Mia.



I explored the meaning of my pockets and where on my body they were in this by the level of the pockets on my clothing and proximity to my skin. So 'i' started out on my jacket pocket above my left side (above my heart, on purpose), 'love' was one layer down in my vest and 'you' was in my shirt pocket. So as I went deeper into the intensely personal phrase of 'i love you', I literally was moving closer to my heart and bearing it. Tirtza loved it. Kara did too!

I've got lots of digital work and some ceramics work to show you as well in the near future. My current week should be significantly less crazy than the past few! Thanks for reading!

P.S. I'm making a longboard (a long skateboard made for cruising, not tricks) with the U of M chapter of the Industrial Design Society of America. Learning, finally (not thanks to U of M A&D, more on my dissasifaction with my education quality later), to use the laser cutter! Sweetness. But no seriously, this place (U of M Art & Design) has no focus, with no majors everyone is just kind of floating around aimlessly. I'm frustrated and thinking of transfering, see the Chchchanges post before this one.

Messages

I'm taking, like all freshman A&D students at Michigan, the TMP (Themes, Materials, and Processes) series of classes. I'm currently in TMP II : Messages. It's about the messages conveyed by art and the art process, we are concentrating on 2-d design. I'm super excited about it, the class seems really interesting and the prof is excited to be there and has some interesting projects lined up for us. Below I have posted part of the first project we are working on, it's about spaces. It's just cut out paper on heavy stock paper. We had to use 10 rectangle or square black paper blocks (we got to pick what sizes we wanted) and arranged them on a 6x6" square. All I could think of was sheet music, not sure why, I'm tone deaf. But this is what came out of me.


I like it, the predictability of the vertical lines relatively evenly spaced out overlapped by the more random, different sized horizontal bars is really appealing to me.

I had some scraps and which had some rubber cement on them and had stuck together in the form you see them in below. I simply put on some more rubber cement and attached it to a long rectangle of heavy paper stock. I think it looks like a cross. It's appealing to me because I didn't mean for the black paper to be arranged in that order, they simply fell like that. All I did was glue it on some paper. I still like it though.


I was playing around with scanned image of the cross with the free photo editing software The Gimp Shop after class. Bare with me, it's my first digital image manipulation past red eye removal and cropping. But it was fun, and I like how the image stands out in gray.

Drawing 100 (Literally)

So, welcome to my digital portfolio blog. This may be simply an assignment for a class, but I really like the idea of keeping a digital version of my portfolio and I'll be updating all my course work here. Now everyone can see my work!

Before I delve into any current class work, I'll get you up to speed with my (limited) first semester of Michigan's Art & Design School. I had a drawing class, 100. It was a life drawing class (nudes! hehe) and I hadn't drawn since middle school so I was quite pleased with the results that I got out of myself. I've got a sampling of some of my favorite works from last semester below. I hope you enjoy, please feel free to leave comments at the bottom! Thanks!


This was from Halloween, the model kept her costume on, she didn't have horns for real. Sorry.