Summer Lovin / Bummin

Well, schools out. I've been home going on a month already actually. The last semester wrapped up nicely, I was pretty happy with final grades. No surprises, well actually I was expecting an A- in my Humor Class (one of my advanced studio classes), but I got an A. So a good surprise.

I'm actually missing art school allot, I had such a great semester. Met lots of really creative and fun people and made some pretty sweet art. I miss it. I'm working full time (I actually like what I'm doing, more on that in a bit) and making the monies and riding my bike, but there is a lack of artiness for sure. I aught to get on designing my wedding invitations or save the date cards, or start taking my camera with me more.

I'm working for a trike company called WizWheelz, we make the Terra Trike.

A TerraTrike

I do assembly, shipping, R&D, and anything else that needs to be done pretty much. It's a pretty sweet job, but I still miss art school.

Speaking of art school, I have pictures from my final TMP II project that I never uploaded. It was the expanded image piece. Overall, Dennis, my prof (who was great) loved it. I was less happy with the final result. He gave it an A-. I gave it a C-. I think that he liked the amount of time I put into this mother and the fact that I stayed late on the day we had to work on it and finished it at 11pm on a Friday when I still had a week to do it.


It's three of my friends/roommates ascending the stairs of the house I lived in last year at Michigan. I really like the top of the piece and the sides where you can see the banister and the baseboards of the stairs. They were used to give the piece some cohesion. That worked, all three of them are climbing stairs, but I have way to many pictures of them and not stairs up the middle and that mucks it all up.

I made this by taking tons of pictures, printing them glossy 8.5x11 and then cutting each one into roughly 2/3 " strips and gluing them to the foam core to expand them climbing the stairs. The idea was that it would look like several were climbing the stairs at one time and all at the same time.


In retrospect, I'd like to try this again but with only one person and less pictures of them. Don't make is so cluttered and obvious.

the stairs and bannister, I like this part of the piece

Well, I'll post more when I start working on wedding invitations. I've got some ideas and some sketches. We'll see what I can come up with.

Oh other, artistic news. WizWheelz (my summer job) also makes guitars, Etavonni (innovate backwards) under the same ownership. Pretty sweet carbon and aluminum guitars. Pretty sweet $10,000 guitars. While the carbon and aluminum may seem sacrilege to some guitar people, they're all technical and tone chambered up. I guess, I don't actually play.
But anyway, Ben and Jeff, who work for both companies are starting up their own guitar company (normal wooden guitars). Ben, who is the Production Manager for WizWheelz and Etavonni and a video game fiend (we play during lunch hour), has asked me to help them design a body for their new guitar. Super Sweet! I'll post what happens!

Oh and another thing, I'm now a published author. Kinda. In a newsletter, The Bent Rim Bugle, for an organization that I belong to, The Michigan Mountain Bikers Association, I was published. I wrote a piece about racing at Mt. Snow, Vermont and submitted it. They really liked it! I'll have to scan it in since there is no web version. But still, cool none the less that I can say I'm published.

Kinda.

Thanks for reading!

Manifest Destiny: The American Dream

So, Laura and I finished our American dream poster this afternoon. We're both quite happy with it. When the whole project was assigned, I was a bit dubious about the assignment being on the American dream. As I said in a previous post, how hackneyed can you get? I had images of apple pie, immigrants and the statue of liberty.

Laura and I skewered that whole idea. Manifest Destiny baby. Spread by the bullet of course. I would say were commenting on the whole idea of American imperialism. Of course we don't call it that anymore, we call it "spreading democracy" or "protecting freedom", but it's a watered down version of colonialism. This time with 24 hour press coverage. And bombs. But the bullets have always been there.

The visual style of our piece was inspired by the British graffiti artist Banksy that I had talked about earlier. The piece below is what directly inspired me. It's in the solider.

So we took our idea on manifest destiny as the American dream and our Banksy inspiration and came up with this piece. The solider is shooting red, white, and blue bullets at a American flag world. Cause we want to own/command it (if that wasn't obvious).
We photoshoped it onto a wall because of our graffiti artist inspiration, both of us saw this as a graffitiesque subversive piece I think and putting it on a wall incorporated that idea for us. The text is read as off the wall because it is the title for the poster that this will be printed as (it prints with a white 1/2 inch border). Oh the whole poster size it 17"x11" printed. We did it mostly in Adobe Photoshop with some Illustrator as well.
It may not be a 'normal' poster, but I really like it and think it would be a good bit of fun to actually graffiti it somewhere in A2. We'll see if that ever happens.


Thanks for looking!

The American Dream

For TMP graphic design, all the sections are in some completion on the American dream. I have no idea if it is just school wide or larger, but these are a few of the ideas I came up with.

I was originally none to excited about this project, I mean, the American dream? That's so many different things to so many people and it's really been done before. Many many times before.
But I guess there is a reason it's been done so many times before. It's quite interesting what comes out of you when you start thinking about the American dream. Also, it's a group project which can be not so much fun (my partner is good for this project though, so that's good).

I started wanting to skewer the whole idea of the dream and landed on the idea of manifest destiny (the idea that the early U.S. had the right and the duty to govern from Atlantic to Pacific) and American Imperialism in the past few decades.

I also have started into how broken the dream is here at home. Specifically the level of poverty and homelessness in this country being so high is appalling. I wanted to comment on that for the last piece.

I'm not sure which one my partner and I will chose to work on further and submit, but I'll keep posting!






Thank you for looking!

Idioteque

For TMP we are working on images inspired and derived from songs. We were assigned Radiohead's Idioteque from the Kid A album. It was later changed so that we could do any song we wanted after some people complained that they wanted to use their own crappy music, but I really like this song and have some good ideas, so I'm sticking with it.

A page of ideas for the Idioteque image from my sketchbook.

It's a great song, if you've never listened to Radiohead, I recommend them. This song is great (and the one after it, Morning Bell is great too!), I would check out their latest album, In Rainbows. It's really good.

I'm going to create a object using the letter forms of the lyrics for the song. Specifically a bomb. If you listen to the song it's pretty obvious why, but the lyric "Who's in a bunker, who's in a bunker, women and children first, and children first, and children" is what started my head going.

We'll see what I come up with.

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Also of note, my Drop A Gear, Drop The Hammer, I'm GONE print and the wedding invitation cover idea I made are currently being exhibited outside the Slusser Gallery here at Michigan A&D along with some of my classmates stuff. The images are right here(the wedding invitation) and here(Drop A Gear) as well as in previous posts.
So far I've had two things exhibited, my self-portrait from last semester's drawing course (I've got to go pick that up, it came off the wall to make room for my new stuff) and now this! How exciting!
Oh and it's spring break next week. Thank God. I need a break.

Personal Font

For TMP graphic design we created our own personal font and then used it to create some sort of an image to compliment our fonts.
My font ended up being a sharp, angular type with inferred type just as important as what is there. I accompanied my font with a composition inspired by the band Mute Math. The text is from their song Stare At the Sun and reads,

"And we stare at the sun
but we never see anything there
Just a glare has become
all that we'll ever see there
And we stare at the sun"

The image it is overlain on is of the band. I created 4 different compositions of the text over the image with the image different in two of them and arranged them behind the main orange image with the words over it. I arranged them to fan out from the main orange square and to get at the hopeless repetitiveness of searching for meaning where there may be no meaning.


Thanks for looking!

Free From and Structure

So in my big updating day (sorry it's been so long, i've been rather busy/lazy), I've got some graphic design work to show. This was for my TMP graphic design class. The whole assignment was about, again, figure ground work and a heavily contrasting interplay of colors and objects.

We used letter forms to create what was supposed to be a highly abstracted composition at the final print. I used the phrase "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" from Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail. I picked the primary colors red, green, and blue. I really wanted the whole thing to blend together when looked at, your eye is not supposed to be able to find one area, color group, or letter form to really focus on. I really like my result.


I decided to try this technique on a possible wedding invitations or program cover for Kara and my wedding. The phrase is "Your my best friend and I love you." from a Weezer song. I tried to make this one a bit more legible, but it's still a bit illegible in places and if we use something like this, I'd clean it up a bit more. I was also thinking of redesigning it so that there is a large section of one color, like if I made the L in love wider, and putting there the specifics about the wedding, date, location and such.
I picked the colors based off our planned wedding colors, light navy blue, cream, and light yellow.

Thanks for looking!

Figure & Ground

Well,
I've finished up my latest graphic design projects for TMP II. We are dealing with figure ground relationships. The first was a personal statement piece. The second was a piece exploring repetition in figure ground relations.

I really quite enjoyed these projects and really love this class, it's my favorite of the semester by far. I'm thinking I may change my concentration to study graphic design. Graphic designers have such a hand in everything we visual interact with. From your toothpaste tube in the morning to the Coke can at lunch is visualy designed by a graphic designer. I like that immediacy of the work, it is everywhere. It may be viewed as art, or it may be viewed as marketing, but it fascinates me.

Anyways, these are the the two pieces. First is the personal statement. Click for the images for the larger versions.

I am extremely happy with how this image came out. Done in Adobe Photoshop and printed 8.5" by 11", it's a statement of my bike racing attitude. Or what I'd like it to be. It means to attack to win the race. In the race this picture is from, I actually did drop a gear and drop the hammer on my competitors. I was gone for a bit, but could not hold my gap and was brought back. I guess it should say after "i'm GONE", "I'll try it again when you catch me in a couple of miles". But that just doesn't hold the same ring and finality of "i'm GONE".
I really like how my body stands out so drastically from the back ground (black) and foreground (white) because of the vivid nature of the colors against such muted ground. My classmates suggested that this could easily be seen in a magazine add for a company like Gatorade. Wouldn't that be cool! They pretty much have fanned my graphic design flames for me. It's nice to feel talented.

The second image, shown here, is the repetition piece. I designed this piece thinking that it would go in a campus tour booklet for Michigan. The booklet would highlight special areas around campus like the Diag, The Union, the Lawquad, The Bell Tower, State Theater and so on. Each section wold have a title page of sorts with following information, maps and such about each location. I designed the title page of the Lawquad. Using a photo I had of one of the arched walkways in the Lawquad, I cropped it down and used several filters to achieve a photocopy look. The I accidentally dyed it purple somehow and liked it and stuck with it for the type. The arches are arranged to give many vanishing points in the grid of the photo.
I am very happy with this piece and am considering actually making the book that it would be part of for a personal study. It's an interesting concept for me and would look great in a portfolio.

Thanks for looking!

Compositional Units

So my first project for TMP II is done. It's pretty much a class on graphic design, which I never really had any experience with before, but I rather enjoy.

We had 4 different studies for this project, all dealing with arrangement of 10 rectangles and or squares. We're learning about the illusion of space, texture, composition and balance, proximity, and unity. Also big was the dynamics of figure and ground.

Study 1 was all black blocks and study 2 was blue, red, black, yellow, or white blocks. Study 3 was blocks of text (newspaper or the like) and study 4 was blocks from pictures. A few posts down I put up my first thing I did in this class, it was my first iteration of study 1. I like my new one better. They're all below.

Study 1 Black Blocks

I designed this to look like the equalizer in iTunes (the bars that jump up and down correlating to your music that is currently playing, don't know if I've got the right name for it).

Study 2 Color Blocks

This was designed to be symmetrical down the diagonal while giving the illusion that the horizontal center of the picture plane is further away than the top and bottom edges. I did this by fading the colors closer the middle on the bottom set of bars and sharpening the colors going away from the middle on the top set of bars. And of course, closer to the center of the picture, the bars are shorter.

Study 3 Text

This was a surprisingly fun study to do. I had a great time searching for things like old newspaper clippings on Google and messing with their colors and saturations. I tried to make it look like the top of the picture plane was further away from the bottom by arranging smaller blocks on top and lighter colors to contrast the heavy, thick blocks on the bottom pulling the arrangement down to the base.

Study 4 Photo Blocks

So in the 4th study, I was trying to use several different pictures cropped out of loosely related photos. I had this one of Audrey Hepburn that I was using, it dawned on me to cut that one up into the 10 squares. I arranged them so. I really like this one. It's my favorite of the 4, and not just because I like Audrey Hepburn. How it is still one congruous photo because of the organization of the blocks, but each column dosen't give all the info needed to discern what is going on is really pleasing to my brain.

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You know I once read that most blogs have one reader. Thanks Mom. Knew I could count on you.

Anyway, thanks for reading (Mom). Please feel free to leave comments.

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.