A New Assignment

So I've been hankering for a new assignment that has distinct flavors of design with a lot of fun illustration opportunities, a wallop of spicy heat. As I was finishing off the last hard cider in my fridge, it dawned on me....why not redesign a six pack? Now that I am 21, have access to a car, and the variety of local Boston brews are readily accessible, I've been scouting out the cool labels and looking for a new favorite. (No surprise,...not much out there has tickled my fancy and I think we could do WAY better.) I say, let's rev up our lazy summer days, drink a six pack and design some kickass labels and packaging for funzies.

This would be all typographic (think red stripe), all illustration (think fat tire), or a combination of both (mike's hard lemonade.) Feel free to take on anything from Schlafly, to Budweiser, to Sam Adams, to organic whole foods sarsaparilla. Whatever you like, it's YOUR summer.

Deadlines:
Monday July 27th: Present your favorite idea with sketches + two backups to the blog. Comments ensue.
Monday August 3rd: Present 1st iteration of label + beginnings of six-pack carton.
Friday August 14th: Project Due (and portfolio ready!)

Who's with me. I bet Amini is! Let's all also try to get some more people on board. Where the heck is Jenny anyway?

STAY OFF MY LAWN

I understand that this is severely late.

Hoever, I would like to point out that I used this as a learning opportunity on practicing with traditional and digital media. I hope to have a more in depth examination of the piece on my blog soon- but in the meantime.....here you go : P

At least I'll still have a hobby when I'm 85

I went a little crazy with the lines here. I'm getting back into practice with my nib. The line weight can be really hard to control even though I like the sharpness and the organic nature of the line. It's fun to see myself old,....the way I'd like to be....crazy hair and all!

Pincushion v3

Alright...here's my third iteration of my Etsy identity. I've enjoyed your comments and tried to follow their suggestions. I tried to do three banners with simple changes ranging from really subtle to less subtle...I'm kinda fond of the middle one. Thoughts?

Let's be clear: I won't be alive in 76 years...

Pictured above: Wishful thinking.

...but if I am, maybe I'll look something like this. Over at Drawn!, somebody posted a challenge to draw yourself at 100. People approach it from different directions, playing with varying degrees of caricature and, for lack of a better word, realism: the human face changes somewhat predictably with age. Burne Hogarth has a fantastic book, Drawing the Human Head, with a chapter that helpfully explains the process of how you will start to look like the Crypt-Keeper. Apparently, I have ignored the part of the text that describes how little hair you'll have left. So sue me.

The other thing about this particular doodle is that I tried some new tricks I've been toying with: the inking was done digitally on a tablet in Flash, and the painterly effects were an experiment in Photoshop to keep it from looking too flat. Any thoughts?

Let's see some old people! I'd love to see everyone else's wishful thinking.

Etsy try 2

Silly me, they were in CMYK,...that's why the colors were messed up. Thanks for the feedback Amina!

Etsy Store

Hey guys:

So I'm trying to start my own Etsy store and a lot of the names I wanted for it are already taken. I'm deciding between Pincushion Crafts and Echo Crafts and I want to make a banner for the store. If you know me, you know that I can't make a decision all that well without getting my studiomates opinions. Feedback? Pretty please?






So those colors are supa nasty so I'll upload some in black and white...or not. The black and white images aren't showing up,....this ever happened to you using blogger before? Well,...no luck tonight. I'll try again later.

Game-show sketching.

For those of you draw-ers that have been complaining about lack of inspiration, this little Flash gadget was featured on Drawn! today. Step right up, spin the wheel, make a doodle. You're never gonna win unless you play...

use it or lose it

so i am back home with too much time on my hands, with a long drawn out job search still laid out in front of me, and i can feel my design faculties slipping away from me. the little side freelance jobs aren't cutting so even if it just me that feels this way, i need some ideas or something to keep me going. who knew maintaining creativity would be so hard! thoughts anyone?

Tom Waits: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

With all the free, uncompensated time I have these days, I've actually been using it somewhat productively. I have wanted to try something new for awhile, so I decided to tackle the first assignment discussed here at the Summer Studio: the portrait. I even returned to my original subject, lovably weird-looking Tom Waits.

pictured: the sound of gargling with whiskey and broken glass every night.

The art of capturing likenesses is a frustrating one, to be sure, but it's also a big part of drawing for a living. John once told us a story about how, with approximatey eight likenesses to do for a job, he churned out the final sketches for all but one in a day: Gwenyth Paltrow, however, took forever. Looking at Gwenyth, she has no unique or offensive features, is thin and blonde, and has no props with which she is frequently associated. She is, in short, a nightmare to draw. Tom Waits does not present this problem. Not at any level.


I went through a few sketches that missed the mark before I got close. My inclination to make his craggy face more angular was steering me wrong.

...and the "finished" product. I wanted leave tons of white on his face, and keep everything else in the drawing very simple and stark. The value of the purplish tone is a little too dark, but scooting around too much photoshop negatively affected the rest of it. All in all, I'm pretty happy with it. Thoughts?

In approximately two weeks, you'll all start scattering far and wide, so let's rev this thing up again. Come late August, when surely you'll all be desperate to return to studio for another year, this is closest you'll have. I may be a year late, but I'm still working through these assignments. What about you all?

Playtime

In lieu of my actual presence at your seminar presentations—a disappointing absence to both sides, to be sure—I figured I would take a page from Meredith's book and try to keep the Summer Studio alive. In the spirit of spurring some conversation, I'm posting two versions of the same piece. The piece above is the "do-over," produced today, April 16th, while listening to the Yankees collapse. The piece below is the original, produced sometime last February, and was one of the first pieces I executed in gouache.


I was never truly happy with it, so faced with some free time today I decided to use it as an opportunity to add some grayscale work to my portfolio. Having completed it, I see positives and negatives in each. The prompt was a short article from PC magazine about how Internet communities have begun to functon in some capacities like a "Neighborhood Watch," monitioring and reporting viruses, malware, and other unsavory characters. I got very stuck on the concept of a magnifying glass both locating and destroying internet "bugs," but I think that even though the new piece is more capably executed, the color original communicated the concept more clearly. Thoughts?

Hope all of your presentations are going well! How about posting some of the work from this semester up here?

m

I thought now would be as good a time as ever to post my final sketch for shotgun 9-1-1. like most people, i never actually finished it, but I've had this picture sitting around on my computer for a while, so why not share it? Once again, the prompt was "reasons you would need to call the Remington Rifle Hotline." I'm pretty pleased with this concept so maybe someday I will finish it.