more thoughts on toast

I forgot to add, in my last postings, that this particular assignment and the craziness that has been my journey toward completion have solidified in the minds of my co-workers that I'm a little nuts. I was a little bit nervous about not being able to turn in my assignment in on time, and I told some of the folks about it. Then, one of my co-workers was running errands for work near my house, and I asked him to look for the baggies of toast for me (he didn't find them). So, today, I took my new masterpiece in to show everyone, and they all laughed at it.

a masterpiece of toast

Fantastic, isn't it?! I'm kinda glad, now, that my first batch of toast got lost. I'm really proud of this one. It's a capital T in Times New Roman. (Oh, the T in the last photo is Easy Street Alt EPS.) There are several reasons why this one is better. First, the quality of the bread/toast - the first T was made out of English Muffin bread, which is smaller and dense and I had to cut into slices myself. Second, further evidence that practice makes perfect. Third, I had a lot more time to do it and didn't feel rushed at all.

my toast is toast

Our next project was to create letterforms out of toast. Pretty creazy, huh? Well, I had a lot of fun with it. I ended up making three of them for class on 3/25. I spent a really long time on them, and used a lot of bread. Unfortuately, I had a really bad morning the day they were due and ended up driving away with my toast on the top of my car. I tried to look for them when I got home that night, at 9. I wandered the streets with a flashlight. It reminded me of this book I have called Speck. It's a collection of collections - different people's weird collections of things. Pretty neat book, actually. This one guy decided to see if leaving a trail of breadcrumbs would work in NYC. He left slices of bread instead of breadcrumbs along the route to his girlfriend's house, and retraced his steps later to see if he could find the bread. He found a bunch of them, mostly all gross and mangled. I also succeeded in finding some of my bread, pictured here. Just my luck, it was the one of the three that wasn't so great.

Thankfully, Z believed my crazy story and let me re-do them to turn in on 3/29.

final - textbook cover

. . . I played around a bit with background colors. I tried green, but it ended up a little monochromatic despite the really great shade of mint green that I was using. Then I tried yellow. Hideous. Then blue. Blue was much better. I added a little more yellow to the blue (thanks, Z, for that suggestion), and there you have it. Pretty fantastic, if I do say so myself.

The class liked the color, but thought it still looked boring and textbook-y. True, but isn't it supposed to be a textbook cover? Besides, anything would be better than that garish thing the book currently has.

comprehensive

Thanks to my wonderful cousin Adam, who was super patient and helpful, this is what I turned in as a comprehensive the next Monday, 3/9. He showed me how to use kerning instead of stretching my type. He also introduced me to Illustrator, where I created the fun green squiggles. I think it came out pretty darn good, especially since it's my first project done in PhotoShop.

In class, posted on the wall, it looked really flat and boring. Sad to admit, but it's the truth. So . . .

AAAAHHHH!!!!

This is as far as I could get in PhotoShop on my own. I made a box where I wanted my graphic to go, found a type I liked and stuck that in, and then totally freaked out because I only had a weekend to work on it by that point, and no idea what I was going to do or how I was going to do it...

rough

This is the full-sized rough I did based on those two thumbnails. This is actually my second rough, because I didn't like how the swath of "energy" (as Z described it) came out in the first one. I had an idea in mind, and couldn't seem to get it down on paper, no matter how many times I drew it. This rough is actually worse than the first rough. From this, I went on a hunt for some sort of picture that conveyed that organic energy swath. That hunt proved unsuccessful.

Another thing this rough shows is an evolution in the 5 boxes in the center of the design. Z suggested that instead of putting words in the boxes, as I had originally planned, to use graphics or pictures that illustrated the different elements of design. So, yet another hunt for photos, this time with more success.

beginnnings

Hi. Welcome to my very first blog. Through it, I'm going to be documenting the journey of my ART 125 class. I'm also planning to upload pics of some of my other artwork.

So, let's get started!

For our first assignment, we were asked to re-design the cover of our Design book. The current book cover is a little bit disturbing, considering it's the cover of a book about graphic design. Hence, the assignment. Here are some thumbnails I drew. The idea I had in mind was something organic and fun in the background, and then pictures of some of the elements of design (typography, line, shape, color, etc) in the little boxes.