The Answer

A couple posts back I showed a social poster designed during one of my classes for a contest in France (We've gotten confirmation that they made it, and they'll be judging the posters in late march. So around the beginning of April I'll find out if mine made the cut. And yes, Katie, your ring is on a poster in France.) I've actually been rather suprised by the answers I've gotten, both from those of you that commented here, and from classmates and friends I've showed it to. Meanings from "Marriage is timeless" to "Time is running out before marriage" to commenting on the "biological clock" to family values and things like marriage and family needing time in order to be successful.

The meaning I was trying to get across is that anymore it doesn't seem like our culture takes marriage seriously. Girls are given advice about what to look for for their first husband, their second husband, and it doesn't seem to be something that's sacred anymore, and I see this as a bad thing.

That being said, I like "Marriage is Timeless" better.

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In other news, the semester has been steadily marching on, and so we've been going through a lot in my classes. This week I show you three ink drawings that I did for my Illustration class. We were to read Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and do one cover illustration, and two inside illustrations. Unfortunately, two of these are getting scrapped because they weren't quite successful enough for the goal of the assignment.

This is actually something that happens a lot for my classes. I may
be productive and produce a lot that gets rejected before I finally achieve what I'm going for. This happens to most (if not every) artists, designers, and illustrators, a common malady, you could say. And while it is kind of tragic and seems like a waste, many of these illustrations or designs that didn't work for one thing might come in awfully handy in a later project or assignment.

Maybe this is why I'm such a packrat.

Happy Valentines Day!

Happy Valentines Day!

Have a Rose. (Done for a magazine layout for my Image Design class, but I think it works for this, too.)




Also, have a cool link - Some of the art of Mark Khaisman. This guy does art out of packing tape. Yes, you heard me. Packing tape. He layers the tape on plexiglass and lights it from behind, which creates a really interesting effect:

Check out more of his works at his site.



Explanation to the poster from my last post to come in the next post.

Students, All to Chaumont!

Every year there is a student poster contest held in/by Chaumont, France. It was our first assignment in my Image Design class this semester to create an entry for this contest. Our posters had to be a social poster commenting on this years theme: "We, Men and Women".


I chose to comment on marriage, but that's all I'll say. I'd like to hear what any of you think the message of the poster is.

I'll post the meaning I was trying to get across in a later post.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Well, maybe not completely different, it's still art.

It's been a few posts since I've put something up that wasn't done for class. I've been working on a good amount of sketches and drawings on my own, most character design. One of my friends is working on a story for a creative writing class she's in, and she plans to try to get it published once she finishes it. I've been involved in the making of the story, as she's used me as a sounding board for the initial world and story building (Which was a blast, I must say. World building is a lot of fun.) So, because of this, I've been doing a lot of the characters of that book. Maybe later I'll show the process of trying to get one of the characters looking right, but for now, what I have is a sketched and colored of one of the main/supporting characters of the book.


I was trying something new with the coloring/painting in photoshop on this one (Found in a tutorial made by Etoli on Deviantart). Making use of both the flow and opacity option on the brush tool instead of just one or the other. I find it gives me a much smoother and easier to work with brush. It also made the coloring go much faster for me than previous methods I've used. It was a nice discovery, to say the least. For those that are curious, the settings I had my brush at for most of that painting are between 60-75% opacity and between 5 and 15% flow.