Christmas Artstuffs

Apologies for lack of updates on this blog lately. I got so busy finishing final projects that I never got around to posting them here as I finished them. However, I will be updating my site in the next few days so keep an eye out for a very long post soon with information about all the new stuff.

For now, here are some Christmas-themed pieces that probably won't go on my site but that I wanted a record of anyway. First, the 12 Days of Nerdfighter Christmas wallpaper I made for the Project for Awesome 2009. The charity: water campaign is now over and it ended up raising $835, which is just incredible. Thank you to everyone who donated, and enjoy the wallpaper:




Second, I spent a day last week letterpressing Christmas cards, which I then made into wallpapers so even people who I didn't send cards to could enjoy them. Watch the video of my process of making the cards, and then check out the wallpapers:

Wallpaper 1
Wallpaper 2

Thank you so much for reading my blog and I hope you all had very merry Christmases!

"Take Me Home" EP Cover

Here is the cover I just finished (this morning, actually) for Paul (songsfrompaul)'s new EP Take Me Home, which can be downloaded for free at http://tinyurl.com/TakeMeHomeEP. Paul wanted the imagery to feature a man walking away in the rain, and I decided that using watercolors as the medium would compliment his music style well. I went through lots of paper just dripping the watercolors down in different patterns, and then pieced it together in Photoshop. I had some trouble deciding on how to handle the title, since no typeface seemed to match the organic quality of the rest of the image (I tried to get Futura to work, but it just wasn't happening), so I ended up writing it with a calligraphy pen and scanning it in. It was a fun project, and I'm happy to have worked with such a talented musician as Paul.

Simultaneous Contrast!

For Color class, we had to do a project on simultaneous contrast, or the effect that happens when you put different colors next to each other. We had to make a light gray and medium gray look the same by manipulating the background colors, and the same with medium and dark gray. Then we expanded it into monochrome and analogous colors.

I chose to present mine as if it was a toy kids could buy. I made cards where the "background" color swings on top of the colors that are supposed to look the same, and can swing backwards so you get two illusions on each card. I also designed some packaging to bring the whole thing together.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions!

Nature Lab Photography

I should have more graphic design work to show you guys soon (I'm almost done with a color project which should go up next week) but for now here's more photography. The assignment for this week was to photograph a place, so I chose RISD's Nature Lab. If you have any questions, let me know.

They're better in real life where you can actually see the cuts in the paper and they come out from the wall a bit, but this is about as good of a scan I can probably get.

Color Spellbook

For Color class, we had an assignment to make a book with pages that represented each of the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors on both white and black backrounds. Being the nerd that I am, I decided to make it a spellbook based off the spells from Harry Potter. Some were easy, like Lumos and Incendio for yellow, and some were obvious after a little thought, like Levicorpus, a spell made up by Half-Blood Prince, for purple. Some of them I just kind of went off a gut feeling, and I think they all turned out nicely. Below are photos of the actual book and then the digital version of the entire book. It's not lined up exactly right here, but in the actual book the lines flow into each page perfectly. Also, the colors got a bit screwed up in all the changing programs and saving for web, but you get the idea. Enjoy!























Full Book
[LARGE FILE]

Moaning Myrtles Merch

Now that Lauren's put the new Moaning Myrtles merchandise up for sale, I can reveal that designing it was one of my secret projects. Lauren contacted me at the end of August, and I designed a new shirt, a tote bag, and a frisbee for her to sell at Wrockstock and other wizard rock shows. While designing them, I was really inspired by Nicolas Saunders' work, so definitely go drool over his gorgeous designs after you finish reading this.




For the first shirt, Lauren wanted the quote "Don't worry. You're just as sane as I am." I decided to draw the type in a very informal way and surround it with simple illustrations of things that have to do with Luna. I tried to make it look like a shirt you could just buy in a store, and not necessarily scream wizard rock from every inch of the design.




The tote bag was originally another shirt design, but we decided it was more fit for a bag. I had the idea of using bathroom sign pictograms, but making them specific to Lauren and Nina. I really got to play with iconography, making the lightning bolt guitar strap stand for Lauren and the piano scarf stand for Nina. It's a design that you only fully understand if you really know the Moaning Myrtles, but it's also accessible on a basic level to people who don't know them at all.




The frisbee was very much inspired by Nicolas Saunder's work which I linked to above. I didn't want to directly copy his aesthetic, so I stayed away from the grungy style and instead tried to make it look slightly old-fashioned but in that magical way that the films do so well.

Thanks for reading guys. I'll definitely have more work to show you soon :)

Creepy Business

I took some photos over the weekend that I'm really excited about, so I'm posting them here before I even present them to my class. I set them up by putting playing cards in the sink and getting them damp and then dropping ink on them, and I love how in black and white the ink looks like blood. The hands are from the Peter Petrelli action figure and are now stained grayish from all the ink.

















A few more where I'm playing with dripping the devloper onto the paper and bending the paper while shining the light on it:










And because I can't seem to go through a week without photographing something Harry Potter related: