Friday, October 30, 2009

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]

Thursday, October 29, 2009

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 :)

Monday, October 19, 2009

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:


Friday, October 16, 2009

More Photography

I promise I'll have more design-y stuff to show you guys soon, but right now it's all still secret. In the meantime, here's some more analog photography:

















I tried something different with the last two. Instead of just putting the whole photo into the tray of developer, I used a paintbrush to drip the developer onto the paper, so that some parts developed more than others. I think they turned out pretty cool, and I'm going to be trying it again in my assignment for next week, so be on the lookout for that :)

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Analog Photography

If you read the post a couple down from this, you know that I'm taking an analog photography class this semester. The first couple weeks were kind of an epic fail, in which I couldn't figure out how to open the camera, then how to get the film out of the canister, and then how to change the developer so the photos would actually develop properly instead of all gray and gross. I think I've overcome most of those obstacles, and since we finally learned how to englarge photos in the darkroom, I thought I'd show you guys the ones I developed. Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.


















(You can probably tell that I really like using my macro lens.)