Coil Pot

Alright, so this picture is a lot nicer because my professor took it to include in his teaching portfolio. This piece I worked on for 10 hours straight, and I do mean straight. I sketched a few different ideas, and this is the one I went with. I originally wasn't going to do the little lip rim thing, but it looked really strange so I added it. My professor wasn't a fan of my glazing, but hey, different strokes for different folks.  Besides, you can hardly even see the glazing in this picture, at least not around the top.

Hard Slab

For the hard slab box we had to have at least 3 non right angles. A little perspective, the last time I tries to bake a hard slab box, it was such a complete and utter failure that it couldn't even be categorized as a box. Fantastic. Thankfully, this one turned out a bit better. It's shape is supposed to approximate a stylized "M" and the lid was supposed to be in 2 halves, but the glaze glued then together at one end so there is kind of a huge gap in my lid :(

Master Copy/Museum Piece

For this project we basically had to recreate a piece that we found in the museum on campus. Mine is pretty close, with one glaring error, the coil at the bottom was supposed to the smaller than the column. I made the bowl out of coils, the column out of soft slab, the coil out of a coil (weird, right?) and the bottom out of a hard slab. Looking back, it may have been better to pinch the bowl, but coils work too. It's probably about 6-ish inches tall. I really like how the glaze turned out on this one though. :)

Soft Slab

Ugh, I definitely do NOT like these, I'll probably keep one, but the rest have been documented and will probably go away. I underestimated the amount of clay I would need, so they are skinny almost to the point of uselessness, those handles are ridiculously huge, the glaze turned out too dark, and the while accents didn't even show up that great...oh well. We had to do a set of 4 identical mugs. Mine are mostly identical, sorta.

Ceramics: Handbuilding

Now to the ceramics portion of our program... We started off the semester with handbuilding. Ok, so the last time I was in a ceramics class was in middle school, and before that, my 2nd grade clay class, I like to think I've improved a bit since then.

Pinch Pots, minimal to no tools used. There are two more, but they didn't get fired hot enough and so the glaze is this strange pea-soup color >.< I may post them later, but I doubt it.




















Pinch Mugs, some tool use, mostly to carve out the handle. There are three, but I'll probably only keep the smallest one, it's my favorite. As far as measurements, I'm not really sure how big they are, but they are pretty small, same with the pinch pots.

Value Color

First off, I love ribbon dancing. If I was graceful enough to pull it off, that would be my chosen career path. Well, maybe just in the top 5. Anyway, I wanted to incorporate that somewhere in the semester, so I chose to do it for my value project with color. I looked at a lot of different pictures, and got a sense for the movement of the ribbon and the dancer. I made quite a few sketches of what kind of composition I wanted, and ended up with this. My instructor didn't like that the background was a solid color, and told me to make it have variants like the figure and the ribbon. I had already tried that and it was too distracting. I got points taken off anyway, but whatever, I still like it like this. :) We had a few color schemes to choose from, and I chose complementary.

Grayscale Value

For my Grayscale Value project I did a self-portrait. I am not bald, my hair is just pulled back... Anyways, I've noticed that a lot of people do this type of project with organic shapes and curved lines, so I wanted to do only straight lines. So I did. I thought it was interesting to see a human face done in straight lines, because that is not what we see in the real world. I used three values.

GridMorph

So, next we had to do a grid morph project, which is similar to the Character Morph, but we also had to look at how the composition changed when the colors were switched in the positive and negative spaces. Also included is the assigned grid, with the original asymmetrical shape. I think the last one looks like a penguin :)

Character Morph

Basically what we had to do was start out with a symmetrical humanoid figure, and then manipulate it by degrees to become something totally abstract. My teacher wasn't a fan of my final layout, what do you think? Project done in Illustrator.

He also didn't like my final morph, so I redid that. I like it in a different way, but I kind of like the original one better. I have no idea what's up with the funky gray shape outlines, so just ignore those...

I'm back!

Hey, so my life has been crazy and I haven't had time to post anything. It's still crazy, but that's how it goes. So, after the book cover project, we did a magazine layout, but I haven't figured out how I'm going to upload that yet, so we'll hold off on that one. :) Anyway, I'll be updating with my projects from my 2-Dimensional Design class, as well as my Ceramics Intro class. After that, Drawing II projects will be forthcoming, I just have to take pictures of them first. Right then, here we go. Up first, 2-D design.

Book Cover: The Final

 OK, this project was a pain in the neck. Literally. After who knows how many hours on the computer, I've finally created my masterpiece!! So, maybe not really a masterpiece, but pretty cool in any case.

I'm so happy with how it turned out!! I overlaid textures onto all the buildings individually, and added the text onto the Ministry pyramids.  As for the back, I got some quotes off of Amazon (thank you by the way!) and used the pyramid shapes as paragraph spacers and to create implied line on the spine.  I looked up the original publisher, and created a quick logo for them because I felt like it.

Honestly, my favorite part of the cover is probably the back, especially those 4 pyramids at the bottom that look kind of creepy.  Kinda random, but it's still my favorite part!  I created the barcode in Photoshop, and in retrospect, I probably should have made it smaller, but oh well.

Here's a closer look at the cover.

And here's the cover upside down, because  I know you're curious :)

It was a screenshot at an earlier stage, which is why it my look a little bit different, especially the texture of the dystopic Ministries...

















Feel free to comment with question or observations!

Book Covers: Initialize - digitalization!

Alright, so I wasn't sure how well my sketch would translate into the computer, but as I got started, to more confident I felt.

Here is the product of 3 hours in the computer lab on my first attempt.  I thought it looked rather promising :) I don't really know what I was thinking with the strange gradient on the title bar, I suppose I just wanted to jazz it up a bit.

This is the front cover with both "sides" done. There are no effects, and I really love how it looks. Unfortunately, this could have been done (and probably done better) in Illustrator, and it didn't really meet the requirements of the assignment. I'll probably keep it in my portfolio, but I still had a long way to go before I got my final product.  If I had been able to keep this as my final, I probably would have made the title bar a lighter beige, and included the author...

Book covers!!

So, um, I absolutely love books and I was really excited to get started on this project.  The hardest part of getting started was choosing what book to do! I've read a lot of books, and seen a lot of book covers in my time, but I decided to do 1984 by George Orwell.  It's one of my favorite dystopian society novels, and I wanted to make a kick-butt cover for it!

 I sketched out a couple of ideas, and was getting all set to do the one with the fence-type shape in the foreground (bottom left of this first page), but later I decided it was kind of static and well, boring.

To remedy that, I played around with a few different ideas.  A dystopic city behind that idyllic white picket fence, or even a dilapidated (such a great word) house.  The fence posts were supposed to be the 4 ministries, with their names, and then their actual functions.  If you've never read this book - go do it! Right now! For real though, read it, it's pretty amazing.

I still wasn't sold on this whole fence thing, but none of my other ideas were any good, but then one day inspiration struck!  I needed something more dynamic, and what's more dynamic than triangles? Nothing, that's what. So this idea was born.  The illusion of the bright, shining, utopia juxtaposed (another awesome word) with the dark, gloomy, and slightly creepy dystopia that is the reality, but is supposedly hidden.

And here's a close up of the colored one, because you look kinda silly with your head turned sideways like that. :)

Pictograms: The Grand Finale!

I am happy to report that I solved all my remaining problems before turning this in!  The stroke weight problem was resolved with a little visit to the Preferences panel, and the GPS coloring became much better with a little more playing around when I got bored with that blah dark green background I had before.  What do you think? Pretty snazzy huh?

*although in retrospect, I think I should have made the GPS arrow black in the small version...

Pictograms: Tweaking and Sqeaking

Next up: Color tweaking and making sure the weight is balanced.

I decided that the map was fine the way it was, so this only applies to the globe and the GPS.

The globe was the easy one of the two.  During our critique, it came to my attention that in the black and white version, all the weight was on the bottom, and the actual globe part was lost when viewed from far away. So, I made the land masses black. Problem solved.  I didn't translate that into the little ones, which were having their own issues because the stroke weight was becoming distorted the smaller it became.

So, this blasted GPS (technology is wonderful) was my next project to tackle.  The color scheme was all wrong, and as I mentioned earlier didn't mesh with the other two. So I spent an entire evening in the computer lab solely devoted to resolving this little snag.  I tried many different color combinations, until I found one that wasn't completely awful. Voila! I knew it still wasn't right, but there wasn't anything to be done about it at that point.

Pictograms: To the computer!!

My next step was to translate my ideas into Adobe Illustrator.  

First up is the globe.  This one was actually quite fun to try and put together.  I free-handed the map of the world (and yes, it's hard to have that much talent) and chose a color scheme.  The color version came first, and then I translated it into black and white. 

Next up: the paper map.  I wanted to make it have a old, worn look, but I think I could've gone farther with the ripped edges and adding creases and such.  As it is, I still like it, even though it looks too pristine to have been in the hands of explorers and ye olde crusty pirates.

*I have no idea why the rest of the sea monster didn't show up in the color one....

Lastly: the GPS.  Now, I haven't had a lot of experiences with these newfangled gadgets, but I do know what one looks like, and its presence catapulted my pictograms into the modern age.  I wanted to make it a combination of the map and the globe, because it is flat, and rectangular-ish like the map, but still has a sheen on it, like the globe.  However, I wanted the colors to be bright and vibrant, but that didn't really do much to unify it with the other two.

PIctograms: Conceptual stages

     

Alright, so for our first project we designed pictograms.  At first I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do, so I sketched out a bunch of different ideas. (Top image)  I finally decided to go with the "navigation through history" idea represented by a globe, an old-style map, and a GPS. (Bottom image)

Long time, no see!

Hey all!

So, guess what? I'm in college now! Woohoo! I set this portfolio blog up my Junior year in High school for a visual technology class, and I am calling upon it once again as a college sophomore.  I'll be updating it more often with (mostly) art portfolio stuff/studio assignments/etc.  It's interesting to see how my style has changed from complete novice to, well, now a not-so-novice-but-still-not-super-exceptional level.

You will be hearing from me again very soon!!

~Monica

Bumbershoot

This assignment was originally for a Bumbershoot logo contest.  However, it changed to being an art contest instead.  Bumbershoot is a music festival that is held in Seattle every fall.  Both of these designs incorporate the name Bumbershoot, some kind of symbol of music, as well as an element of Seattle.

Butterfly wings

This was another experiment I did in photoshop, with the help of a tutorial.  (I have a lot of free time on my hands)  The design is simple and beautiful, and it took many tries to get it looking this nice.  I realize it looks more like a flower that is kind of folded in half... but that's beside the point.  Hope you like it!