Urban Sprawl

String garden how to

String garden hanging from buildings

4/9 progress

Here is the second draft of my overarching artist statement - still needs work - 

My work and interests lie primarily in design, video and photography. I enjoy exploring many ways to get my desired message across, such as experimenting with typography, stop motion animation, straight forward designs, such as brochure, and web design, and video that can contain more ambiguous content, such as my piece entitled, Within a Dream. Because I use different mediums within my work, my body of work overall contains a good amount of variety.

I have used concepts pulled from how our society sees things, as shown in my piece entitled, Surroundings, as well as in my Vector Self Portrait, which focuses on the masculine and feminine stereotypes that appear within our culture, and how they are largely untrue.

Other concepts I focus on include personal experiences, which can be clearly seen in my cubism piece, Cubist Self, concepts about the inner workings of our minds such as dreams, the unconscious self, and imagination, and human emotions, as shown in my series of traditional black and white photography pieces, entitled All Kinds of Love. When using stop motion animation, I focus on whimsical content, which can be seen in my pieces, Two Little Birds, The Domestic Goddess, and Mischief, a short film about gummy bears coming to life.

The combination of mediums I use, and the concepts I have explored have made me a more versatile artist. I am able to create many different types of interesting visuals, while engaging the viewer to think further into the concepts being presented.




final design for business cards -

My project 1 is finished, with a sort of proof of concept PDF of it. -

Progress -

3/26

I am working on my artist statement for my second project (the typography portrait) - this is it so far...
Every person has many layers that make up who they are. Which layers of ourselves we choose to show others, and how we portray them is a choice that we all make. In this self-portrait, I have chosen to portray certain traits to the viewer, and in particular I have chosen ones that I believe make up one of the major aspects of my life, which is the artistic portion. Artist, designer, open minded, free thinker, and clever are a few of the terms and traits that I would consider to be pieces of myself that are important in keeping myself creative, and my thoughts engaged in the artistic process. Although I am made up of many layers, it made sense to me to make a self-portrait out of these particular terms because it is this layer of myself that I feel is shown to most people.




Then I have also been rethinking my 3rd project -
I think I may want to take on the stop motion beast again, now that I have done two previous projects with it.

I have a few ideas floating around -
One idea I was thinking about could entail using gummy bears (or some other sort of recognizable candy figure). I was thinking maybe they could group up into teams out from the bag and then try to escape the fate of being eaten. Along the way though they will face challenges to escape such as, some may melt in a frying pan, some may fall into a sink full of water...or maybe float down a drain, some could get stepped on, and then maybe one group could escape the house. I was thinking if I did this, I might do a small written narration as it goes, probably on a dry erase board (or maybe some other way) - also in stop motion.

Another idea I was thinking about for stop motion, would be to take a poem (probably one by Robert Frost since that is one of my all time favorite poets) - that is public domain - and do a collage style stop motion, making up the typography of the poem. Then to go along with that, I could use clippings from various places (magazines, newspapers etc) to create imagery that the poem is talking about.


I saw this and liked the collage-type style it had.
Of course, this idea of doing stop motion with typography wouldn't have to just pertain to a poem, I could also choose a general concept, theory, philosophy or something like that and illustrate it through stop motion.

I would love to say I would like to take on a super ambitious stop motion and do one with the camera mounted from directly above the subjects....I found this guy's blog talking about how he rigged a mount up for it without buying super expensive equipment, but I haven't looked into it really any further than that - but I love the stop motions that are from directly above. 

http://blog.iso50.com/15588/how-to-shoot-stop-motion-from-above/

If I could pull off a stop motion from above some concepts I'd probably think about using would be dreams, or the belief that your right part of your brain is your 'creative' portion of the brain, and the left is the more analytical/strategic portion.

This one is pretty amazing









And then I also am thinking of more possibilities for the Header of my portfolio site, or business cards - Not thinking I'll keep the CMYK circles, because I feel like that might imply that I only do Print design, and although print is actually what I do prefer, I wouldn't want to label myself as ONLY working in print design.

Update

I have started thinking about ideas for my portfolio website, as well as for business cards - this is just one idea so far. This would either be for one side of a business card or maybe for the homepage of the website. I am still messing with it and I want to have multiple things to choose from for the cards and the site so this is just the first idea.

I have also started thinking about my 3rd project for the semester -

I'm thinking about doing font posters. So I would choose maybe 3 - 5 of my favorite fonts, or ones that have significance in society and make almost a promotional poster for them. Including things like: the font name, the type of font, the year/who created it, and maybe a little bit of info about it. I really like the one above, but i found some others as well -

and as a random side note - this website has some nice typography examples.

Change of plans for the third time....

Okay so...occasionally things don't work out how I had envisioned them and my second project has been an example of this. First, the movie poster idea....then the digital natives & immigrant idea that I actually made progress on....then it was just not turning out as I had planned.

It wasn't holding my interest and I can't expect something to hold anyone's interest...if it cant even hold mine.

I have been making a list of random ideas that I want to try for about 6 months, just randomly writing ideas down for projects as they pop into my mind. So, I looked over my idea list and I had forgotten that I really had wanted to experiment with a typography portrait.

Since this was something that I had never tried before, and I had basically wasted a week and a half or so working on my other project 2 idea...I have had to spend A LOT of time working on this in the past 5 or so days.

I chose words that I think can be used to describe myself, and created my portrait with the words. After that I thought I should add color, so I made a pallet on kuler and added touches of color with the words. I'm still deciding on if I want to do anything in the background, but as of right now I'm thinking I might leave it white