New semester

Here I am again at yet another school year starting… and not a minute to late!  I am actually excited to get back to doing working on things for school. So far this week went fantastically well.

As I am sure you noticed… I did not really get to update this summer as much as I would have liked too.  Between Hooked on Tonics never getting back to us (or paying for that matter) and literally walking just about every inch of Kent and taking pictures, I didn’t really have a lot going on outside of working on campus this summer.  I was getting terribly bored this summer doing the normal job routine.  Not that there is anything wrong with normal jobs… I just find myself feeling burned out at the end of the day, every day.  Generally lacking any need for creativity and being solely task oriented, I found myself being the master of multitasking and not really needing to use the same skill set I did during the school year. With that falling into disuse, I found myself not really being able to get going when I tried… except for photography, but to me thats not creative and rather a release and something I do a little more organically.  All of this of course, made me feel that this semester was going to feel like a gigantic hurdle to leap over because of that braindrain.  

I found myself the first day of Graphic Design 1 thinking “oh no…” not “FINALLY!”  The interesting thing though, was that in Illustration 1 (the very next class), I had exactly the opposite response.  We were given a list of phrases and told to choose whatever one we fancied and then illustrate both the literal meaning in a creative way, as well as it’s figurative meaning.  The first step is the literal.  I found myself snapping to favorites:

“Cool as a cucumber”

“Bring home the bacon”

“Happy as a clam at high tide”

“The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree”

“Nuttier than a fruitcake”

Among others, these seemed be have the most potential because as a child I clearly remember hearing these, thinking and knowing “there is no way that is possible” or the “wow.. that makes perfect sense” as I visually would create imagery entertaining my young mind with a person bringing home bacon shaped money.  That of course makes the project fun, mean I can now find a way to create some type of childish realization of these weird sayings.

I am choosing “Lame Duck” for reasons of personal entertainment.  The literal translation in my head initially was something lacking originality like “a duck with a broken leg” which brings to light other related things such as: crutches, casts, bandages, black eyes, etc.  I decided, at the push of my grad student teacher Steve Hughes, to take it the next step further.  So making a story to go along with it.  Right now I now have my concept featuring a cute yet disgruntled looking duck with a massive cast sitting on a wheelchair in a dark, musty (the “probably should be condemned look”) apartment peering out a window at a pond with other ducks Rear Window style.

Needless to say I am actually really excited about this Illustration project.  I’ll be posting scans as it develops.  As for the GD1 class, I’m actually benefitting from the Illustration project’s interest.  I’ve found that creative jump start I needed and am currently working on my ideas for that as well.  It is just basic page layouts, but they are of the subject of our choice.  Each of the 5 that are due have a different requirement as to the text on the page.  The final requires we have one in Center Axis, Horizontal/Vertical, Diagonal as well as two others at the end.

I chose Superheroes because I think that they have some of the most dynamic poses and will provide some of the best opportunities for type placement.  Not to mention I have a wealth of comics available so I can search for the perfect pose to match what I need. So within the coming weeks you can expect to find a lot more posts, as well as scans of my work in progress and eventually final pieces.  Hopefully this year will bring out some of the best work yet as the projects are finally hitting the conceptual stages rather than the rigidly structured classes proceeding it.