Author: callibeth

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Whew!


The spring 2009 semester at Florida State University is officially over. What a sprint. It’s all over but the cleaning up (except for there is this one lingering project …). I believe that this week I used nearly everything in my studio at least once.

  • I had the acrylic inks, sumi ink, colored pencils and gel pens out for the pieces I made for the Senior Design Seminar show, Made (link requires Facebook login). I also used cheesecloth, Saran wrap, tapes, bubble wrap, squirt bottles, spray bottles, drop cloths, hake brushes, sponges, and so on.
  • I had the framing supplies and tools out, for the next step in the same project. That included the mat cutter, the foam-core cutter, the frames themselves, glazing, framing and hanging hardware, rulers, and so on.
  • I had the collage supplies and tools out for the final Color Theory assignment. And the roll of kozo paper, and the wax paper for flattening/drying, and the glue and glue brush and the glue palette.
  • And before I settled on collage for the final assignment, I had the gouache and brushes out for a my first attempts. And the palettes and masking tape and so on.
  • I had my paste-painted and otherwise-decorated papers out for both Color Theory, Print Design, and Animation. Those papers were in and out of storage all week long.
  • I had my balsa-wood lettering out to scan for Print Design. And I went through a whole bunch of portfolios of my work for scanning as well.
  • I kept cutting long pieces of paper from the roll of paper that makes me think of the paper tableclothes from potluck suppers of my childhood. That was for lettering trials in preparation for lettering Hebrew on long strips of muslin to be sewn into a quilt. And then there were the various pens I tried on the muslin, the water-eraseable pen for guidelines, the measuring tools, and so on. I ended up using a Zig calligraphy marker because it bleeds very little, and is lightfast, waterproof, and fun to write with.

Whew! It’s good to be finished with the semester … almost. It will be nice to see the surface of my drafting table again.

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Print Design — a double spread


Click on the thumbnail above for a larger image.

Some fun with type punched out over a pasted-painted background, and hand lettering over a wall of Velvenda Cooler type, done for Print Design class. The quotation is from Henry Adams. I’m working toward integrating hand lettering with type. “Toward” being the operative word here. The print version of this has better contrast, by the way, and at 11″ x 17″ the background type on the right was a more noticeable and readable list of adjectives.

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Color Theory – dimensional color study

In Color Theory we’ve been working with Color-Aid pasted onto bristol. This image fulfilled the assignment to make a color study which gives the illusions of three-dimensionality, rendered through a consistent depiction of light and shadow. I missed making the light and/or shadow progressive. It’s hard to hear when I’m looking at color. And when the 400+ different colors of Color-Aid are all laid out on the tables, I feel something akin to panic.

The craftsmanship of these exercises is challenging — a bunch of little pieces of painted papers adhered with PVA onto one side of a 9″ x 12″ sheet of bristol. And as we all know, pasting anything on one side only will cause cockling, wrinkling, generall drawing-up of that side of the paper. Can’t fight physics. The study shown above is 6″ square.

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Why the lull in activity here?

Well, there’s a lot going on now. I’m in the Fine Arts Graphic Design program at Florida State University , and this semester I’m taking an unprecedented 15 hours … and they’re all studio classes:

  1. Animation
  2. Print Design
  3. Senior Design Seminar
  4. Dynamic Web
  5. Color Theory

I need to graduate in December, so this semester and the summer semester, in particularly, will be a slog in terms of class load .

Shockingly enough, on top of that we still need to eat and have clean clothes to wear, things still break and need repair (we’ve been riding on a wave of those), children still need help with their homework, and … I’ve got regular customer in my free-lance business who still call me on a regular basis.

As my grandfather said, “It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken.”

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In Defense of Doodling


part of a doodle from last year

I always knew that doodling helped me concentrate in a meeting, but here’s a scientific study that backs up my intuition. The new study, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, shows that “people may doodle as a strategy to help themselves concentrate,” says study co-author Jackie Andrade. Read more about it in the blog post at Wired.

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A Designer’s Portfolio, 16th Century-Style


A recent post at CR Blog showcases The Macclesfield Alphabet Book, a 16-century pattern book, the precursor to our modern black-vinyl-and-plastic portfolio books.

According to the Rare Book Review, The British Library is trying to acquire this recently discovered manuscript. The purchase price is £600,000, partially because these pattern books are so very rare.