First Day of Spring in Tallahassee
This is the view from my studio window. Nice, huh? I will miss this hedge very much. The front yard is even more spectacular this year.
Edited to add a couple of photos of the front yard. It’s fairy-tale beautiful right now:
Too addictive
This font shooting range game, Deep Font Challenge, is wa-a-a-y too addictive.
Animation
Here’s a frame-by-frame animation I did for class, using rotoscoping. It’s 76 quick sketches. At 12 frames per second, that’s … 6 seconds. I enjoyed the sketching more than I anticipated.
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.
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.
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:
- Animation
- Print Design
- Senior Design Seminar
- Dynamic Web
- 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.”
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.
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.
Her Morning Elegance – stop-motion videography
Awesome stop-motion music video: “Her Morning Elegance.” I love it.
Directed by: Oren Lavie, Yuval & Merav Nathan
Photography: Eyal Landesman
Featuring: Shir Shomron