Flamenco Poster for Illustrator Class

I have been meaning to put this piece up for a while.

We were made to create a poster for our final project in Illustrator class. I decided to do one on a Flamenco event, and researched on the internet to see what other event posters looked like. They were all very busy with floral and vine ornamentation.

I originally wanted to do a black and gold piece because I've been hooked onto Sam Sparro's song. Also used Fabian Perez's painting for the illustrator work. I kept a little red (magenta) for the feel of Spanish FLamenco.

There is a longer story about how I got to this final composition, but I just made sure there were lines along the neck of the dancer and the red swish to point to the information of the event and try to keep all the elements of the piece to relate to each other.

I'm more worried about my other final project for Design Fundamentals... argh!

Design Fundamental Final Project

We've been doing projects for the class throughout the semester. I've not been enjoying the cutting and pasting but the last two projects, we've been allowed to color/draw with oil pastels. Many of my classmates and I have developed an aversion to oil pastel because of its smudgy property and melts in our hands.

However, I am really resistant to give my final project that we have to emulate a 20th century Post-Modernist style. I chose Pop Art and doing a Santa Claus for Christmas might work--I'm not sure if we're supposed to simulate a famous artist's style (say make it comic book-y) or work with a theme.

I made a second piece that was a minimalist, and saw a simple piece with vertical bars in black paint.

Well it's either this Santa Claus close up or a green minimalist piece...?

Horror film project

I decided to do the word "demon" for my wordPlay project in Typography class. It was a simple concept but I didn't expect it to be a lot of work--I thought that I could easily do something in Illustrator, but when I showed it to the teacher, he advised that I should make it more realistic, more like a photograph and look at shadows from photographs.

I did take photographs and worked with how the shadows look. I ended up trying to duplicate the shadows on the wall and the grainy look of noir horror films like Nosferatu.

I hope I did it justice and here it is:

Illustrated Manuscripts on White Collar

I think I've been too hooked on crime-dramas like the CSI series, Cold Case and Closer that this series seemed to be a little more fun mix of crime investigating and Italian Job feel of Leverage. So, I decided to TiVo an episode on USA; TV series about a master forger-turned-FBI pet.

A supposed illuminated manuscript gets stolen from a church and turns out to be book of psalms, hymns and prayers and was believed to be a healing book, whoever touched it would get cured.

I started watching it because the episode revolved around an illuminated manuscript and how valuable they are. It started getting interesting when the two main guys, Tim DeKay and Matthew Bomer are two pretty good looking guys. It'll be one of the series I'll be keeping track of.

Here's the URL of the USA site for the show:

http://www.usanetwork.com/series/whitecollar/

Glyphs

I've been meaning to put these up for a while now. Should have been my first post, but it's been pushed back because of homework, projects and mid-terms

What do you think? We had to loosen our hands for the first three classes of Typography to get the "scribbles" that came out:

Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day...

... almost. I had a general bad feeling about today. I was late for the club officer meeting, my ball point pen stopped working even if it was a couple weeks old, I was dropping things on the floor, almost dropped my hot dog but dropped the container and some napkins when I was done eating, some of the chocolate brownie cookies I baked for Holly were cracked and falling apart, forgot my stippling work at home and worked with photographs of them from my phone (how embarrassing), the inside of the car was COLD and took a while for it to defrost, and finally, yay, I got pulled over by a cop!

I got a slap-on-the-wrist warning, and I'm not allowed to drive until I get a license. I was pretty scared--especially when you see a black and white car, tailgating you right up against the back of your car, and you suddenly realize, OH MY GOD, the police headlights a-flashing.

I KNEW I shouldn't have had an extra swig of Pepsi and Cheetos :( I was nearly home and didn't realize how fast I was going--just needed to get to the damned loo! Ah, well. Come Monday, I'm going to have to find a way to get to the DMV office somehow.... (What a way to end a crazy, typhoon-y, stressful week.)

Out of this crazy day, I think the best thing that happened were the good looking y's, l's and e's coming out of our Typography class exercises tonight. You can barely see the red arrows, but imagine a whole 11"x14" page of letters! I think I've got OCD just because I like looking at all these and nitpick why one doesn't look as good as the others. I will frame them one day, mwahahaha.... ha ha... ha....

Rain Rain Go Away

The pelting rains that totally drowned out Sacramento yesterday and this mornings were the downs to living here. I am SO not ready for heavy rains with the cold, especially here.

Driving to school yesterday wasn't quite the disaster people made it out to be, but the mist-spray of water behind cars on the highway did scare me quite a bit. The tires losing grip on an incline and the strong gusts of wind that are able to jerk the car to the side were terrifying as well.

I got to ARC and parts of the parking lot and open hallways were flooded (not as high as the infamous ISM flooding in the old Bel Air campus) but you could see all the fallen branches and toppled trees all around school. Janitorial service personnel would groan for a good week or so. (On a side note, I laughed when Tita Boots wanted to grab the metal fences bordering the back of the WinCo. "We need a metal fence!" she says :p)

This mornings rain was pretty bad, but no more winds. I bought my trench, umbrella and a pashmina to make sure I'm covered and insulated from the rain and cold. By the time I reached school in the afternoon, it was warm and humid and clear! It was the perfect weather to have a study group outside! Meh....

The good news of it all is that the ground got a good, good, GOOD soak :p

And I was able to spend time at the yarn store learning about crocheting. I will make myself SOCKS mwahaha! I wanted to crochet myself a blanket, but that might wait. I might as well just get my fleece blankets from back home--or something :p

My cookies will not last if I bring them to class to snack on. People have been moaning at the smell of chocolate and asking for some :(