CWS Brochure

This brochure came out of my advertising & graphic design class. We were to make a brochure for the law firm, Chester Willcox & Saxbe, and were given a few stipulations such as colors, logos, and body copy. The rest of the layout was up to us. I decided to showcase it as a very professional firm, while grabbing attention with both the shape of the brochure and the bold use of type on the photographs.

Antler Prejudice and New Layout!!

Well another week down, and a little more work done. This piece was my first real Photoshop painting. I've been wanting to do a painting where a person has antlers for a while, so this was a long time coming. I decided to have it be designed to go with a magazine article about different types of prejudices. I still need to tweak it a bit, probably by adding some reflecting yellows and blues in the actual characters rather than keeping them completely grayscale.

Next project for the class is to do an illustration to go along with a song from the 1960's. I'm fairly certain which I'm going to do, but the two that I've narrowed it down to are CCR's "Fortunate Son" and the Beatles' (and Joe Cocker's) "With a Little Help From My Friends."

Also, the big news is about the blog. I finally got my updated layout up. I'll still be doing some tweaking over the coming weeks, as well as adding a link to my new site, which will be up within the month. Let me know what you all think in the comments! Also, some details of familiar faces after the jump!

New Portrait Drawing

Sorry for the long gap in between my last post and this one. I've been busy working on a redesign for the blog. It'll be up and running fairly soon. My goal is by next Sunday night (Nov. 1). In the mean time, here's my latest drawing from Kortlander's class. I tried to go somewhere in between realism and illustrative proportions.

See you soon with a brand-spankin-new look!

Tattoo Reminder - Step By Step

So my first project in illustration class is finally finished. The main concept of the project was that a magazine was doing an article on the twenty most "American" jobs, and each person in the class was to do an illustration in their own style with their take on the job. I luckily got the tattoo artist, and decided to go semi-humorous. My final is of an artist taking a call from his wife/girl-friend and she's telling him to pick up the laundry for her, so he's giving himself a tattoo to remember. Here's my entire process:

First I have the line drawing. Then to make sure its got a good value structure, I did a colored pencil and acrylic sepia study overtop on coldpress illustration board. Finally, I did something a little different for me. I went into the computer and digitally added color, as well as overlaid certain parts of the original line drawing to give it a little oomph. I chose a complementary color scheme of blue-green and red-orange to highlight certain areas over others, and to play with both warm and cool lighting. We're still technically doing one more step where we place it in a magazine ad, and I'll post that next week once I finish it up.

Figurative Drawing Dump

I've gotten a couple decent drawings out of this semester's figure drawing class, and one of the nice things is that the class is so relaxed in composition, that I can focus on portraiture. Here's a collection of drawings I've done in the past week (and one from last year that reminded me of a drawing I did today). The top one is the only mildly illustrative one. It's a little hard to tell, but it's supposed to be a little humorous. I'm sure you'll all see it.

Gestures

Portrait from last year

Here's to the Crazy Ones..

Here's a project I recently finished that was a lot of fun to work on. It's a poster series I did for my advertising and graphic design class inspired by Apple's 'Think Different.' commercial. It's a very moving campaign that signified one of Apple's transitions. The first poster was simply for displaying the type. Printed out, it's very vivid and eye catching. The next three are a series I did with the original text (slightly edited for size). I really love the colors against the historical black and white photos. I chose Einstein, Picasso, and MLK Jr because I believe they were three of the most influential people that changed the way we see or do things. A lot of kerning and leading went into that text block to emphasize the most important lines and words, and overall, I'm really happy with it.

(Side note, the condensed text of 'Here's to the Crazy Ones' can be found in the Text Edit icon in OS X, take a look!)

Back in the Swing of Things

So school's back in session, and my break from posting is finally over! I think I needed a break from design and art for a few months, and I definitely took advantage of it. So far, the only class I've had that we've done something worth posting has been figure drawing, and we've only done two short poses. The first day was spent mostly on our instructor, Mr. Kortlander, telling us about the class and everything, and then a quick pose at the end of class which is located above. The drawing below I did in the first half of class today, then went to the Columbus Museum of Art to check out the George Tooker exhibition that's going on with everyone else. It was pretty amazing. I had no idea how detailed he actually gets with his egg tempera.

Anyhow, I'll have some actual illustration and design work posted in the coming weeks, and this year I'll definitely have more design than last. Package design was the only class I was taking last semester that was "design" oriented. This year, I'm taking both senior illustration and senior advertising and graphic design, so I've definitely got a work load ahead. I'm glad to be back up and posting, and hope you all enjoy!