How Do You Doodle?

Do you doodle? I used to doodle a lot in school, but since drawing is part of the curriculum as a graphic and web design student, I haven’t really been doodling too much besides what is required for class. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t completely absent from the day-to-day, it just pops up in infrequent and little bursts. It makes me yearn for the days of boredom in math, science, and literature that fueled my creativity so endlessly. As a good student, I made sure to take my notes first, then doodle next to and over them.

In my illustration class we have to do 25 doodles every week as part of our home work grade. It is supposed to help us develop our style some more. Here are the first five weeks of class:

First week’s doodles

Second week’s doodles

Third week’s doodles

Fourth week’s doodles

Fifth week’s doodles

Self portrait from memory

I also included the Illustration assignment we had to do for the snow day make up assignment, a self portrait in B/W/Gray-scale from memory.

Blank Book Update

Did some further sketching to hammer out what idea I wanted to pursue on this Blank Book Project.  Mr. Dockery then showed me these old magician posters from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Names such as CARTER, KELLAR, and THURSTON. Found out there was a lot of Kellar memorabilia in Barney’s apartment on How I Met Your Mother.

I decided to use the iconic imps from Kellar’s posters as a homage to the art.

Keeping with the Old timey magician poster idea, I’ve taken the liberty of experimenting with fun type.

And since I’ve always liked the idea of a spell or summoning circle, I used this as an opportunity to learn the rather simple art of creating a magical tool of the mystically inclined.

I wasn’t able to find some suitable magicians to use with the spell circle on the front cover of the book, so I had my photojournalist girlfriend take photos of me, but we met some issues along the way. Mostly it was scheduling conflict, since neither of us has lights and she was working into late afternoon on the days where our schedules overlapped (plus it was cold).

She still took amazing photos, especially for having to deal with me (I had gotten frustrated and was being quite moody and shut the shoot down about 20 minutes after it started). I have had to deal with models before, and I was definitely exemplifying the worst. Auteurs and Models need not be the same person.

Here is the photo of myself, since I have not quite edited it [much] yet:

Mull Tea Mead y Uh

In my Multimedia Design class we have learned a lot. A lot of which is re-learning, which is one of those things you just have to get through to get to the fun stuff, like scripting and all that jazz. I really like the user interface and the drawing tools. The animating I will have to remember to have to patience with.

We also made movies. Mine will make you think twice.

We drew out some practice storyboards to bring us into animation basics, which I don’t particularly like the word “tween”. Got some sketches done on an animated banner for the Raleigh Christmas parade, which will certainly be interesting once it is done. Popular ideas include The Giant Acorn, Snow-covered Oak Trees, and Christmas Pigs.

Raleigh Christmas Parade Banner Ideas

Story board exercise

A look at Adobe Flash CS5.5

Another screenshot of the GUI

The Blank Book Thumbnails

These are the 12 thumbnails I did for a project called The Blank Book. The blank book involves coming up with an idea for a book that has no content inside, such as the memoirs of an honest politician, albino bunnies in a blizzard, and toilet paper for when you go camping.

I had three major ideas:

• Secrets of a Magician
• Vegan Baby Back Barbecue Recipe Book
• What Japan is Doing to Stop Dolphin Extinction

That I flushed out with 4 thumbs of each:

Secrets of a Magician has possibilities for playing with occult themes in design. Vegan Baby Back Ribs allows for some Ed, Edd, N Eddy style art with weird jokes in the copy “Morrissey: Some Grills are Bigger than Ovens”. and Dolphin Extinction allows for a re-envisioning of The Great Wave with dolphins (dead or alive) instead of boats emerging from the waves.

Whatever I go with, it is going to be a lot of fun!

First Graphic Design IV Project

The first project we are doing in Graphic Design IV is the 90 Minute Turkey. In this project we have to design and present a print piece to accompany the 90 Minute Turkey recipe, including the recipe in some way.

Going into this I decided to make an infographic, because that would be something slick and neat to throw into my portfolio, although I wasn’t really sure what printed piece I wanted to make.

I sketched some thumbnails to figure out what kind of images I might use in the infographic, try out different ways of organizing information, and playing with different concepts for printed pieces. I settled on printing the infographic on an apron and t-shirt, and if time allows a printed poster as well. I had a friend with a t-shirt of Linux commands on it that were printed upside down so the wearer had a quick reference guide, and I wanted to incorporate it in my apparel. Ideally, have “90 Minute Turkey” facing proper as a chest piece, and have the rest of the info graphic printed upside-down.

I should have done this before, but better late than never. I organized the recipe into more manageable chunks, which was recommended by some pro-tips on making infographics lists.

Doing more solid sketches, I played with designing the chest piece and figuring out a nice way to break up the information, as well as section headings. I like the digital 90, it gives it a countdown feel. The turkey tracks went over well with people during critique so I am going to use those to break up the information.

Stay tuned for further developments.

Hello World!

As the title implies, this is my first post on this blog. I will try to use it to highlight the goals of this blog:

• Satisfy some bureaucratic school requirement
• Track my progress through the class and semester
• Help keep my time management in check
• Show off my amazing work

This weekend, I am hoping to make my second post which will help me lock in and lock on to my big 16-week-long project: “A little bit is more than enough”. The goal will be to post thumbs of my ideas, and hopefully have one or two roughed up ideas to post.