Jumbled Inspirations

After finishing the project for my church earlier this weekend, I decided to do the norm. Sit in front of my computer 'til late or early morning. Yeah, I don't go out often. But I had inspiration hit me after listening to my favorite game's soundtrack.  This is the song that gave me an idea.

Yeah, I love DDR's dance/house, disco-style music. It's just so fun. I love how the cover art for the songs are bright and colorful with an awesome silhouette. Simple but effective.  And that's what I thought I should try to replicate.  However, it kind of got out of hand.

I also wanted to use pictures of 1940s women since I like how they used little makeup, and simple but beautiful hairstyles.  Too much of LA Noire this past month. I tried using the same colors that I thought about whenever I listened to the soundtrack. Unfortunately, I don't know how to make the same silhouettes without taking too much time.  This project was on a whim and I wanted to make it fast in fear of losing my inspiration.  Instead I opted for the same method I used with my roommate's picture. I didn't get the original feel of disco/dance/house music and instead I got a 1940s Charlie's Angels-esque perfume ad.

Oh well, I still like it. It's not perfect, and I should've corrected the outlines to be more curvy and less jagged. This took me about an hour to do, and I used a font named 'betty noir'. Honestly, would you buy a perfume like this?

Downhill While Going Uphill

Forget about the other weekend. This weekend was ruined.

Today started out great. Last night until nine in the morning I have been working non-stop on a project for my church. I was worried that I wouldn't finish by the deadline, but actually finished earlier than expected. Afterwards, I went to sleep (when others would be waking up) and woke up at three in the afternoon for a long drive to Chick-fil-A, which isn't very well-known where I live. After a fun time eating and talking with my family, we drove back home and that's where the horror began. While driving uphill on the freeway, the car made noises and beeps, and didn't pick up speed when shifting gears. And the fear spiked up when we saw smoke from the engine. It was night when we stopped and called 911 for someone to help us.

We got back home in time for me to write what happened and finally get a picture of what embodies me for my profile. While watching The Ricky Gervais Show before starting the project, I paused at the the frog about to go mental. Both my sister and I laughed for a long time just looking at the frog, which I described as "looking like a deranged hick". I decided to take a screenshot of it for later laughs. However, now the frog looks like how I feel now.

One Heck of a Weekend

Crashed a wedding, did someone a favor, attended a gathering for fellowship, asked for forgiveness, forgave a bunch of people, made new acquaintances, and got back my inspiration.  All in the span of this weekend.

Wow, and people think I don't go outside often.

At this certain gathering I met a person who reminded me of a joke my old roommate (not my previous model) made from an incident that happened in her biology class.  I'll get back on that later.  This of course reminded me of another joke she made while doing her famous impersonations.

She made a prank phone-call to one of her friends while acting like a Chinese woman taking an order from a restaurant.  This restaurant was named The Golden Chopstick Society.  So I, being silly, decided to quickly make this in honor of my old roommate.  It's not perfect, but I had fun making this.  Now this is only for fun, and I already know that there are restaurants named Golden Chopstick(s).  But this is a fake restaurant with no malice or offense intended.  This is just one of the many precious memories I have of my roommates, and I hope to continue making things like this.

Still Alive

To the dismay of many around me. Yes I'm not dead, just back from college.

Actually, I've been home since mid-May but a lot has happened since then. I was very depressed and had constant nightmares of going back to college. The thing is: my college is on the other side of the country. And I always feared that I would never do all the things I wanted to do before going back. Why is that important? Because my college is also VERY strict, and I'm scared of losing the freedom I have here. But a friend has helped calmed down those fears.

I also feel bad for never emailing my old teachers and acquaintances. The blame belongs to the very same college I'm fearful of. As said before, the school is strict and I have limited access to internet. Not being able to use my own email and not being able to update my blog. But wait there's more!

First semester was terrible, I've had to start all over with Graphic Design (learning just the basics), lose inspiration, and even lose the love I had for Graphic Design. I really want to bring that back into my life. This is something I have to pray about.

But all is not lost. Second semester was when I finally smiled during school. That may seem unimportant, but keep in mind: first semester was REALLY BAD. I won't give all the details except for the fact that I smiled more often.

Might as well show the only graphic design projects I've done in college (aside from class projects).

My mother sent me a picture of my younger self. My job was to get rid of the glue marks (evil popsicle-stick frame), pen scribbles, and marker... marks. Of course I covered my ugly mug with the Laughing Man logo to save everyone from the horror that is me. But my mom was very pleased from the restoration. Wish I could show you how bad the original was.

I can't believe how many years have gone by since this picture was taken. And now I'm no longer the happy-go-lucky kid I used to be. After watching over pre-schoolers in Bible Vacation School, I wish I could tell them to never take this time for granted. But they probably wouldn't understand, and it might be best that they don't know what's ahead of them.

Come on, don't start getting sentimental now.

This entry was for a contest all Graphic Design majors had to participate in. A lot of things went wrong during this project. Lack of inspiration, upcoming deadline, and an overexposed photograph. I took the picture of my lovely model the night before the deadline and worked on it the day of the actual deadline. Not my fault for a lack of inspiration.

Since the photo was over-exposed to the point where I couldn't fix it in time, I decided to just outline my model's face. By the way, that lovely outline belongs to my old roommate who took the time to put her hair up and have many pictures taken of her. I messed up the outline by trying to make the lines sharper and less blurry. But instead they became pixelated. It only took me twenty minutes in total to make the outline, the background, it's gradient, and the oval pearl necklace. Yeah, not much.

It's finally over

I never thought it would be.

Since I'm done with high school now I guess the future posts will show projects from college and/or my own projects that I'll do in my free time.

The future projects might have some limitations seeing that not much creativity is in me and the fact that my college might not allow certain things to be in my work (although that's not really a problem). But hey I'm still growing and hopefully there will be some kind of change seen in my work. Hopefully.

Old SkooL

Well, kind of...
I went back to what started graphic design for me, Illustrator. I outlined a picture of a phoenix using the pen tool and filled in certain parts with black or white. Then I used a flame font of sorts to make the flames (duh) on the Los Inmortales part at the bottom.

This was for my class' senior awards night booklet. Ironically, I didn't go.

Because I wasn't invited to get an award.

But apparently I did get an award. Two of them.

No one told me. *sob*

I got them the next day. No applause for me...*sob*

Even farther than before

This has gone too far.

An ugly cover, a bad model, too much going on in the background, illegible words, bland teasers (randomly choosing a country) and headlines, it has everything you don't want. I might have had an easier time with this if I used a different model, particularly not a real human model.

In a nutshell I used a lot of blend modes in the layers palette, particularly color dodge, then I used brushes along side from what I learned about glowing ribbons and I used masking for the pictures. This of course is not my best but what else could I do. Maybe later on if I get a better picture and more time, I could do this again. My inspiration has seemed to be Ghost In The Shell for a while. At first I tried to make a grid on the face but I gave up on that idea the last minute and started using brushes. It didn't come out as I wanted but I still got some interesting reactions, even if some were trying to be nice. By the way, I'm not used to having pictures taken of me so I can't smile by force. Well that and I never look good.

It's pretty obvious what our objective was but I'll say it anyway. Our objective was to create a magazine cover with us (in ten years) being the main point and why we were on the cover. This is rather pathetic for me ...or about me.