Collective Update

I am so, so, so, so, SO sorry! The entire month of October flew past and here we are in November. It's Fall. There is a chill in the air. I am extremely busy with school. It has just been intense. Good, but INTENSE!

So, really, the least I can do is show some of the stuff I have worked so hard on over the past month:

My Illustration: Advertising Art class has kept me sufficiently occupied. It's almost an overwhelming feeling. We had been working on packaging designs for food and beverage items. It was a fun but challenging project, mostly because there is an element of design involved. I designed a label for a Greek-inspired salad dressing and marinade first. It was actually based off of an existing product I found online which featured the Venus statue on the bottle--Not even Greek, I might add. It's called Greek Goddess:

This is NOT the final copy of this, unfortunately, but the main focus is the art. Not extremely proud of this one, but I learned a lot from it.

I also designed a label for a bottle of Iced Indian Chai by a made up company called "Karma":

 I should mention that both of these were done in watercolor/gouache and both are sans text. With the tea label, I was dealing with subject matter that I was more familiar with and liked more, so I suppose that is the reason why I think it turned out better than the dressing label.

Also, for this class, we had to design an ad for John Fluevog's Spring 2011 shoe. John Fluevog is a shoe designer who specializes in very, very unique and flamboyant footwear. The project was based around the contest to design the actual ad for the shoe. See the details here: http://www.fluevog.com/code/fc_briefs.php

This shoe--The Radio ABC Penny Loafer-- is something I would never wear, as it is a men's shoe and is not really my style anyway, but in the real world, you have to design for stuff you don't necessarily like, so it was a little life lesson as well. This is how mine turned out:

 
Compared to some of the others that are in the contest, mine seems kind of dull. You can really tell when I'm not feeling a project. Things just come out "blahhhh".

Then, there is Watercolor class. I truly am enjoying this class. I am almost starting to wonder why I didn't major in watercolor. I have so much passion for it. I am always happiest when I am painting. It's something I can't quite understand or explain. It just is what it is. I just love watercolor!

Our second project (After Skittles) was to paint a still life (I know...Zzzzzzzz) that included shiny, glassy, and sparkly objects. It was an interesting process, but in the end it was a winner. Our still life included a metal teapot (that I love!) that had a slightly ajar lid which made it look like it was speaking. That and the color scheme made me think of Beauty and the Beast. Perfect! I like to have some element of magic and whimsy in everything I paint so it just fit.

The illustration on the book was added by me. Unfortunately I don't have an old book of fairy tales, although that would be awesome.

Then after that we did an urban landscape project--AKA Perspective. I know it is important, but I've never been fond of it. The project was not to take an urban landscape and turn it into something completely different, but that is what I, and the rest of my class did anyway. I was thinking something oceanic and the picture reference I took of Michigan Avenue just happened to be very blue-toned, so viola! Underwater city!

 It turned out nice. Not exactly as I would have hoped, but things rarely do.

So, hopefully I should have more work up soon. I need to get into the habit of updating this more often. I do apologize again.