Digital Painting - First Foray

As I think I've said, our teacher appears to have refused to teach us anything, so this is self-taught. The assignment was to create an expressive self-portrait, I chose myself as Mr. Potato Head, as one, I have a head shaped somewhat like a potato, and two, I often feel like I can change roles from artist to tech support, from loving husband to selfish gamer, etc. I decided to include the process from start to finish so you can see how I worked, and so I can keep a record of it for my own nefarious purposes.

Let me know what you think but be kind, remember it's my first attempt. :)

Graphic Design Vote

The time has come to help me decide. In my "Designing Brand Identity" (aka Graphic Design 1) class, we're redesigning a particularly heinous logo. I chose the restaurant "Salty Iguana," with the idea that if I can make this look good, maybe I can make anything look good.

I'm mostly decided on the appearance but need your help with the color. Let me know your favorite. Below is the original logo for the restaurant.

So, Austin, how do you like school? Well, I'll tell ye...

It's school. Nothing profound here.

If you're still reading, school is good but already hard. I'm closing out just my second week of this semester, let me tell you what I think:

Graphic Design 1 is a lot of fun, I think the teacher of this class is shaping up to be my favorite teacher this semester. He's adjunct faculty and cares more about us learning and experimenting so far than meeting some arbitrary goal of thumbnails. He is either under the impression that it's a branding class, but I guess I gotta learn branding sometime. All we've done so far is design or redesign company logos, which is neat. Not what I want to do, but neat.

History of Design and Visual Art is fun but a surprising amount of work. We've already had a field trip to the Crandall Printing Museum, written a 3 page research paper on a designer/printer/typographer of the teacher's choice (I got William Blake) and had a quiz. In some ways it's good but I prefer art history classes when the teacher lectures and we have 3 tests and maybe one paper like all my other classes, instead of 3 research papers, 4 assignments, 5 texts, and 6 calling birds, but oh well. It better improve my knowledge of type history I guess.

Digital Painting is cool and I have a bunch of friends in the class though I'm not sure I'm going to do well due to the teacher's teaching methods, or lack thereof. He seems to be more concerned with our artistic and conceptual sensibilities, not our mastery or proficiency with painting using photoshop. He has flat out stated he's not planning on teaching us any technique or use of the program which is really frustrating, as I thought that was why I was paying him. Oh well. One semester, and you can't love every teacher.

I'm also in my last semester of art lectures, once a week and an hour and a half every Thursday, shouldn't be too painful though I've never heard of any of the presenters except one, and I've only heard of him because I took a class from him.

To get the extra credit I need to qualify for my grant I'm taking another 1 credit class, Saturday Weight Lifting. Yoga was all full and all the other classes required too much cardio/leg mobility. I've only been once but it's just like you'd expect it. Lift weights for half an hour and chart your progress.

Finally and most awesomely I've started an internship at McNeil Printing, the family (in-law) business. I've been shadowing their Graphic Designer as well as being given little projects to work on. So far I designed a sticker for BYU's Athletic Department and a company's mission statement plaque. It's more fun than all my classes combined but it's unpaid and I'm only going @ 5 hours a week, but I've learned more there in going 3 times than most of my other classes in their entirety. So there's that.

That's my semester in a nutshell, I finally am beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel, hoping it's not a train, and am gonna do my best to get all A's like last semester.

Thanks for reading

2011 - We Hardly Knew Ye.

As one gets older, and distractions from living overwhelm us, we tend to complain how short the last year was, despite it was the exact same length of time as every other one. That being said, 2011 was really short, yo.

Can't think of the highlights month for month, summing up, it was the hardest/most credit filled year I think I've had, on top of working full or near full time, I got semi-demoted at work, we went on vacation twice to California, once to Arrowhead to be with my mom's side of the family and once to Stevenson Ranch to be with my dad's side of the family, as well as a trip to Zion's National Park to be with some of our friends, my skills in design have grown (imho) tremendously and my fear of getting a job has grown just as tremendously.  

osama bin laden, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Mars, Elizabeth Taylor, kim jong-il, Peter Falk, Cy Twombly, Amy Winehouse, Patrice O'Neal, Steve Jobs, muammar gaddafi, Paul B all died. Some of these people were viewed as monsters such as jong-il, bin laden and taylor, some were beloved such as falk and jobs, some should have seen it coming such as winehouse, and possibly frankenthaler, and one was like a third grandfather to me, such as b. I went through wikipedia looking up all the famous people who had die, it was depressing and quite extensive. Not gonna do that again, for at least like a year.

Morgan has grown into a hilarious albeit developmentally behind boy. We've had counselors and classes to help him and he's always improving but still behind which frankly pisses me off at certain gods and breaks my heart but I love him to death and he can do no (ok very little) wrong in my eyes.

Tracie and I are both still working in case you didn't know, 2011 I failed most of my resolutions except reading and getting all A's except for one stupid typography 1.

 I got my first graphic design job from a friend and fluctuate between thinking I'm the best and the worst designer ever and think this is enough for now. Happy new year everybody, let's hope 2012 is just the end of my twenties and not the end of existence. silly Mayans. They predicted our demise but not their own.