Lettermark

Our second assignment was a letter mark. We had to do a mark using the first letter of our last name and represent our last name some how. Searching back in the history of the harris last name i found some affiliation to hedgehogs, and due to my love of Sonic the hedge hog i felt it only natural to incorporate it into my design

Branding class start

Started a branding class this semester And ou first project was to make a word mark for a fake drink so I of course went to making ninja juice aka "ninjuice". I ended up having to drop the uice part of the mark lower to gain a beter balance of the word, seeing as the altered J gave so much weight to the Nin portion

Wedding invite

Wahoo my friend got married. Nice job dude. he also needed wedding invites. And I felt inclined to help. I was nervous at first because most of my art as you can see lacks the elegant qualities that many would want for a wedding invite. So I strained my brain tried to draw like roses and things but It ended up that I had no choice but to rely on my new found love of type to accomplish the task. I figured if my drawing skills lacked elegance then I'd have to try a medium that embodied elegance within it before I got to it. So I searched the web and found an elegant font and set to work. It was pretty rough working through my ideas being as i hadn't thought in this realm of design ever. But once i made the monogram this started to fall into place. I used it as a the background pattern and then it was just a matter of organizing the technical info to fit the elegant pattern. Thus the wedding invite was born. Yeah it may seem pretty average to most graphic designers but comparing it to the rest of my work I feel I grew a lot on this project because it was so far out of my comfort zone.

Thai Food

Our last assignment in typography was to make a menu for a restaurant. it took no time for me to know I wanted to do a thai restaurant. Not only because their food is one of the greatest things I know of, but also because I had been watching a lot of thai movies and I was interested to look study their art style. So I started by doing just that. I looked at a lot of thai traditional art and realized they had very elaborate line work and it included a lot of elephants. Elephants holding a good deal of significants in thai culture. I also looked a lot at the thai alphabet. I liked it a lot! I think it has tons of amazing shapes. So I went and found a downloadable font that made the english alphabet take on a thai alphabet look. After I decided to make the menu look like an elephant standing on your table it was only a matter of seconds before i decided to use that same thai font replicate in a small way the fancy line work and pattern that ethnic thai art had in it.

Like I said earlier I meant for this to be a standing menu so these images are actaully from the side. when it was printed out I cut it so it was only the orange elephant shapes and removed the white. Then I folded the menu into a triangle shape that stood very firmly on the table. I'll see if i can dig it up and get a photo of the physical piece for the blog.

SoniKicks Final

I finally ended up trying to incorporate sonic the game into the ad. I made this by taking a screen shot of sonic 2 and then copying the track itself I then tried to imitate that 16bit style brick pattern with type. I found a font on Dafont.com called "BM tube A10" And used it to Type sonic the hedgehog over and over then varied the position and it ended up looking like the bricks. I then used a 8bit arcade styled font for the words you need to read.

Sonikicks

Later on in my type Class we got the challenge to make a shoe ad using 1 picture and just type for the rest. I of course turned to the man who relies on his shoes for his very life, Sonic. I named his shoes Sonikicks and figured it would be cool for like a free running or a soap shoe type of thing. these were 2 i deas i had to get out of my head when we first got the assignment. But I felt neither of them portrayed Sonic's stylish attitude. Also I think that the Speedy letters in Fast are too gimmicky but I couldn't find a solution that didn't seem gimmicky, other wise concept wise I liked it the most.

Bird in a tree

In this project I used a Font from DaFont.com called a charming font. It had really exaggerated serifs which makes good for making things other than letters. In this project I challenged myself by trying to make Each thing out of it's own name.

Black Letter City

So after the cellist I went with making this here city using the same alphabet. The city itself is made out of the letters from the name "Lucida Black Letter" then the characters are made out of the names of one of the other characters. Don't know if that makes sense but that is how I did it.

Typography

So after trying a few design classes I found I had a huge need to learn about Type because I was terrible at it. Which is kind of a sd considering my mom also being a graphic designer and being a type nut it was amazing i lacked so much of an eye for it. At the beginning of the class we were encouraged to look at Letters as shapes instead of letters and so I did a few projects trying to use The letters of font to make different things. This cello player and friends was made in Lucidia Blackletter I liked the font because the letters all had very unique and exaggerated shapes.

Last whats under the bed idea

So After i finished the cover i decided to see what effects color had on it. So I took it out and tada The pattern really shows it's power here. At least that is what i learned from it. the pattern makes shapes that aren't even there. Like imaginary lines but instead imaginary shapes.

Whats under the bed cover

So this is what I ended up doing for the project. I kept the idea of pattern in the color which was pretty cool to work with. It took a while to draw the pattern but in the end it turned out cool enough that I was ok with the work load. The book Itself is a story about how the sandman help a girl escape an Imaginary realm taken over by little gnomes that like to hide under kids beds. kinda one of those creepy kid's stories.

Whats under the bed

This is an idea for a book cover project we did for my class. I had just watched "secret of Kells" Which is such an awesome show. I liked how they used pattern in that cartoon and wanted to try some of my own. The book Whats Under the Bed is one I wrote a long time ago but never fixed up enough to do anything with. But it had enough content to make a cover out of.

Illustrator

In our class we learned how to use Illustrator. My teacher told us that if we could master the pen tool we would master the program. So this was some practice with the pen tool. It was really weird to use something so crisp and clean but in the end I like the effect drawing with shapes has on the over all pic. This is a pic of Optimus Prime and I Fighting a Dragon. Pretty much an average day occurrence. I used photos and then with the pen tool drew shapes to make this peice.

Squid armor

This was my favorite out of the three. It also took me the longest to think of. i had elephants being a land animal, birds being a sky animal, and so I figured to make the set complete I would need aquatic sea life. But I couldn't decide what to do. At first i tried what seemed like 1000 different lobsters and whales. but neither of them could I think of a good face on veiw. Final when a squid came into mind I found relief. It didn't take long for the design or color to come after i had decided on which animal I was going to use for it.

Bird Oxygen

This was an immediate idea that came once I started thinking of options with the elephant gas mask pictogram. I always thought that the oxygen masks that pilots wore while flying jets looked kind of beakish. So this evolved quickly in ways of the design. What colors to use though were hard for me. I tried tons but could never settle. Once the green seemed to come in it stuck and i started designing around it.

Elephant Gas mask

So this doodle came out during some lecture on physics and i didn't think much more of it till I saw it while making the note men. i remembered someone had mentioned how they liked it. So I turned it into a pictogram. I chose this Idea over the note men because it had a better potential to be colored and i wanted to work with color for this project to see if i could make something success full both in color and not in color. Of course this change of plans gave me the challenge to think up 2 more pictograms that went along with this pictogram. Which was way fun to try to figure out.

Note men

So after the shirt bugs i took a long break from design. Eventually tho I got into a class that forced me back into it. Which may have been when my paint brush tool escapades started slowing down a bit. This was an idea for a picto gram assignment. I wanted to represent different styles of music and I finished these the night before. But then something else hit me so I had to stay up and get another idea out of my head which im about to post. But I am sad these guys never really got any apreciation. it was fun to try and see what I could do with different note symbols. And this started putting me onto a path of a type of illustration through design i'll be posting later on.

Shirt symbol 2

This ws the symbol for the second shirt. I really liked this symbol personally cause it taught me more about the powerful effect of width when using lines. it was also when the concept of hierarchy started to grace my thoughts, though I had yet to understand it's importance.

2nd Shirt bug

So this was for my other brother's shirt. Like i said i was trying to get a better concept of the power behind line. And really even tho this was almost 3 years ago I still love using this style to do things. I feel line can express things very clearly. again i wasn't focusing on color use here so i used it limited

Shirt symbol

This was for the same shirt. It was a smaller symbol and to be put on the shoulder. I was really getting into line when i made these and minimal use of color. I made one more shirt bug for my other brother.

Shirt Bug

So this is an attempt i made a couple years ago at design. It was a gift for my brother for his B-day. This was a design for him to print on his shirt thus we called it a shirt bug.

Stick figures

So this is the stick figures I made for the Trunk of the tree For my last post. It was an excersise i did to try to help me model people in different poses. it is a basic exercise i know but it really helps for animating i think to be able to draw people in any pose and know how their limbs and things should be moving. if that makes sense.

DESIGN

So now i'm gonna post some of the design work. keep in mind i was doing these between the drawing projects so these are also many of them old news, but i thought i'd post them anyways. this here is a pic that isn't quite designy but i did avoid the paint brush tool entirely an d believe it or not it. This was my first project that i tried to make with just photo editing. And yeah the whole thing is made from cut up photo's. the leaves of the tree were made out of a picture of an action figure. it was this cool trojan spawn mcfarlande toy i found. the trunk of the tree took the most out of me. it is made out of a scanned pic of sketches i did of stick figures doing different verbs i'll post it here in a sec for you to see. the letters in the back ground are Estonian words spelled backwards so if any of you have that skill try to read it.

It was good tho to try to get my mind out of the drawing arena every once in a while and try to be illustrative with more of a design skill set.

Dream 3

Oh yeah, also we were in the form of squirrel men. Don't ask me why but hey it worked in dream world. And yeah this one was my own squirrel. I had power over wind and was way fast. safe to say it was a ridiculously fun dream to have and way fun to draw. I did however get occupied work and havent come back to it in some time :( maybe here in the future. Sadly haven't done any paint brush projects since then. But i have other stuff i have worked on.

Dream 2

Did I mention that we battled against tremndous titans made from the chaos that the spirit of the world held that were 1000's of times our size!

Crazy Beans Dream

So as the Summer came to an end I had a crazy dream that my brothers and I were ancient elemental guardians that were supposed to protect the world and prepare it for habitability by life. And so I did what any of us would do and made 2 and a half pages of comic to help me remember this awesome dream. I of course used it as a chance to practice some paint brush tool.

The turtles

So the summer of 2010 after i had drawn Raph I lucked into finding the Old Ninja turtle comic books and dorked out Hard core. And yeah side note those are friggin sweet comics. Anywho I decided that my Raph attempt wasn't good enough and went for a team shot. took a bit more time on it and this is what i came out with. I feel Leo turned out pretty good in this one. Over all it was a fun project. I went online and found pictures of my favorite versions of the action figures and then kinda complied their qualitys. The biggest difference i found in other peoples drawings and in their action figures is the width of their necks. I liked the skinnier approach cause I think it makes you look more ninja and less body builder.

Raph

So after the city backs pic i got really sucked into programing and felt i had lost some of my paint brushing. So i gave drawing the coolest ninja turtle (raphael) a shot. First attempt didn't seem to go so good. But hey had to get back into it. oh yeah correction on the last post. I actually did citybacks 2 years ago. That was christmas of 09. this Raphael didn't come until May of 2010. Like i said i had just gotten into programing a lot and let my drawing slack off.

City Backs

This is a more recent drawing with the paintbrush tool done about a year ago. I feel my style has come into it's own a little more since then. I left some things intentionally uncolored in this because I wanted to give it a more imaginary feeling. wether that worked or not I'm still deciding

1((1

Once I had a year of Flash under my belt I of course started thinking of Enormously too big of projects that I could ever imagine finishing and 1((1 was one of them. It was and still might be in the future a cartoon about a robot that wakes up and tries to make his way through a robo world. I was going to draw all the back Grounds on fireworks with my paint brush technique, and this is one of the back grounds I finished. I did this about 5 years ago not long after the bandit pic i posted earlier. I feel at the time I had more of a concept of scenery than I did characters. Also posting all of these has made me realize how much i like to use dark blue in my work.

Orb

Another one done more than 6 years ago with mouse and paint brush tool. I remember being way frustrated cause i didn't understand layers yet so i kept drawing over my lines but now that i look at it I might actually like this style more than being able to see the outline itself. Either way this one was fun to to do in the end.

Board Game Pic

This is something I did for my brother over 5 years ago, we made up a board game and I decided to draw his character for him with his little sidekick. I put it up mainly cause it is when I mainly started experimenting with drawing using only the mouse and a paint brush tool in either photoshop or fireworks. I really like the human effect the paint brush tool gives to another wise obviously computer drawn picture.

it might be cool to come back and redraw some of these characters in the future.

REVIVE THE BLOG!

Well I pretty much forgot i had this thing. And now I feel all like I have abused it terribly so I'm gonna try to revive this blog and regularly add to it so to kick it off I'm gonna add some stuff some way old some newer but all pretty fun to make. BUT TO KICK IT OFF here is a project I did more than 3 years ago just getting aquatinted with the paint brush tool in fireworks. personally I like the turtle in the boat in the sky, mainly cause he is in the freaking sky!