Final post my dudes

     Hey guys, it's me, your friendly neighborhood art student.  This is gonna be my last post, so yeah, it's time for reflection.

     I was part of the rough-draft end of things - I'd design something, and someone else would design the final draft of it, keeping the first design in mind.  It was chill.
     We managed to complete a lot of stuff.  There was the graduation program, invitation, and certificate (diploma).  I had a design for the program, but the team didn't like it so we used someone else's.  I thought it was pretty cool but hey, I did what I could, and the one we picked was nice.

This one was mine.  I thought it was pretty sweet tbh.

This is the one we went with.

And the invitation for graduation was pretty cool.

The diploma ended up really nice - just elegant but still artistic.

We also finished the theater strand's poster and invitation for their show.

Here's the poster.  Pretty nice.

And here's the invite.

And last but not least, we got the Long Story Short tickets, lanyards, t-shirts, and poster all done, too.

The tickets ended up being pretty too.

And the lanyard looks great.

We also did a poster to advertise the show.

There were challenges, of course, as with any team effort.  It was hard to figure out what needed to be done, and there was some confusion as to who was in charge of what piece.  Plus it was tricky trying to figure out where to post the Final Draft of stuff.

I haven't gone to see the other strands' shows yet, but I'm gonna go see the Dance show tonight and the Vocal show tomorrow night.  It's gonna be pretty lit.  A couple of my friends are in the dance show, so that's cool.  I'll update after I see the shows.

lmao what am I even doing at this point

hey guys what's up

ok so we finished up with the tickets and everything, so my latest project has been the program for graduation.

i mean i thought it was pretty badass, but apparently it was too badass for my group, so we went with another version of the program, which is a bit lighter and less saturated. ok,,,,, i mean yall losing some valuable artwork here but o k,,,,

but yeah so anyway, now we're just waiting on one of my teammates to finish up the diploma

so thats fun

aight bye

Long time no see, yall

Hello my dudes, it's me, Riley.  It's been a while!  Last time we talked, I was working on the Academy graduation stuff for my school, but recently I've been working on the tickets for the Senior Production show thingy.  They're really cool tbh.  Remember how I said last time that the aesthetic was kinda vaporwave-meets-old-TV?  Well, the way the tickets are designed, they look like TV remotes.  Here's a picture (with the location info scratched out):



Pretty cool, right?  The colors are way brighter in real life, but that's the gist of what it looks like.  And yours truly hand-wrote the numbers on them, 1 to god-knows-what number.  I lost count after like a million.  You see the part that reads "LONG STORY SHORT"?  That's Soerjaputera, the twenties font I told you about last time.

Other than that, I didn't really work on that much, since I've been busy with stuff for other classes.

See ya!

New Project Who Dis

Hello my lil chicken nuggets.  It's me, your friendly neighborhood art nerd, Riley.  Now that I'm all finished with my senior thesis project, I have another project.

AND IT'S TEAMWORK TIME, CHICKEN NUGGETS.

This is very different from what I normally do, so I'm pretty excited to work in different circumstances.  I haven't done graphic design in ages, but apparently I'm good enough at it that my teacher (the muggle art school version of Professor McGonagall tbh) put me on a team in charge of handling several senior class projects, including the Academy theater production, the senior art show, and Academy graduation.  So that's impressive.  Additionally, I'm working with the quiet-but-#GotArtSkillsForDays kids in my class, and I admit, I was really intimidated by their talent (and eerie lack of chatter at first...).  Turns out they're all pretty chill, but they just tend to be very straightforward, which is one heck of a relief.  I have ADHD, and if I'm gonna get anything done, I need to sit with other people who also want to get stuff done.  Sitting with the non-ADHD nerds makes that 2000% easier, lemme tell you.  Plus, I get to work with one of my best friends, who doesn't have ADHD but knows me well enough to know how to keep me focused while we're working.

Anyway, I sadly wasn't paying attention during the planning process for one of the projects I mentioned - the Academy Senior Art Show - so I didn't have much say in the design decisions the team made.  But the final aesthetic is really cool.  It's like vaporwave meets old-TV-error-screen with a little bit of Roaring Twenties.  I'm not too familiar with it (I'm more into the flower child thing), but I'm honestly pretty hype for the opportunity to learn about it.  For those who are as unfamiliar with it as I was, here's a link to an image search for it.  The show is called Long Story Short, and we're using a television as the main imagery - pretty clever considering the movie version of a book is usually way shorter than the actual book.

One of my teammates, who will go unnamed for security reasons, sort of took over most of the projects we need to do, so there isn't much on my plate.  For that reason, I offered my services as King of the Typefaces, and so far I've done the lettering for the posters, programs, and tickets for Long Story Short and the Academy theater show, and I'm currently working on the Academy graduation program.  Most of the lettering has been in Soerjaputera, a Twenties-inspired typeface designed by Adien Gunarta, and the rest has been in Adobe Garamond and Palatino.

Sorry for such a short post, but well it's dinner time and I gotta eat.  Talk at yall later!

It's Finally Done(tm) and So Am I

Finally.  At.  Long.  Freaking.  Last.  I can finally say that my thesis artwork is done.  It's been changed so many times, beyond what any sane person would consider.

At this, the end of the project, my thesis artwork is in its final form.  It's a series of three posters, five feet tall or so, and each of them is covered in stylized text in various fonts.  There is some sort of box/bag/basket full of pink/green 3D glasses, for the viewer to look through.  The viewer puts them on and notices that one word on each poster is actually two different words, overlaid on each other - one green, one pink.  At this point, it would be some sort of instinct to close one eye, and therein, the viewer would be able to read each word.  Depending on which eye the viewer chooses to close, the statements on each poster would say very different things:

1. The world is best viewed through the eyes of a dreamer/realist.

2. A person with few close friends is beloved/outcast by those who matter.

3. I will love/hate you first, but you can earn the opposite.

The color coding is consistent across the posters, so the row of five-foot-tall posters with optimistic/pessimistic phrases represents, in a way, the mindset of an optimist and a pessimist.  Neither word is entirely invisible through the lenses, just as conflicting ideas are still present in people.  An optimist would say the world is better viewed through the eyes of a dreamer, but they are still aware that one must be realistic about things in order to survive.  Likewise, a pessimist would say it's better to see things realistically, though it's okay to have goals and dreams as well.  But the conflicting ideas are faded, barely visible comparatively; by closing the other eye, looking through the other lens, the way other people see things, the viewer can observe and understand other people's perspective.

Also, because I'm the absolute trash garbage king, I made a pun.  The optimistic words are written in green, and to cancel out the overlapping pink text, you have to look through the pink lens of the glasses.  You have to look through rose-colored glasses.

Ok so it's a lil different but it's all good

Hey guys, it's me.  This is the latest installment of my thesis project, Optimism vs Pessimism.  A few things have changed since I last gave y'all an update.

On the last post, I said that the words would be really big - like, each letter would take up an 8.5-x-11" piece of paper - but that didn't quite work out.  I wanted the piece to be more interactive, so I made the words into cards roughly 1-2" tall, so the viewer could pick them up.

I also implied that the words would face the same way, and that's changed as well.  In a given pair, one word is written normally on the paper, while the other one is written upside down.  This forced me to make the piece into more of a game.

There are two baskets and a round table.  One basket is labeled "Optimist or Pessimist?" and it's filled with green-pink 3D glasses.  The other basket is labeled "Are you sure?" and it has about thirty paper eye-occluders (paper circle on a stick) in it.  On the table, 64 cards say either bad things or good things, depending on which color lens the viewer is looking through, and a sign above the table reads "Put these cards right side up."  If the viewer is a pessimist, they'll look through the green side and arrange the cards so the bad words are seen.  If they're an optimist, they'll look through the pink side and arrange the cards so the good words are seen.  However, more than one person will look at this at a time, and there's only one set of cards.  If an optimist and a pessimist are looking at the cards simultaneously, they'll disagree on which way the cards go, because the optimist's words look upside down to the pessimist, and vice versa.  They'll inevitably have to realize that they have the option to look through the other eye and therefore see the words from the other person's point of view.  This teaches them that, when they don't understand what someone else is doing, the best thing to do is to try to figure out where they're coming from.

I'm worried because the cards are just words now, and it's gonna be harder to make art out of it.  Unless I can color them or something...

Finally Making Progress

Hey everyone!  It's me, Riley, back again to talk about my thesis.  As the title says, I'm finally making some decent progress on this, though there are a few snags here and there.

For those of you who don't know or just forgot, my thesis is about optimism vs pessimism and the worldwide need for balance between them.  The piece itself is a six-foot-tall list of at least 40 overlapped pairs of words.  In each pair, one word is a good thing, while the other word is a bad thing, and both words are the same length.  For example, good/evil (4 letters), freedom/slavery (7 letters), and so on.  This is so I can effectively overlap them by the letter - for good & evil, the letters would be overlapped like (G/E)(O/V)(O/I)(D/L) so each letter pair can share a piece of 8.5"x11" paper.  Probably copy paper because it's cheap.  The viewer would then don a pair of pink-green 3D glasses and have to choose which lens they want to look through.  If they choose the pink lens, they can only see the good words, because the pink lens cancels out the pink letters.  If they choose the green lens, they can only see the bad words, because the green lens cancels out the green letters.

I'm running into a bit of an issue, though.  I'm doing this with prismacolor markers, and as much as I love the ease with blending the ink, they're not that great once they start drying out.  And I'm not made of money, so I don't wanna have to keep buying new markers to keep a consistent shade.  I was thinking about making this digital, but it would require a lot of printer ink...  Any suggestions?  Should I go digital, or should I just work with a different type of marker?  Acrylic paint, maybe?