Dangerous Dingers

The mood of my piece is exciting; the commentary of the announcer, the vibrant color and the atmosphere of the scene. 

Pittsburgh & The Penguins

Inspired by the wonderful city of Pittsburgh (where I will be attending college net year) and my love of baseball, this image was made in photoshop to create the illusion of an event that actually happened. Although adorable penguins did not take over the Pittsburgh skyline, this image gives the impression that it did. Making this image may look complicated, but all it consists of is layers upon layers of clipped photos. Using layer masks, clipping masks, hue/saturations, filters, brushes, and lasso tools (just to name a few) were all used to reach this final image.

Below is the panel of layers that were in my image;


Image one                                                                                         Image two


~r.h.

Typography Poster

Like the rest of my work, my typography poster is centered around sports. The main emotion I want to encourage in my poster is motivation. The background picture is the Vanderbilt baseball team celebrating their National Championship title in 2014. The celebratory emotion and motivational quote gives the vibe of achievement because of hard work.

By using a uniform font throughout the entire piece, I was able to play around with the thickness and color options. My decision to make the "Believe In Yourself" solid gold makes it stand out among the other white words and grey/blue blurred background. It also emphasizes the most important part of the quote, and draws attention to that phrase.

I think the most successful part to my piece is my background, because the emotion it captures is a perfect pair to the quote. I also like how clear it is despite the blur and pixelated/broken effect I put on it. To be honest, I get the chills of motivation when looking at this picture, it truly does its job!

~r.h.

Typography Intro

Typography skills are important to have, especially in a design class; our newest assignment was to type a word and make it look how it means. So loud has to be loud, quiet has to be quiet, etc...
Here's what I came up with.

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Why this is Loud:
1. The colors of hot pink against the yellow make it pop and in-your face.
2. All capital letters.
3. The font is bold and lacks sharp edges, so it is not sophisticated or elegant.
4. The spikes behind the text were the original text but had a warped effect, making it edgy.
5. The white border helps it pop so it doesn't blent into the background.

Why this is Quiet:

1. The color choice of the pastel blue against the white lettering is soothing.

2. The font is open so it is not chunky.

3. The placement of the text is at the bottom which does not draw a lot of attention to it.

4. It is not busy, it is really simple. 

5. The text is all lower case letters.

                                                                                                             

Why this is Camo: (My personal favorite)

1. The pattern of the background is busy to the viewers' eye. 

2. The font is large but you cannot see a clear outline of the text.

3. The text goes against the grain of the background pattern, which blends.

4. There is no border.

5. The dot size on the background is smaller than the dots inside the text. 

Why this is Active:

1. The text flows with the twist.

2. The colors remind me of the vivid color of work out clothing.

3. The text has depth. 

4. It moves across the page, as if it is running away.

5. The pattern is uniform and moves across the page also.

Why this is Stable:

1. The text is strong.

2. It is right in the middle of the page.

3. The color stands out on its own behind the white background. 

4. I purposely made the background wild and unstable to emphasize 'stable.'

5. The complimentary colors of Blue and Orange make it strong.

Why this is Implied:

1. Implied means that something is suggested but it is not direct, so the text is behind the pattern. It is there but not THERE,

2. The color of the text is opposite to the pattern color.

3. The text is hiding behind the pattern.

4. The text is all lowercase.

5. The text is sophisticated, and polished. 

~r.h.

Senior T-Shirt Design!

Graduation is right around the corner, which means it's time for class t-shirts! Our given task was to create a t-shirt that expresses the emotion of graduation. My focus was to create a t-shirt that captures the emotion of celebration as the graduating class prepares to move onto the new chapter of their lives. A few clues that drop hints for what the logo is for was the balloons, which are usually associated with celebrating. Along with that hint, I also included the graduate with diploma in hand with the other graduation caps in the air in a celebratory fashion. These were the three main clues that hint to my theme of celebration. As a member of the graduating class, this would be a GREAT t-shirt to wear and cherish!

~r.h.

Senior T-Shirt Brainstorm

It's that time of year again, GRADUATION!! And I cannot believe I'll be a graduate this year! Time honestly flies. T-shirt design brainstorm, any further ideas?









~r.h.

The Anatomy and Physiology of Fitness

Fitness and sports take up a big chunk of my seventeen year old life. As a college bound student athlete, going to the gym and practicing my sport are important to me. What fascinates me the most is how my body works together to allow me to execute. The anatomy and physiology of the human body is absolutely amazing; our bodies have over 650 muscles and 206 bones, attached by ligaments, tendons and protected by cartilage. All of these parts work in unison to allow our bodies to do millions of things, and my passion for learning about the human body is shown through this project, using Adobe Illustrator.

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This first piece is a page that consists of strictly fills in black, grey, and white tones. The focal point of the theme is the three runners in the middle. The original picture, that is now a silhouette in the middle of the page, was the progression from the skeletal system, the muscular and skeletal systems together, and finally the entire human body with all systems in tact. I thought adding the mosaic tile fill in the background would help to move the viewer's eye across the page. The smaller runners in the camo-like pattern and their shadows were a last minute add-in; I felt that the silhouettes alone were not enough to make the piece interesting, so I decided to take the actual picture and add a fill to it, with a shadow for depth. My inspiration for this piece is the unity of the body; the bones depend on the muscles and the muscles depend on the bone in order to work properly. All of the systems are needed to move, and shown in the piece is running. Since running is my least favorite exercise, the smaller runners are camouflage since I believe anyone who has a passion for running is a true trooper.
You go girl.





This second piece was my favorite piece to craft, since it involves color. Working in black and white for a majority of the project was not as entertaining, but with color the possibilities are endless. My original idea was to show the progression, once again, of the skeletal system, to the muscular system, to the whole body. The last picture has a similar emphasis to this one, with the idea that the body is a system with many parts that allow us to move. However, in this picture it shows the individual parts and shown at the bottom is the parts all working together. My focal point of the image is the woman flexing in the dead center, she is larger than the other images which makes her stand out. This image relates to my theme, The Anatomy and Physiology of Fitness, because it shows the anatomy, "What is it?" and the physiology, "What does it do?" as well as the fitness aspect.






The focus of the third page is split between the bottom half with the woman leg pressing and motivational quote, and the top with the lines drawing attention to the dumbbells where the lines intersect. This is the fitness focused page, since it only includes fitness equipment and working out as the theme. My main goal was to make an interesting picture with image tracing and lines that followed my theme. This page was the simplest page for me to make because I duplicated and image traced weight room equipment and added lines of various opacities and thicknesses that overlap.






 Finally this last piece was creatively, the most challenging piece to make. How can I illustrate the anatomy and physiology of fitness through patterns? Well, I decided to take photos of muscular and skeletal tissues under a microscope and collage them together to make an abstract pattern. To give it some depth I took the image and made it larger and more opaque as it gets farther away, and more focused and smaller when it gets to the front. To give some kind of hint as to what it is the viewer, I assed an image trace of the human skeleton and muscular systems, hoping to give the viewer some clue. This was the most difficult and unclear piece of my collection.

This is the front view of the book fully assembled. I wanted to keep a clear and simple cover to compliment the complexity of my piece.








This is the inside of the book, fully assembled. I wanted to break up the black and white scale, by putting the colored piece between them. I'm really glad how my first project came out, but I learned what TO do and what NOT TO do for next time.








~r.h.

Bauhaus School of Design, 1919-1933

The origins of digital design may live in Weimar, Germany, but its new home is right here in America. This remarkable school of the arts was founded by Walter Groupius, in 1919 and crafted a new and unique curriculum for its students to learn. This included, "a utopian craft guild combining architecture, sculpture, and painting into a single creative expression" (Winton, The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Products that came out of the school included, furniture, jewelry, buildings, modern art and many more; the possibilities were endless. The Bauhaus changed the way the world saw art, all before the World War II era. From the Bauhaus emerged multiple well known artists, including Marcel Lajos Breuer, Herbert Bayer, and of course, Gropius. 

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Marcel Lajos Breuer

DOB: May 21, 1902

DOD:  July 1, 1981

Breuer's work was focused in modern furniture. His furniture is can be simple in its design, or complex. All of his work is architectural and he is best known for his furniture. He also focused on the theory or International Furniture, where his most famous design The Wassily Chair No B3 (shown on the left) came from. Breuer worked with bended steel frames, which had never been seen before in               the architectural world of furniture before; he also worked with wood, seen in the chair in the right, later in his career. One element that stands out to me the most in Breuer's work is the shape of his work. He made abstract looking furniture, which is interesting to me.

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                                                         Herbert Bayer

                                                               DOB: April 5, 1900

                                                            DOD: September 30, 1985

   

Bayer's work is .my favorite out of the three artists that we are studying. His work has sharp and vibrant color mixed with his interesting images grabs the viewer's attention. He is well known for abstract images, but he was also skilled in architecture, painting, sculpting and interior design, to name a few. Much of his work can be seen in magazines.The element of design that I like the most in Bayer's work is by far color. His pieces has rich and loud colors, which makes his work have an attention grabbing appearance.Bayer was the latest living Bauhaus mentor.

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Walter Gropius

DOB:May 18, 1883

DOD: July 5, 1969

 Finally, the mind behind the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius. Groupis was skilled in multiple fields, but his strongest was architecture and design. His focus was primarily on designing buildings and designing interiors. However, he did work with typography as seen in the photo on the bottom right, for Bauhaus. He too, like Breuer, were the architecture masters of their time. The element I like the most about Gropius' designs is the space he has and uses in his artwork. He uses a lot of positive and negative space in his work which is really interesting to me. 

-r.h.

The Big Three

Art can make an individual feel something; the emotion a piece of art may cause one to feel may not be uniform across the viewing audience. Not only can art make one feel something, it can also tell a story or deliver a message to an audience. The message art can display to an audience can be straight forward and convey a message that is the same for each viewer, or can convey a message that can be interpreted in multiple
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Paula Scher
 http://www.pentagram.com/#/home

Scher's work stands out to me because if you look closely, her artwork is made of text, and text only. What is most intriguing to me is that she makes her designs in the shapes of states, countries, and seen above, continents. The work is sophisticated, and it has a continuous nature to it because it keeps your eye moving all over the page. Not only is Scher's work map themed, she has also done work designing logos for CNN, Citi Bank and the New York Ballet; and designed album covers for artists such as Boston, Lady Gaga and the New York Philharmonic.
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James Victore
http://www.jamesvictore.com
                                               

When I first saw Victore's artwork I felt a sense of sarcasm and wittiness in some pieces of art, such as the piece above. Some of his pieces are very scratchy and incorporates text in a free form. Other pieces of art Victore creates are touchy subjects that are usually censored in todays society, but he still does not disappoint to create them.  However, some of his works are related to current affairs including this work about nuclear warfare.

 Victore's work can vary from funny, to sophisticated, to witty and even serious. He captures the attention audiences with pieces that forces the question, "Why on earth did he create this?" to come up. His work can be simple, one line designs, or complex text and scribble designs. After observing and analyzing his artwork, I slowly catch myself becoming a fan of  his "against-the-grain" and sarcastic style.



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Setphan Sagmeister
http://www.sagmeisterwalsh.com

Sagermeister's work is unlike the other works observed because he incorporates all three elements of art the previous artists do not use. His work uses typography, design, and photography in creative ways. Some of his posters were made specifically for subways in NYC, but most of his work is design based and exhibited in museums and galleries. 

Most of Sagermeister's work has actual photographs with design edited onto it, but some work like

the work below is completely digital. His artwork portrays a feeling of seriousness but also some sophistication. His work is very well known, but like Victore's work, censored because of the nature of the work he produces.






~r.h.