Seattle Walk

Objectives such as "walk until someone talks to you" or "walk four blocks then turn left, walk until you smell something". We had a list of 14 such objectives which led us up and down the streets of downtown seattle, letting us experience the feel and culture of the emerald city.

We were tasked with creating some artistic documentation of our time meandering through the city center, some chose to take pictures, others simply collected items they found on the journey. I however, opted to draw my experience. See above

Field Guide to Denny Park

Located a block from our dorms Denny Park is Seattle's oldest commons and possibly one of its most famous. Noted for its ancient trees, beautiful shrubbery, cozy feel and homeless population Denny park seemed like the perfect place for creating a 'field guide' . . . Whatever that means, hope you like what I created.

Map of My Childhood Home

One of the very first projects we were assigned in my Foundations class was to create a map of our childhood home from memory. The assignment was left open for interpretation but it was made very clear that it must be a cognitive map and it must be from our childhood. My fellow classmates maps ranged from an illustration of a lone window to a black and red cigarette ash-smeared canvas. I took a little more traditional approach, enjoy.

A Twist on My Elephant

Just messing around with my original design. Tweaked the hue and played around with reflection / rotation -- I think I like it.

Typography Composition

Here is another set of compositions, this time using letters instead of circles. Behold

Composition Assignment

 

In my Digital Imaging class I was instructed to create a number of thumbnail compositions using only the ellipse tool and the colors black and white, above is my take on the assignment. 

After creating the thumbnail compositions we were asked to pick one that we particularly liked and turn it into a full fledged illustration. We needed to be careful not to lose the original composition in our new image which basically meant transferring the circles and negative space into recognizable objects. I decided to create an elephant spraying water out of its trunk -- no particular reason why. 

Babble Floor

The Seattle Central Library holds many works of art for the public to enjoy, both literary and pictorial. On a recent visit to the library one piece stuck out from the rest. The pieces of art was a sculpture titled "Babble Floor" by renowned artist Ann Hamilton. 

The piece (pictured above) is a 7,200 square foot wooden Maple floor in the Evelyn W. Foster Learning Center on the fourth avenue level of the library. The floor is covered in over 550 lines of text from 11 different languages and alphabets and is made up of sentences from various pieces of literature. The floor consists of the languages Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish and vietnamese. One unique element of the floor is that all of the writing is set in reverse, a play off of the unknown aspect of new languages and a reference to how books are made by the use of typesetting. 

The letters on the floor are raised from the base and make for an extremely tactile experience. Hamilton claims to have done this for a number of reasons, most notably is the fact that she wanted anyone who walked on it to be able to experience the languages in some way or another. Even though most may not be able to read what the words are saying, they will most definitely be able to 'feel' what they are saying.

Hamilton did an exceptional job in creating a piece that was both aesthetically pleasing and thoughtful. I was genuinely engrossed by the floor and will have to take a visit back soon to get the full experience. 

Egon Schiele Copy

In addition to the previous post we were also asked to replicate an Egon Shiele painting titled Lyric Poet. Above is shown my interpretation of the original work.

Illustrator Painting Copies

For the past few periods in my Digital Imaging class we have been working on copying famous paintings in Illustrator. I decided to pick a Wassily Kandinsky painting titled Composition III, above is shown the comparison between the original (left) and my copy (right).

100 Things That Interest Me

Recently was asked in an assignment to list one hundred things that I was interested in. The list was extremely challenging but opened my eyes to interests I had long forgotten about. Here are the results of my list.

1) Art
2) Painting
3) Biking
4) Hiking
5) Walking
6) Bonsai
7) Music
8) Legos
9) Graffiti
10) Printing
11) Reading
12) Architecture
13) Rock Climbing
14) Dinosaurs
15) Money
16) Playing Cards
17) Poker
18) People
19) Trees
20) Nature
21) Fractals
22) Cars
23) Flags
24) Cartography
25) Astronomy
26) Cosmology
27) Language
29) Carbonated Beverages
30) Thai Food
31) Spanish
32) Psychology
33) Photography
34) exploring
35) Roller Coasters
36) Eyes
37) Rain
38) Beach
39) Forest
40) Animals
41) Brain vs. Mind
42) Physics
43) Science
45) Boats
46) Miniatures
47) Tilt Shift Photography
48) Cities
49) Road Trips
50) Farming

I'll save the monotony of the rest of the list, but you get the idea. I recommend everyone make a list of their own you might just find out something new about yourself.