Thursday, March 22, 2012

Adventures In Freelancing -- Part II

As I mentioned before, Steve is a pretty consistent source of clientele. This time, one of his roommates needed a website for a web series he is making entitled Arklay. It tells of the events leading up to a big zombie outbreak and the conspiracy behind its origin.





For the website, he wanted something very basic, and without any heavy navigation. The idea is that there are five key phrases, each with an accompanying video. There isn't any indicator of what phrases the videos are linked from, so the viewer has to search for the link amongst the cluster of crazed writing. As of right know there is only one video up (spoiler alert: you can watch it by clicking the not-so-subtle bloody words), and I'll be updating the site with the others as they are completed. You can visit the website by clicking here.

Fun fact: the bird in the Twitter icon on the bottom of the main page is undead (it has x-ed out eyes), but it ended up being so small you can't tell. What can I say, superfluous details are my bread and butter.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

CLose to finish!

Hey guys, just looking for final crits on this piece. Maybe resolution on the puddle or background trees? Maybe more dark vignetting in the foreground? Thoughts please! And thanks to Elyse I now have a very detailed schedule to finish this series and accountability, yay teamwork!

 

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Super Post III -- Christmas in March

I was consolidating/deleting some files on my desktop when I found a folder containing a bunch of images I meant to post to the blog a while back. Since they are all gifts I made to give to people for Christmas, I decided to make it into another big fat super post!




It's become a yearly tradition for my mom to brew some variety of alcohol to give as gifts during the holidays. This year, she wanted the bottle to look a little more 'professional', so I designed a wine label using an updated version of the one I did for Vargo's class. For those of you who are wondering, 'Trois Amis' is French for 'Three Friends'. At least that's what my mom said. I have a limited knowledge of French (a.k.a. none whatsoever).



To further develop the sewing skills I discovered last year, I decided I wanted to try my hand at making hand-sewn ornaments. The moose was for my mom (she's crazy about moose) and the owl was for my good friend. Funny story: the design of the owl is actually based off of one of the designs I created for my application for the internship at Carter's. The difference is that this time, the recipient actually liked it.




Before my sister moved to California, she adopted a kitten from a litter one of her neighbors abandoned. For her gift, I decided to make something she could give to Florence (her kitten), so I made a handmade catnip-filled dead animal toy. My original idea was to make a set -- a bird, a fish, and a mouse -- but I ran out of time. Maybe next year!





When trying to figure out a gift for another one of my friends, I remembered how taken she was with Lizard Wizard, one of the abandoned toys in the Toy Story short that proceeded The Muppets. What's significant about this drawing is that I used markers over top of my rough pencil sketch, and then added stronger values with colored pencil. I didn't do any ink outlining -- which you all know I am so prone to do. You can scrape your jaws off the floor now.





In addition to moose, my mom has always been an avid collector of nutcrackers. So every Christmas, my sister and I make a custom nutcracker to add to her collection. This year, we decided to do a matched pair -- a tamborine player and a trumpet player that were supposed to be Salvation Army workers...but we lost the Salvation Army scarf and badge accessories, so we decided to made them into a police band. My sister knit mini-scarves for them to replace the ones we lost.

...And that's what kept me busy during the holidays. I'm currently working on some more projects now, so expect some updates in the near future!