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What’s Inside:

Walking the Line The Hero Within Toasties

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Contents 3. Early Work

We introduce you to a collection of The Creator’s finest and most well-known techniques, practices, and SkillBuilders.

4-5. The Deep End Delve into the a pool of more detailed and consistent posters, illustrations, and designs.

6. Toasties

The world of Toasties was a product and company branding solution. The repetition in colors and design elements is meant to ensure consumers.

7. The Hero Within The final composition of the school year, The Hero Within captures The Creator’s inner strengths in a pop art portrait.

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The design Hero Within “process was Digital Pop Art

My Pop Art Self Portrait was intended to demonstrate my steadiness, strength, and ability to see the hidden beauty in art.

Lasers. I struggled with ideas for this project, but once I settled on the idea of bricks for skin — and received a positive response— I stuck with it. Bricks are a symbol of sturdiness and clean, classic design. This contrasts with the halftone rocks in the background in that the rocks are totally chaotic and colorful and dark and light.

I have both sides within myself: a chaotic and energetic side, and a classic, sturdy side. However, both sides of me are tough like hard rocks/bricks.

The design process was a struggle for me, just as the idea part was. Colors and techniques felt restricting to me. I like halftone, but Photoshop’s filter makes the dots quite blurry. I enjoy a much cleaner and sharper style.

Originally I left the eye “bricks” empty to act as eyes, but with suggestions, I put a rainforest scene within them to show how mystical it is in there. I also sealed up my

a struggle for me, just as the idea part was

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mouth and got rid of some facial features, as they would look out of place on the bricks.

Our school, as a whole, has been sticking to a “Hero Within” theme this year, and being able to learn techniques and apply them to a pice of art, a collage, a portrait, a piece of pop-art, is a pretty neat way to be taught. 7

I created the Toasties Brand Design with the idea of a soft, round, and iconic look in mind. The logo immediately matches the product and the logo itself can even be used as a custom shaped business card. I made full color versions as well as a black and white and typeless designs for use in multiple mediums.

There is a lot of detail in the shadows, type, gradients, highlights, and coloring. All of these choices were made consiously to match the theme of the product. I even went as far as making an html based site layout for the fictional Toasties.com.

Toasties has been designed for recognition and to convey the product and company’s ambitions at a glance. The designs work together, and would even look great on a truck’s side. The logo’s type/ catchphrase is “Toasties — The Toast Company.” This feels pretty classic and really hits you over the head with the message: This is where you go when you want toast. Toasties offers itself as an all-in-one solution to toast-based appliances, pretoasted toast, and more.

THE TOAST COMPANY

THE TOAST COMPANY

I think it’s a successful design, and it works to show how I enjoy clean aesthetics and interfaces.

Expanded Shapes and countershaping negative and positive space is an extremely import design concept. Being able to use important art skills as a starting place — a foundation for the future­ — ensures quality of artwork and a solid understanding of concepts. I’ve always loved the feel of organic shapes and flowing designs, and being able to work freely with positive and negative space and craft what I believe looks elegant and interesting is a reward in and of itself.

Learning about typography via skillbuilders such as logo deshape with my name cut into sign and graphic styles is a fun proit via pathfinder. I chose to cess and really pays off. Graphic take my feedback on it and styles are reaplicable so that one The personal logo project is always a great starting point for using illus- try adding depth. I achieved this type of design can be applied to trator techniques in a composition by using a layer style inset with a medley of words, shapes, and that reflects you. I started a few days a drop shadow. I used several designs (an example of which is late with roughly one day to get my shades of green for simple shading. visible in the “Poke-mans” typoThe logo very clean and graphical element above). It is this 3 rough logos on the page, but still, I got some original ideas out there. simplistic, and can be easily made sort of freedom and ease of use The one I chose to finalize was the to work in print and web and that makes computer-based graphsimplest logo with only a green simple black and white as well. ic design quite a marvelous thing.

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Early Work SkillBuilders

Toasties The Toast Company

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(Clockwise) World Aids Day, Fahrenheit 451, Walking The Line, Laboraparty, Beautiful Lengths, Did You Know?

The Deep End The Work Evolves

I’m really proud of my Walking the Line project (3). My work starts off as a cluster of dots that stream into a fluid line. The line curves and loops into the patterned shadow of a man. The man is a projection of ambition, and there is a dashed line representing a path and movement from the man to the rocket. The rocket travels along gradients of color and positive and negative space to eventually reach the moon. The stars and sun in the background act as the explosion of size and color within the assignment, and represent the man’s accomplishments.

The toughest aspect of the art was deciding how to demonstrate the growth and linear flow of the elements of art and color. Af4

ter my rough draft and critique, I felt that my work wasn’t expressing growth from dot to line to shape to color. I reworked some aspects and added patterns, size changes, fading, and more colors. The only real problem I encountered was that my sun appeared to have abrupt, cutting edges. I eventually decided to crudely fade out the edges with a series of shapes and gradients. In the end I believe that the elements of art and the story began working together in a much more cohesive manner.

The part of the design that I criticize the most is my decision to include color at such an early stage (the rocket). I felt like I was jumping the gun, adding color before counter change, but after finishing the

entire project, it seems very natural and fluid after all.

I feel like I’ve been doing quite well in detailed illustrations in Illustrator lately. I’ve learned new skills and developed somewhat of a style including color, shape, and shading. You can see that I put plenty of detail into the rocket, the sides are shaded and lightened, and the windows have glares. The moon has a custom pattern-fill for its surface, and also has plenty of nice-looking craters and shading under each one. The sun has lighting and glare and lens flare, and demonstrates the most powerful area of the work.

The basis for my collage (2) was the book Fahrenheit 451, and more specifically, the burning of books in a society that stresses synthetic happiness.

The main color scheme for my work was dominantly red, for the sense of fire and chaos. I chose grungy textures for the documents entirety and added a bit of a vignette to symbolize the darkness that surrounds the people and their book burning. I filled the lower section with flaming piles of books to hit the audience over the head with the theme, and I also included the words “Burn” and “Happiness” in a grungy, cracked typeface. This shows that by burning the books, they burn their only path to TRUE happiness, the kind that their society does not allow. I chose a green

landscape, colored Red to show how the people’s freedom is just beyond the burning pages; only, it’s in danger of burning up completely as well. In place of the sky, I added foreign text on a singed page to further stress how strange a concept as knowledge, truth and freedom is to people within the society.

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