One Week Left...

...'till I go back to the city! FIT's winter break is freakishly long. I suppose it helps to save on those heating bills, though.

Anyway, I can't say I've been as productive as I wanted to be. Too busy being lazy and playing Fallout 3. But I just recently rediscovered my brother's acoustic guitar under my bed, as well as another miniature guitar of his in my closet. I can't believe I forgot about them! So I've been fiddling around with them a teeny bit.

Fine arts-wise, not much has been happening. I don't know why, but it's impossibly difficult for me to get anything done when I'm at home. Maybe it's the prospect of someone looking over my shoulder every hour, seeing me work. I can't stand it when that happens.

BUT, speaking of work and artsy stuff, I want to direct all of you readers to Dude Craft! Run by my former tech theater teacher and big-time awesome guy Paul Overton, this arts and crafts blog has a number of interesting posts and projects for DIY-minded people out there. Definetly something to check out if you're in the mood to produce (unlike me!).

Anyway, enough about my (currently boring) life! Here are some pics of my 3d design projects! You may remember this from way back:


Since then, we've done maybe....5 or so more projects. Here are some highlights!



Project: Create form with intersecting shapes composed of parallel vertical planes.



Project: Create a radiating form that had the same profile view from all sides. Looks rather menacing, no?


This last one is our final project. We had to take a geometric/cubist/abstract painting and translate it into three dimensions. I took this painting by Theo van Doesburg and turned it into this:






I was going for a crazy Star-Wars-esque city/Death Star scape.

Pardon the crappy photo conditions. In fact, I am ashamed to have uploaded these without color adjustments, but alas, time constraints suck. Yupyup.

Later kids!

New Year, New Prospects!

Hey all!

Well, I've been back at home for the past two weeks or so for winter break. I don't go back for another two weeks, either. To make the time at home less...'meh,' I've gone back and touched up a few paintings, while working on a few new things.

First, if you didn't notice, is the little original painting of a penguin waving goodbye to his polar bear friend. I felt like doing something without references or observation and that little thing just popped out.

Next, I touched up the old skull painting. A few posts back, I put up pics of a skull we did in painting. I really, really wanted to go back and touch it up, so here I did!



It has much deep shadows and is generally sharper looking. I also added a bit of saturation into the background hues.




This isn't new, but I never put a pic of it up. This was done before the skull, almost entirely with a palette knife. Sorta Obama-esque, no?



I also went back in with this guy and deepened shadows, defined the apple a bit more, and sorta cleaned things up a bit. It's interesting what another hour of work can do for a painting.



Lastly (for now) is one of the more recent 3D design projects. We had to create a wall piece that was to be viewed from three sides. I initially wanted to do something that moved or opened, sorta like a cuckoo clock, but that proved to be too complicated. In the end, I went to a good ol' GanPen motif and did this movie ad-type wall piece. I painted some foamcore to make the buildings and explosions and printed out pictures of the bank and GanPen, then slapped them all together with glue.

That's about it for this update. I'm looking forward to seeing how things turn out at the end of this year. Seems to be a tricky time to be a toy designer, what with the economy and all this lead paint going around....

Look forward to more updates, especially featuring 3D design stuff!

Happy New Year!

-Jordan