Monday, January 3, 2011

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2011, everyone! This year, I resolve to work hard, keep a good attitude, and stay upbeat! Which is what I try to do every year, but why should I resolve to change one aspect of my life when it's much easier to live a positive life anyway?

So...

It's been about 13 weeks since my last blog post.

Please forgive me. Bah, I don't need to apologize! I've been obscenely busy!

Almost immediately after my last blog post, things started to get a bit hectic. And that's putting it lightly! As the semester went on, the workload only continued to build up. Well, it didn't exactly build up, but we were given a lot of short-term projects with no breathing time in between.

While the workload was almost overwhelming, I am happy to say that I loved almost every minute of it.

At this point, we have the 10 boards that will compose our internship portfolios. At around the 7th or 9th board, we started to re-do out older ones to get them up to shape. Here are some before and after shots:

Do you guys remember this?

14/15 weeks later

I cringe every time I look at an old board.

Crazy what difference a few weeks can make, eh? It certainly helps that we have one (or two/three towards the end of the semester) of these due every week. Here are some more pics of renderings I've done:

A toy in translucent plastic. I (and most of the class) got scolded for using gray.


Not too bad! I really enjoy marker rendering now. It's super-fun and very rewarding. Unlike paintings which are often never "done," there is always a finishing point with these product drawings. The sense of accomplishment after finishing a board is maybe one of the most satisfying art-related things I've done.

As for the rest of my boards...well, I'm afraid I'll have to keep those secret. Secrecy is a big part of the toy industry, but I believe that processes are interesting and sharing knowledge is important. If you ever encounter me in real life, I'd probably be happy to show you others!

That's about it for this blog post. Tomorrow is the first day of Winterim classes. It's three weeks of re-doing our boards and further preparing our portfolios and resumes for our summer internships. I'll keep y'all posted!

Happy thoughts,
-J

P.S. Do yourself a favor and check out Every Day Is Awesome. I'll talk about it more next post, but...just do it.

Oh, and I have my own web address! You can get here by going to http://jordanliv.com now. How cool is that?!