This is a movie poster I created for ad class. We were asked to come up with a one-word title that was a noun and use photo and illustration. In my brainstorming process I came up with way too many words (I love words) and ended up with a short-list of probably 15. I couldn’t make up my mind which one to use. On the day of class, I decided on the spot that it would be a movie called “Souvenirs” and it would be about hoarders.

I had a lot of fun curating the objects on the “shelf” and coming up with a graphic solution for this poster. Turns out maybe I’M a hoarder because I found most of the items in my junk drawer at home (including the teeth), and the “wallpaper” is a piece of paper I had bought for another project from last year. The composition was photographed together in cool, very late (bordering on too late) afternoon light, using a piece of tin foil as a reflector. I then used Illustrator to manipulate it to look like a painting, and added the finishing touches in Photoshop. I was hoping to achieve a “paint by numbers” look, as if these objects were precious to the collector, but trashy and a little creepy to anyone else, to whom these items didn’t carry the same emotional attachment.

What surprised me the most about this project was the emotional connection I had with the composition. It took me several hours to curate the objects and several more to compose them in a way that I hoped would show the character of the collector. I sat for a long time looking at it and even left it for a day before photographing, allowing time for a few final adjustments. I even told my roommate that looking at this composition made me feel sad. I really hope that sentiment is translated to the viewer.

And here is a “the making of” photo 🙂

This is my latest project for my Graphic Productions class.  It was a poster for an exhibition called “Question Reality” for an art gallery called Space Between.  This was totally the coolest and most fun thing by far I have ever made on a computer, and I had so much fun making it.  I even bought a really cool book on how to tell stories with photoshop compositions, and I can’t wait to make some more.

Whoop whoop!

As one of our final color theory assignments we were tasked with creating a poster in Illustrator that depicted a house or any kind of dwelling of our choice.

Here’s mine!

This poster illustrates several color relationships.  The tetradic (double complementary) set of yellow, orange, blue and violet.  I used analogous relationships for the fish: yellow, yellow-orange and orange.  For the house, I used various tints and shades of the primary colors red, blue and yellow.

I used a muted color scheme and lots of shades and opacities to show highlights and shadows.  I used a radial gradient in the background to indicate the light source.

I worked on the words quite a bit.  I wanted to put something poetic on there, but couldn’t really come up with what I was looking for, so I opted for something still poetic but more childlike.  I feel like the typeface expresses the mood of the words well.

This is the first project we were given for Jason’s class.  It was intended to get our creative juices flowing after the Christmas break.  I of course took the opportunity to express myself through comics, and was surprised with how fast I was able to do this.  Admittedly, it’s a bit of a mess, but I still like how it turned out.  In typical form, I used this opportunity to explain my failures and why my life has been such a goddamn train wreck before now.

Roadmap of my messed up life.

When we were assigned the final poster project, I got some beer and did a huge brainstorm / braindump with a my friend Cory Foster. Over the next couple of hours we came up with a ton of ideas, many of which I thought were pretty cool. I sketched out my top ten ideas.

On my way to school one glorious Tuesday, I was sitting on the bus, continuing to come up with ideas for this assignment. I couldn’t believe it. It was like my brain was a fountain and the ideas were.. I don’t know if this is working…. anyway you get it. Long story short, I felt like the world’s biggest friggen genius ever invented. That’s it, I thought, this is my time to shine. I’m gonna be the president of the world.

Within blocks of the school, whilst daydreaming about becoming president of the world, I thought of the old saying “don’t be second banana” and also the Woody Allen movie Bananas, wherein a clip from Battleship Potempkin was featured. WORLDS COLLIDED. As the bus rolled up to the school, I made one last doodle. It was a banana.

Teacher Jill liked the banana. I say Teacher Jill because that’s what I call her.

I was like ugh is she kidding?!?!?! She must be like one of those idiot savant rainmen people who can see stuff that other people can’t (that’s not an insult, it means I think she’s smart. Follow along, dumbass)! That’s by far the dumbest idea of the lot…. and now looking back at my sketches I began to question the intellectual integrity of any of these ideas. A banana? What does that even mean? But the client gets what the client wants, right? A week later, I had so many different manifestations of banana posters I thought I was gonna actually GO bananas. Wah wahhhh.

Anyway.

The night before the posters were due, I was still stuck.  I was going cross-eyed, and getting frustrated so I pulled out my notes from my original beer brainstorm for inspiration. I decided that doing a variety of fast and convenient foods would make more sense to the 48 hour film fest, because that’s all you’ll have time to eat.  I also did a fruit series.  Here is the result of all my hard work:

Just kidding, sort of.  Here are a few of my “finished” products.

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