Final Poster

I entered the Communication Arts Illustration Competition. The guidelines for this competition are you can enter any illustration from the year January 2013 to January 2014. There are categories such as advertising, books, editorial, for sale, institutional, motion/animation, self promotion, and unpublished. I put my piece in the unpublished category because it is a personal work of mine. Below is the link to the competition.

http://www.commarts.com/competitions/illustration.html?utm_source=graphiccompetitions.com&utm_medium=square&utm_campaign=GraphicComp-Illus2014

I decided to go with my girlfriend as my illustration for the competition. It's a different idea than what I initially had but I still enjoy it. It's originally made for 36x24. I drew out the sketch first, than went over it in Illustrator. This picture means a lot to me because it keeps my style but still captures the essence of my girlfriend (that is if you know her). I think it speaks for itself. Its is a graphic design illustration and it is part of a up coming collection. They say do what you love, and it doesn't get better than that.

Illustration competition

So I have two ideas on what I would like to do. One is a piece that is almost like an advertisment but not quite. It is of a drawing of a Timberland boot that is actually the trunk of a tree, and from the opening of the boot where your foot goes in, sprout a tree with many branches and vines. For those of you who don't know what the Timberland logo looks like, it is a tree with little branches. Like so,

My picture looks a little something like this, ( its a pretty terrible picutre, I just took it really fast)

Apparently, it looks huge in this post, so I am sorry if it is a little hard to read. But acutally the bigger it is the better detial you will be able to see.
My other idea is a picture of my girlfriend. I am doing a series of her, because they say do what you love and you wont have to work a day in your life. So I am doing a series of illustrations of her mixed with other factors. In this one, it is a drawing of half of her face, with some geometirc shapes, and on the other side, I think i want to incorporate water, or a waterfall of some sort. Sort of like japanese style. Here is part of the drawing,

So those are my ideas.
There really is no intended audience, its just for people who love illustrations.
I plan on using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to add in color and special effects with either or picutre.

Storyboard Screenshots

This isn't so much as a screenshot from my storyboard because I am still in major thinking mode of how to execute this project, but at the end will have both of my logos.

The red is my original company name ALLFOR___, and the purple is a derivative of that, pigeon intuitive. I am still deciding if I want one half of the video to be for ALLFOR___ and the other half for pi, or combine them both. But at the end of the animation, the flow of lines will morph into both or one of these logos to finish off the video.

Self Promotional Animation

So, I have had this idea to do an animation for self promotion on my website, but I was never able to because I had to withdraw from my flash class that was teaching me. So my dream went dim for a bit, but now with this final project is has been revived. I want to bas it around a song from Hybrid. My only problem is it's two minutes and four seconds. I know its long, but will that four seconds over overtime be ok? What do you guys think?

I don't want to just do this project for the sake of this module, it is something I have wanted to do for about 2 years now. This is the perfect opportunity and I am going to take it, four seconds over or not.

It is way more complicated than I would like, but I am going to work with what I have and make what I have dreamed of. It is an animation made completely of lines. You will see the lines being drawn out and creating visuals and walking through a journey of where I want to be and who I am. If all goes well, I will hit the nail on the head.

It is extremely hard to sketch out my sketches because everything that needs to be sketched is all moving. But I have attached my logo of my brand. Sometimes it is hard for me to put my ideas and sketches on paper because I work so well in my head. Its a strange way and a lot of people say it is good to write down and sketch your ideas, but unfortunately for me that's not how my brain works, and I am a very visual person so it gets frustrating.

Any ideas on how to help me put my sketches and ideas on paper?

Adobe is life

After watching the video on photographer Uli Staiger, I learned a lot about how he utilizes Photoshop with his photography. The fact that he acknowledged the use of Photoshop bringing him to where he wants to be with his art is pretty cool. I would love to learn Photoshop in the way that he uses it. I use mostly Adobe Illustrator in order to get my ideas in place, but there are other applications I use as well. I am recently designing some pieces that involve old school electronic devices, such as beepers, old cell phones and old school computers. It is going to be a series, which I haven’t decided what to call yet, but it will be featured on my website I am still working on. I start with a sketch and then bring it into Illustrator and put it into a vector. I work with mostly lines and few color, but it all comes together. I now am learning this new application from Adobe Cloud call Muse. It is almost like DreamWeaver but without the coding. It also has a lot of new feature and it is really easy to work with. I don’t like coding much, so this is perfect for me. I also use InDesign. One day, I would like to take a collection of my work, and put it into a book, or a local magazine and discuss art and life problems. InDesign is the perfect app because it has similar tools to Photoshop and Illustrator, minus the publishing aspect of course. I also use illustrator to make my tshirt designs, which I will be starting a business for. So all of Adobe’s apps pretty much mean the world to me because it is my livelihood. It has helped reach my creative goals since I discovered Adobe when I was 13.

Final Website

I have some screen shots of my website. It's an actual website made on www.wix.com, but in order to get the most out of it, everything you see on it was made in Photoshop or Illustrator. I plugged it into dreamweaver and I am still learning to make the final FINAL website. There is a lot to be done, and it looks a little different than my wireframes. I wanted to be very precise on creating this because it is my actual website. You can check it out here, and let me know some feedback!
http://www.redpentagon.com/

Remember, they're just screen shots, and there is a lot more to the published website. I am still working on the site to complete the whole thing, with DreamWeaver and the new application Muse on the cloud.

http://www.redpentagon.com/

Tools and videos

There are many tools I would like to deepen my understanding of between Photoshop and Illustrator. I am more efficient in Illustrator than I am Photoshop but the tools are almost identical, give or take a few. In Photoshop, I would like to learn ore about the pen tool and the brush tool to widen my horizons of digital painting. In Illustrator, I know a lot about the pen, but I don’t know it all. So that would be a tool I would love to learn all about. I also want to learn about live paint tool and the blob brush tool. All these tool in both programs are a serious essential to what I need in order to succeed in my choice of design industry. They will teach me too complete a piece and have finished colored works of art, with perfect lineage work. It’ll help me get the perfect product I want.

I’ve looked around the world wide web for some websites on my specific design industry and I’ve found a lot of cool things. One website I swear by is tv.adobe.com. I found a tutorial on how to make a tshirt design in illustrator, which s pretty much what I plan on doing for the rest of my life so this is very helpful. http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adobe-for-academics/creating-your-personal-brand-episode-creating-a-tshirt-design/

On a more broader subject, www.lynda.com/ in general is the greatest thing to happen to me. All the videos whether it’s from fundamentals of Photoshop to videos on business and how to manage or really anything you need, its there.

One more website that is of extreme use to  me is youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es6iwTjMLhQ is a video about actually screenprinting. Its from Ryonet, a screen printing company that has supplies and classes. All of this is so useful to me and makes me confident that I can be successful in what I need to do.

Website Frame Designs

These are my website wire frames for a much MUCH developed professional website. It includes an introduction, a portfolio section, faqs, a shop and a bunch of other sections. It's still in development and I don't have everything I need for it yet, but it is slowly coming along. I have used Photoshop, and I am still learning DreamWeaver. Its a little confusing for me.

My website's name is called ALLFOR___. All for meaning all for everything, all done by me, Julie Forlenza. ALLFOR___.

Art Deco

I had to go with a different idea for my spread because I couldn't get the time to draw it from scratch. But in this idea, the cover is inspired by Super Mario with a touch of art deco. The inside spreads shows simple text that would be small articles or captions pertaining to the pictures featured in the spread.

Art Deco for Digital Arts

My preliminary sketches for my magazine front and spread aren't what I would like them to be. Although I will admit, I had a very difficult time trying to figure out how to execute this. And after my research, I finally figured it out. I know what I want to do, but this isn't how it will look. I am actually still working on some sketches and brain storming some ideas, but I am pretty solid what I want it to be about.

 Here, a sketch for the cover of my magazine, I found my research to be really helpful. Art Deco has come about around post WWII, so for my cover I wanted to create an art deco styled cover of WWII fighter planes. I want the titles to be about art styles after WWII focusing on art deco and the origins of it. And the other titles of the spread inside magazine on the cover about architecture post WWII between the 1930s and 1940s. Houses, city architecture and art of that time.

 

I am still working on designs and concepts for what the actual spread will look like but it will all be art deco inspired with articles about homes inspired by the deco and city building and other fixtures of art deco time.

I will create illustrations for the front cover and borders and fancy up the spread itself. And I will use pictures I have researched for the spread itself. And focus the typography around the deco style.

The industry of digital art and design & open source

I find the graphic design area most interesting. From previous discussions, I just find all the aspects of design interesting. Being a graphic designer means understand the basics of a lot when it comes to graphicsm communication, and design. It has information design in it and color psychology in it. It's pretty much the bundle of all that is graphic. To know all of this to perfect being a good graphic designer take a lot of work, but being one can literally land you a job amost anywhere. You can work as a graphic designer for, lets say Macy's, to the NYPD, to a local store, to a giant corporation, to anything really. This is why it interests me so much. I plan on getting internships and little jobs like freelancing to get a big gig as a graphic designer.

I researched some open source applications and I actually found quite a few that I didn't know existed. I wasn't too familiar with open source until now. Although I did have Open Office my dad introduced me too, but I never really thought of any others being out there. All the open sources I had listed would be a great help to me, if I didn't already pay for the expensive ones! I usually work in Illustrator, so what I found would be a great help. I also found a program (Font Forge) that helps you forge fonts, which is big for more because I am always after fonts I can never get a hold of. But obviously being free is a pro, there are quite a few cons. Because it was made as an open source, it doesn't have all the resources to work as well as an Adobe program because of how it was programmed. Such as bugs, little tools here and there, that can be a big help, such as saving to the actual program and not having all commands work well enough under a bunch of different commands. Basically it doesn't take multitasking as well. 

FontForge allows you to edit outline and bitmap fonts. You may create new ones or modify old ones.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/fontforge/?source=directory

InkScape is a vector graphics editor featuring transparency, gradients, node editing, pattern fills, PNG export, and more. Aiming for capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, Visio and more.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/inkscape/?source=directory .

HTML 5 is an editor online tool which lets you design html pages with an interface very close to dreamweaver's or powerpoint's one. It imports medias, design pages, make navigation menus and more. It also has tools that were inspired by WordPress.        

http://sourceforge.net/projects/html5-editor/?source=directory

Screenprinter and the Misuse of Drugs

Johnny Cupcakes. His real name, Johnny Earle, created a company with screen printed shirts designed by him for his nickname “Johnny Cupcakes.” He is a well respected, world renown artist and business owner and entrepreneur. He has stores around the world and some in the states. All because he came up with one idea and marketed it in the way that got him across. His use of colors on his shirts are remarkable and very eye catching.

So I supposed you can say the design business I want to research, and HAVE been researching is screen printing with graphic design. I, too, plan on using similar techniques as his to create my own shop with custom tshirts. It’s hard to list what I would explore in my work because I don’t really have anything specific, I want to learn and explore it all so my option are big. Although, I would like to learn the concepts behind color use, as to where and what to use, how it draws people in, to use CS6 to master illustrator and to become better with vectors. I would also like to learn how to paint with illustrator. I want to learn how to use digital art in a graphic design and typographer perspective.

A social problem I would like to see resolved or positively influence is the misuse of prescription drugs. On the island I live on, Staten Island, there has been a severe misuse in prescription drugs throughout many communities. Unfortunately, it isn’t just on my island either. This misuse has led to many deaths and many young people in rehab, with the unfortunate turn of events of relapsing when they get out. If I could, I would like to make tshirt series based on these negative effects and make series of them. I want to take the brutal consequences of these drugs and there effects and turn them into witty, hopefully not too offensive designs. These days, younger people can’t seem to pay attention to something unless it is thrown in their face in a creative interesting way. A way that can make them think, and say “wow, okay.” Even if it is uncalled for or perhaps rude and unnecessary, the point is across. I would like to incorporate color and well thought out, sarcastic witty designs and put them on tshirts to slap the people of my community and possibly the world about the affects of drugs. I plan on doing positive effects as well. With bright colors and loud typography. I would make them into collections, such as a light collection and a dark collection, standing for the pros and cons of drugs. And for those of you thinking that there is no pro to a drug? Not taking them is a pro. Being happy because you don’t take them is a pro. I’d like to think I would get my point across.

cites:
http://www.johnnycupcakes.com/
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2013/04/23/prescription-drug-abuse-up-among-us-teens-survey

Artist Statement

Being simple in the less is more category, this is my artist statement. I produce nothing more than mere puns, to childish dreams, to explicit material that teenagers non the less would say. Nothing but shapes, colors, and my beloved lines; all come together to either make you laugh, turn your head and squint your eyes, or say "what?"
In other words, my actual "speaking words," this is simple stuff. I just like to create what I like. You don't have to be smart to get it, there's no hidden message in the work. If anything, it should smack you in the face. If not? That's okay too, art isn't for everyone. I like the use of lines and solid color because I feel it pops more. It draws your eye in. Of course, not all my art looks like this, but what I am basing my energy on now, is just that. Simple, plain colors paired up with some lines. Like a geometric white living room with a plash of color accented chairs. Of course I can get technical in computer and artist language, but I won't put you through that.

I would like to say that is my artist statement, but I can feel it lacks a lot of personality. My personality. There's so much that I have to learn about myself and my art, that I feel I can't possibly write a statement now, but I tried. I'm sure it will change from time to time, maybe in the next minute or so, to the next week, month, years. Maybe I'll update it here. I guess I can see I'll keep you posted as soon as I know myself.

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff

That's what my dad says. Well he got it from a little book called "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff, and It's All Small Stuff." I really wanted to read it but I just don't have the will power to read as much as I'd like to. I skimmed through it and yes I did learn a lot from the little I read. Which brings me to my next thought...

...In relation to what I just said up there, in the underlining, I also believe in simplicity. Less is more. Maybe it doesn't make sense now because I mean, how can you read a little and learn a lot, and not read everything and learn so much more? It may sound stupid and lazy but if I can get what I want out of the little that I need to do, I am okay with that. Because I know if I do more, I can be greater than what I am. And I know this won't make a lot of sense, or any for that matter, to most people but it makes sense to me. Now maybe (I'll admit) not in the academic area so much, although I can contradict that also but that's for another time; but for everything else around us. People seem to fail to get the most out of nothing, to see everything out of the little things. Take the world for example- it's not doing too hot right now right? With all the war and crimes and genocide and all the bad things that half of us aren't even educated about or know anything about. But there is beauty deep within the ugly, but we are too scared to look for it. There is beauty in the rest of the world, how everything flourishes and starts anew once everything dies. Or history can repeat itself forever. It's all contradicting and very stressful. Which brings me to another point...

...I do not like stress. But who does? I look at all these important people and business owners, teachers, cops, lawyers, rich, poor, etc, and they are all stressed. Some of them even have everything and no one knows why the are under so much stress. I want to be a business owner and yes I know it's nearly impossible to NOT be stressed, but I am a firm believer that you (in general) can be a very laid back, near to stress-free business owner or whatever you would like to be. People are so uptight with crammed schedules and even when they have people doing their things for them, they're still stressed. I plan on being one of the few, one out of many (E Plurbis Unim) to be a laid back business owner, life appreciate and all that come with it. Even maybe a bit lazy. Everyone deserves to be lazy.
Me being an artist, I am already half way there. Some of us say artists are very free spirited, or some say we are full of themselves. Either way maybe I can be both but so can a lot of people.

This picture I did on Illustrator was the very product of my laziness. I wasn't too familiar with the program when this was created, but it drew me in. And when I redid it, it came out to this...

It turns out that I used my laziness to create another image of something more, something that draws the eye in more. I'm actually selling prints of this image as well now. It may not seem like much, but I do take pride in them. And believe it or not, I worked a lot harder and a lot longer on the second illustration.

So I guess you can say my values and morals as a person and an artist, is try your best  not to sweat the small stuff. We can all be great and kept up to date and a little stress free more and more each day.
It does take practice I suppose.