I was looking around Etsy last night and felt that I had to share some finds from Bugs and Monsters. This seller makes all kinds of things, but I like the mugs the most. The seller hand paints mugs from thrift stores with original designs. What a cool way to recycle and make art!

Frida with Dry Tree Branches, Coyoacan (1943)

We know the lady in the photo as the famous painter Frida Kahlo, but who is the person behind the camera taking the pictures?  Lola Alvarez Bravo a female Mexican photographer who took many photos of Frida, nudes and social subjects in Mexico.

“Lola Alvarez Bravo (1903–1993) is widely recognized as Mexico’s first woman photographer. A pioneering figure in the rise of modernist photography in Mexico, she was a profound humanist who used the camera to chronicle the people and places of her beloved country over a remarkable six-decade career.” source

“I look for the essence of beings and of things, their spirit, their reality. Interest, experience, moral and aesthetic commitment, form the third eye of the photographer. There are those who focus on the landscape; I feel attracted to human beings.” —Lola

Alvarez Bravo

A couple photos by Lola:

El ensueno (Isabel Villasenor) (The Dream [Isabel Villasenor]) (1941)

Triptico de los martirios II /Triptych of the Martyrs II (1950)

Cute and original short video that a student did for character design. It took me a while to find a video that I liked, I guess I was just picky today.

I want to get this blog back to its roots and do more art and indie posts. I’m going to try and do that more now that I’m out of school. At least that way I still have a creative outlet.

ps I’m not sure if the vendredi vimeo is going to work with this lay out, maybe I can come up with a better solution.

It has been a busy two weeks! Here are some photos of my adventures.

Maker Faire was awesome! so many things to see, almost needed two days to see it all. You can see all of the Maker Faire photos on Flicker, just follow this LINK. And yes, we saw Adam Savage!

Then I graduated. All of my family and some friends came up to see the ceremony. The ceremony its self was a bit long, but the key note speaker was pretty good. Even though it was on the morning the weather felt really hot! See more photos HERE!

Last but not least is Fanime. I didn’t take as many photos as I normally do, probably because I just wanted to enjoy the con. There were plenty of really good cosplayers. Tim got his wall scroll and I got m  BAAU Down book making us quite happy! Check out just a tad more photos HERE.

Renewable Energy Content Map 11×17″

Renewable Energy Poster 15×20″

Here are my final versions for the first project in graphic design 105 this semester. I don’t mean to brag but I got an A on both! This will be the last time you see these two, promise. Now its time to work on project 2: brochure.

Tonight I was messing around with photoshop and illustrator and I thought I’d share what I was up to. Above is the final result of tonight and I’m quite pleased with it. I’ve never done any illustrations like this, I always try to make the images look too realistic when working from a photo. Maybe this was easier because I was working with a photo of my self. The closest I got to the flat illustration look it this.

Here’s the progression of experiments that I worked on tonight:

Original photo: heavily rotated and a bit cropped (mostly on the sides)

Version 1: messing around with cropping and filters in photoshop. The main things I wanted for this image was to get the color in the scarf to come out, get the green in my eyes to pop and the color of my glasses to be more prominent.

Version 2: About the same as above but in black with a background color, still experimenting. Tim called this on a Andy Warhol Megan. It’s interesting, but I wasn’t content with it.

New cropped photo: it’s still from the original photo, but it has been edited a bit more. I like the highly saturated and contrasting look to this photo. I changed to crop because I felt like the scarf was working in the illustrations and I liked emphasizing the curls on the left.

Version 3: The more I look at this version, the more I like it. Out of all the photoshop experiments I like this on the best. I made the previous photo black and white; messed with the dodging and burning to get the hair the way I want it; and messed with filters.

Now you know what I do with my “college Friday night” a but dorky, I know. But once I get a streak of inspiration to do something I need to use it as much as I can, you never know when another will come your way. I love the result I got tonight (first image)! I find it interesting that I worked with photos of myself and not someone else. I’m such a narcissist!

I hope you enjoyed the blog post, sorry its a bit long at least there are pretty pictures.

So here is my second option for the poster assignment on renewable energy. The teacher likes this concept better than the gas masked earth so I thought I would try it out. I like the color scheme, I might change the orange to red if it look to traffic cone like. The out going circles seem to be a bit awkward, maybe I can mess with those. It looks better when you blow up the image to full size (20×15). This isn’t due for another week, but still get to see what he says tomorrow.

This is the second part of project one, a poster on renewable energy. I was trying a different approach and concept, we’ll see if the prof will like it tomorrow.  Is it too strong?  Oh, and this is a rough too, not done yet. I’m willing to take suggestions on this, or options for different text. Thanks!

Its the start of a new semester, and hopefully they last, this also means a set of new graphic design projects all having to deal with renewable energy. The first project is a combination of two items a content map and a poster. This is my version of a content map on renewable energy. Its still a rough so don’t judge. There are so many different content maps out there and mine are not anything like them.

I was planing on redoing it after seeing everyone’s version and how they are graph like and organized different, but it ended up the teach liked it! Yay! Still a lot of work to go and 3 poster roughs due Tuesday.

ps sorry for crappy version of image

Here we are at the end of the semester with only days left, and I haven’t yet put up the third project from graphic design class. I can’t feel to bad because the teacher hasn’t handed them back yet graded. The triangle piece was the item turned in, this did not stay 2d this was made into a 3d triangle object. This wasn’t exactly a challenging project, it just got my mind thinking in a different way. The cylinder down at the button was a runner up for this project, but it would have been harder to construct and I was taken more with the triangle form.

Here are the instructions the class used:

Use either a cylinder, rectangle or triangle in a 3d manner.
Must use words or phrases.
Must have some opposing aspect to composition whether it be with the object or text.
Must use 3 pantone colors, able to use screens and the color white.