Mid April & Patriots Day

Hi all, updates will be brief this week as we had Tuesday off as a school scheduling day. I am still not enrolled for a degree so didn't have to attend. But with no classes for me on Tuesday that means I have no new drawings this week.

I did have two Typography classes and two Graphic Design classes. In Typography we are working on Title setup and spacing. Not really something that I think my readers would find all that interesting so I won't bore you with images. Just let me say it isn't as easy as you might think, all sorts of things to keep in mind and so many decisions to make. I know your thinking that there can't be that many, oh but there are, just deciding on a Font to use can be mind boggling when you consider how many fonts there are out there. Then there is how to break it apart, where to put the text on the page, alignment etc. Lots of decisions, I think I will never look at a book cover the same way again.

In Graphic Design we turned in our 4th assignment. Using a word from nature and depicting the word typographically. We had to include the definition in the image and used Illustrator to get different effects with the letters. We could not warp or stretch a letter shape and we could not use color. However we could use different fonts, italic, bold, outline only, and even break the letter apart and remove some of it. Below are the two versions that I passed in. I think I like the black V volcano one better but who knows. My one comment here is that the layout of the letters is my instructors not mine. I did choose the type faces and how to treat each letter, but because he gave me the pattern of where to place the letters I sort of feel that I don't own this piece, if you can follow my thinking.

Outline on the left of the V is actually the definition of a volcano, text on a path if you are interested in the technical details.

Volcano #2 with the black V

I probably should have moved the definition to the first O, or perhaps the L, but I sort of like it on the V so I left it. I did have to move the path a bit away from the letter so it would remain readable. Most of my classmates preferred this one out of the two.

Because Color and Design meets 2 days a week I did have a class yesterday. Homework for that one was to create a drawing in the cubist style. We drew 3 views of the same item last week and then made copies. We then cut the copies up and arranged them so that the image looked like all 3 views of the bottle at the same time, sort of. Below is a photo of one of my original drawings of my bottle.

Straight on view of my bottle, I did 2 more
one side view and one top down view


Here is the final drawing

I cheated a bit and used chalk instead of charcoal, using white, black and gray chalks on the grayish paper. But the instructor liked it (I think), I didn't go overboard with the white so it does blend with the black and doesn't scream at the viewer. Cubist style is tricky, it matters very much the item you are trying to modify. My bottle works (I think) but some of the items the other students used didn't work very well and it showed in the results. The other two drawings that really worked was one of a shoe and another of a teapot, both very nicely done.

That's it. I haven't been sewing except for a bit of hand sewing so there is nothing on that front to show. Should have more for you next week since I will have a drawing class. Though Monday is Patriots Day here in MA so we have Monday off. It is also the day for the running of the Boston Marathon if you are into things like that. I expect I will be at home and working hard on homework. Everyone have a good weekend.