Energy Drink

In this assignment I had to create a label for an energy drink that caters to young adults who enjoy the city's nightlife.

There are a lot of elements that I like about it, like the hair, the offset of the buildings and the shape of the face, but I feel like it could use a little more drama. Maybe the hair should have multiple colours? Maybe there should be more people? Maybe the lighting should fizzle out towards edges? What do you think?

The New Yorker part 2

Here is the second part to the previous post. I actually like the caterpillar better than the butterfly (which is in the previous post). If you look closely you can see how the paint did some really beautiful things in the leaf and around the spots on the caterpillar's back.

The New Yorker

The spec for this assignment I had to design a postcard for The New Yorker to send to their clients. I used yupo paper for this assignment, and I really like the effect it created.

The Perfectionist

This is not a scalable solution.

Overheard & Understood

I know. It's been a long time since I last posted anything. Life just got really hectic over the summer so there just wasn't enough time to update. But since I'm taking a break this week, I've decided to post my latest assignment.

The idea behind the assignment is to listen to a conversation and put it in a completely different context. When I finished this painting, I was pretty happy with it. I think it is because I liked the colours a lot. Now that it's been a few weeks, I'm not so satisfied because I think that the painting could more 3D. I also think that I was a bit rusty, and I think that painting on the back of an old watercolour painting didn't help either. I think that the paper didn't accept the pigment so well the second time around so that the painting doesn't have that fresh look that it usually does. Oh well. Lesson learned.

Work and Play

This assignment was pretty free form in that the only specifications were that it had to do with Work & Play. My original image was a little more complicated and I tried to simplify it down to its core idea. Dunno if there's still too much going on though.

Playtime Is Over

My latest assignment was to interpret an article and create an illustration for it. The article I chose is called Playtime Is Over, written by David Elkind for the NY times. He writes about the growing problem of bullying, teasing and discrimination in schools and how the school system is trying to address it. He goes on to say that the rise in bullying is in part caused by the decreasing amount of time children spend playing with other children.

The Selfish Giant

I had a really fun project recently that required making a 3-D set. I've never played much with clay or sculpey since I was about 12, so this was a really fun discovery exercise. I chose to create a scene from The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde.
In this scene, the selfish giant has come home from a 7 year vacation when he finds children playing in his beautiful garden. He gets really angry because he doesn't like sharing his garden with others, so he scares them away.

I had no idea what I was doing, and so I found out from some classmates that if you use sculpey, you have to start with a wire structure. Then you wrap the wire in aluminum foil to give it volume and then finally put on a thin layer of sculpey. This ensures that the sculpey bakes evenly, and does not burn.

This gives you an idea of the scale of the models. I had to work pretty small because there was a size limit on the project. I don't own any clay modeling tools, so all I had were an exacto knife and a little metal pick for picking lobster meat out of its shell.


The shot above gives you a good look at the giant's face. He was my favourite.



This is my favourite photo of the scene.