Little update:

Boy, has it been a while.

I can’t believe October is already coming to an end. Soon, the holiday season will kick into full gear. Random note: As much as I dislike cold weather, my skin unnaturally clears up. Bring on the winter!

Noteworthy: I am a newly employed graphic designer at a website company that does a lot of branded entertainment. It’s been a slow & steady progress. I first started as a creative intern, which transitioned into an hourly pay. Come November, I will be part of their full-time staff which is pretty awesome. In applying, I made a silly little cover letter “cartoon”, which surprisingly caught their attention. Check it out here.

Consequently, my personal creative pursuits have been strained a little as I adjusted to the 40+ hour/work week. 

That’s pretty much it for now. Perhaps more pictures in the future?

rxmanticism: my rxmance shirt

I try so hard to pretend that shopping doesn’t excite me. But it does.

My mother brought me up to have a high tolerance for shopping. Every Sunday after church, we’d drive off to the shopping mall where she’d train my sister and I to look for good clothes at bargain values. I think we would spend about four hours there every time we visited. My dad would get annoyed – and he would go bum in the bookstore.

I could spend hours window-shopping, without buying a single item. Other people might see it as a waste of time – but it energized me. As the wonderful overthinker that I am, I could also spend an hour deciding between two items. I enjoy shopping, not necessarily to buy, but to see what’s out there.

Lately, I’ve been spending time with my friend, Greg. I intern for him and learn cool things. One thing that I enjoy is wandering the city streets, looking for interesting storefronts with him and his friends.

Today, after work, we went wandering around Soho/Nolita. Our second stop was the store Invent.ory, a boutique store with “outlet prices”. Awesome.

Inside, I perused the racks, musing at the fashion oddities (I prefer my wardrobe practical and long-lasting these days) and I came across this line of shirts by rxmance. Currently, there is not a satisfying website that features the many cool designs I saw at the store – their main website is under construction with nary a product picture and there haven’t been too many blog posts about them for a while. With this, I do wish I could post images of the cool designs today.

They’re cool because they showcase a lot of patterns and abstract line play. There are no punchlines or jokes but very intriguing, abstract and experimental designs. The composition of the shapes, lines and colors are well balanced and visually pleasing to my eye. There is subtlety in their designs but not without some playfulness. The designs cover nearly the entire front of the shirts but they are not as loud as the majority of t-shirt designs out there. What do I mean by “loud”? Here’s a scale: A plain grey crew-cut tee is at one end of the spectrum, Three Wolf Moon at the other. Me being a person of petite bone structure, I cannot do loud clothing very well.

So blah blah blah, without further ado (and rambling), here are pics of my purchase!

Ze shirt

Closeup of the X’s, O’s and lines that make up the entire design. Intense!

The abnormally long tag stem which makes this shirt feel unique and individually prepared – which it is!

I don’t know why there is a gross green glow to these mobile pictures. The tshirt is white, I promise. My mind often wonders about the future of t-shirt design. I do think tees like this (full-blown shirt coverage, abstract quirky images, wholly decorative, unfinished non-vectorized looks) will be hitting mainstream stores in the future.

Breaking the silence

Things have been busy for me lately. Finding an internship these days is hard, not to mention finding paid work! All in all, it’s also difficult to remember to just kick it and have fun. I aim to give a more substantial update soon, but I must ask this very pressing question:

Piggy bank or sea turtle?

Your comments please. Thanks in advance. : )

SAF for unoppressive bookstore

Bookstores have always been a favorite hang out of mine. I appreciate them all, big and small.

Sometimes, I’ll go in to make myself feel more intellectual. But many times, I visit to simply indulge in the visual: tasty book covers on display, as if they were individual little posters that happened to cover pages and pages of words. The quaintness of Outliers, the detachment of a Chuck Klosterman memoir, or the refinement of a beautifully-bound burgundy canvas of Charles Dickens complete with gold foil letters.

Whatever the case, I have a tolerance well built for hours and hours of perusing the inventory of most stores. Every store is a museum.

My friend Annie (mentioned in a previous post) is here in the city for the weekend and I think, for the most part, she is equally curious about stores, particularly the new and foreign. After our dinner tonight, we went out walking around the West Village rather aimlessly – not sure where to go save that we simply didn’t want to go home yet.

And then we saw something promising. A bookstore. In Annie’s words: “I could tell you wanted to go in and take a look because you kept staring at it from across the street.” The bookstore had an interesting name: “Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books”- only in NY. or some other big eclectic city. We went inside and stayed there for about an hour and a half. Annie picked up a bunch of children’s books for her teaching job this fall while I perused the selections of art, design and comics. This was no Strand or B&N – but there were some real gems that I found. Life can be more fun when you work with what you’ve got, less so when you actually have what you want.

Here are my picks.

1.)

Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design
by Paul Mijksenaar & Piet Westendorp
I am quite excited about this one -
I chose this primarily as an inspiration book.

2.)

For A Better World: Posters from the United Nations
by Edward B. Marks with foreword by Kofi Annan
This will also serve as an inspiration book.
I love poster design and it will be interesting
to see it in this particular context.

3.)

War Posters: Weapons of Mass Communications
by James Aulich
This one was the biggest book of my lot.
It is filled with writings on the history of
war posters, not to mention a boatload
of the posters themselves. I flipped through
the book while at the store, and really
couldn’t put it back down.

4.)

Krazy Kat by Patrick McDonnell
This weekend is the Museum of Comic and
Cartoon Art Festival, and anticipating it has
gotten me into a comic mood these days.
Not only am I trying to hash out some
ideas for comics myself, I’m poking around
at the current comic world a bit more.

5.)

Big Fat Little Lit by Art Spiegelman
& Francoise Mouly
Again, another manifestation
of my comics interest

6.)

An Illustrated Encyclopedia of
Traditional Symbols by J.C. Cooper
This is really interesting. From dragonflies
to strawberries, this book will tell me the
meanings of all those little symbols that
are always jammed into the background of
art pieces. Jan Van Eyck immediately
comes to mind.

Total amount paid for six books: ~ $54.50. Support a local business – check out the bookstore and pick up some goodies for yourself!

Yelp reviews

And come to the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) Festival this weekend! I think I’m a go on that, even it is for one or two hours.

Rain, rain…

… go away.

Felt like making this the other day while at work. I drew the figure first and cut it out. Then I taped it to a blue background. 12″ x 16.5″

I love working with cray-pas!

–

On another note, I updated my website (Flash reader required). Check it out – it has more pictures!

Afterschool Specials: Dot Art

There’s no beating around the bush on this one: lately, I’ve been intrigued by Dot Art markers. They are incredibly fun to use! Yet another medium found in grade school that I shouldn’t underestimate – in addition to crayons and washable markers.

The weather has been getting better these days as spring is making its rounds and summer hinting at its near arrival. When the weather is indeed warm enough, we send the kids outside to the playground to run around and wreak havoc on the playground. I have to tell the little dudes to not run in the hallway, often in vain … and I know. I was there once. To see them push open the doors as if the doors were made of rubber and not at all of hard wood with steel accents, burst out into the sunshine, sprint over the white diamond and commence a game of tag on the big-toy… it’s one of the best moments of their day, I think.

However, when it rains, we make them stay inside in the cafeteria. Amid all the young queries – “Can we go outside?” – “No.” -We bring out the box of Legos, the Lincoln logs, sometimes the Play-doh, and last but not least, the blank paper and the paints and markers and crayons. Almost always, the Dot Art markers are out. Sometimes I am not paying attention when the other afterschool teachers bring out all the indoor activities onto the cafeteria table, but when I rear my head and take a look, boys and girls alike are unleashing their artistic fury on the blank sheets of paper. 

I made up the ‘unleashing-their-artistic-fury’ part – but I do mean it when I say the Dot Art markers are always a hit. And now, for this Afterschool Special, I present to you some examples of Dot Art.

 

Untitled 1 – This picture is not from my own hands. Call me Marcel DuChamp, but I found this picture (and the next two) lying on the cafeteria tables abandoned and I took them to be posted on this blog for all of interneternity. The colors here are marvelous, aren’t they? 

 

Untitled 2 - Another abandoned piece. I kept this one because it reminds me of those ancient Japanese landscape illustrations. Just that long blue streak alone reminds me of a volcano. But I know for a fact that the streak was simply the result of a kid using this very piece of paper as a ”table cloth,” so that he or she could color all the way to the edges of his or her own paper. That “kid” may have been me… see second to last image…. Also, I think I know which student started this drawing.

 

Untitled 3 - I really thought this picture was great! I am seriously going to be one of those awesome moms/aunts/godmothers/crazy-female-relatives that thinks everything her little toddler object of affection makes is pure brilliance. I saw this piece and I swear, I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. I can’t really explain why… maybe its composition is well-executed?
 

 

I liked the previous picture so much, that in case it would be taken home by its owner, I made one for myself. This one has more white space though.  

 

HI! - This picture is actually a mystery collaboration, where the mystery lies in the fact that I don’t know who wrote the “HI!” on the blank piece of paper that I found. The jumping guy and the blue background are my contributions. But sadly, even I have no idea who my collaboration partner is.

 

Overheard In New York - I heard this conversation between two middle-school boys while riding the subway. It was funny to me, because the boy depicted by the cap-wearing figure on the left, he had such a soft-spoken voice and to hear him defending himself from his more pushy friend was entertaining. 

 

And that concludes this Afterschool Special. Hope you enjoyed.

Omega Code poster design

A music band, Omega Code (not linked to any movie or academic study of prophetic concealed Biblical code) asked a bunch of great artists to design posters for their upcoming album, “Ω”. In addition, they decided to hold an open call for fan art, of course inspired by their music.

Then I found out about the fan art submissions.

And I made a poster.

Creating this poster feels like a big step for me – when I see it alongside other fan art interpretations, it is easier for me to see my own aesthetic and to see where I may fit in the grand scheme of design tastes.

I actually wanted to do something cartoony instead. I kept envisioning a hand with a pointed index finger, interacting with the triangle icon of Omega Code. Maybe the finger would be pushing the triangle icon, making it about to fall over, like a playground bully. Or maybe the finger would be simply drawing the outline of the icon in some granular medium, like sand.

However, the Kings of Leon BotT album cover has me curiously hooked to Photoshop as a playground, no longer simply as an image editor. After a few attempts at drawing awkward hands and fingers, my mind began to wander toward Photoshop. I had been going over online tutorials afterall… maybe it was time to try something out.

I tossed the hands/pointed-finger theme and decided to play with veil imagery. Why a veil? So many reasons. Weddings. Mournings. Cover-ups. Revelations. Dark. Light. The veil concept gets a lot of mileage in the New Testament.

Using an image I found at stock.xchng I played with Blending Modes and Special Effects, to get my resulting poster.

Some visual images that served as inspiration:

This Woody Pirtle poster

The poster is supposed to pay homage to the asterisk punctuation. I read some kind of sageness in the old look of the keys.

Paul Lee’s “First Light” posters – showing “Marvela”

I consider faith-based graphic design jobs difficult. How can you express your faith originally and humbly?
One great example is Paul Lee and his posters that effortlessly capture a mix of humble meditation and divine presence. Simply majestic.

And of course, Kings of Leon’s fun album cover of the exploding light bulb. I’m still wondering how they made the album cover.

And that’s it for this blog entry. I am dead tired. Did I mention that I made the poster sometime between 1 and 6 AM last “night”? After a day’s worth of nonstop activity, I am done. G’nite.

The Mich Fish

Engineering school was a four-year block of time when I truly stepped away from my artistic identity. No one knew I could seriously draw until my senior year in college, when I began to consider the possibility of becoming a creative professional.

Returning to my creative identity feels like stepping out of some sort of cryopreservation lab. I see this stage of my life as a revival of what had been put to sleep for nearly four years. In those four years, the art world has been infused with so much technology so it’s been a little frustrating to catch up with the art world while trying to maintain and mold my voice.

Not to say this past year hasn’t been fun. Returning to my creative identity also means revisiting the little characters that I  drew, the little ideas that popped into my head during high school chem class, the doodles, the pen marks that distracted me so often in middle school. Maybe this is weird in that ‘Bob-has-an-imaginary-friend’ way, but when you can doodle, you can potentially create a friend, or two, for life. What is also fun is when my childhood ideas get to collide with today’s technology. I have been able to transfer my ideas into the computer! Recently, this collision has been taken up a notch.

I am currently taking a 3-D modeling/rendering class. At the beginning of class, the instructor mentioned that we would be able to render at least one object and send the computer file to a 3-D printer. (The name ‘3-D printer’ is misleading to me. This ain’t your regular paper printer. This is some sort of sand-blaster machine that takes the mold of your 3-D file and blasts into it a bunch of sand.) Whatever you render on the screen will eventually be able to fit in the palm of your hand.

What immediately popped into my head was a little dude who has been with me, in spirit, since at least early high school. I call him the Mich Fish. What’s his story?

He is a fish (probably a common type of minnow) who lives in a fish bowl. He can’t go anywhere because he’s stuck in the bowl. Poor guy – he likes to go places. The most fun he could recall was that shaky trip in a small plastic bag of water as an old man carried him from the country fairgrounds to a house where he was promptly plopped into a small fishbowl – and was never carried anywhere else after that. The little guy is determined though. He somehow obtains a pair of wheels to attach to the sides of the fishbowl. Having thus created a wheel-chair of sorts, he can move around as he pleases. And this is the Mich Fish. His official name is Wheeler.

A kid’s imaginary friend realized. This is sweet.

New Category: Afterschool Specials

Did you know?

I work part-time at a K-8 school in Manhattan. I help supervise the students who are enrolled in the afterschool program, whether it’s means serving snacks, enforcing playground rules or trying to resolve conflicts. People say I appear to be someone who is good with kids and I don’t disagree with this. I think the company of children is interesting and I would argue, is necessary and good for the soul.

However, during my four college years of engineering school in a big and busy city, I did not encounter children very often. Now I see encounter babies/children several times a week and I do enjoy it.

In terms of art, this is eye-opening.

First of all, I’m reunited with copious amounts of crayons, washable markers and colored pencils! I have learned not to underestimate these mediums.

Perhaps more importantly, I’ve had a change of attitude as well.

Often, I watch the students draw and I admire their results. I envy what appears to be a great lack of self-consciousness in the students (mostly 1st, 2nd & 3rd graders) as they just… draw. They doodle, they quickly pick their color scheme, they draw people, animals, etc., they copy, they redraw. They sit there and they just let it flow out.

What I find amazing is they don’t let the possibility of imperfections get them down and prevent them from making something.

This was always a constant obstacle for me. I have had this mentality to create something AWESOME in one sitting. This mentality is pressuring and in the past, I end up not doing anything with my idea.

The afterschool program – I see it as some sort of rehabilitation program for me, personally. To welcome back the company of children and to get over my fear of imperfection. To do so for the latter, I challenge myself to get out a piece of paper and draw something whenever I have spare time to sit and think. Most of them I throw away because I am innately a pack-rat and I know what will eventually happen if I collect everything. But some I keep.

The point of this entry is to introduce a new category: the small little things I bring back from my part-time job. It might not even be my own work – sometimes, as we close up the school, I’ll see a little drawing by an anonymous student, become enamored and swipe it like Aladdin.

So look forward to Afterschool Specials. Here’s the first one.

Sometimes, many times actually, a student will draw something almost negligent, like a line, on a new sheet of paper. Then upon further examination, they disapprove of that line and toss the 99% UNUSED SHEET OF PAPER aside. When I found this piece of paper, all that existed was the red part. I decided to make use of the sheet. The red mark looked like fangs. So I did what anyone else would do and drew a cupcake with red fangs.

And that’s it for the first Afterschool Special.

New Category: Yellow Stuff

One of my favorite colors to work with is a nice bold yellow. I don’t find the pale yellow/baby yellow color to be that appealing unless it’s for little children, babies and mildly tan women.

At my current internship at Fresh Concentrate, I was assigned to create a logo for a Filipino culture/history school and the client wanted it to reflect elements of the Filipino flag. One of those elements is a very happy sun:

I enjoy this yellow sun very much and I happily used it in my logo design concepts. The other main logo concept involved a red-and-blue book icon along with the sun and the text. In the end, the approved logo was one of my logo submissions which simply involved this sun and some interesting type. I won’t post the logo until I get approval from my boss, but I have to say, I felt that the yellow color helped make the black text so mesmerizing.

Anyway, the point of this post is to introduce a new category called ‘Yellow Stuff’, dedicated to all things that involve this beautiful bold color. With that, I would like to point you to this portfolio piece, by graphic designer Adrian Newell.

(I clicked to his site via Anthony Zinni’s Positive Space blog article “15 Ridiculously Good Graphic Design Portfolios (Plus 1 Bonus)“, which was found via my Google Reader) I love Google Reader.

And what is it about this bold yellow color that I adore? Maybe it’s the fact that while other colors like red and blue are too strong for me when “bolded”, yellow as a bold color is softer and lighter than the rest and has much flexibility as a stand-alone color or as a background. It makes me happy but I do hear that too much yellow can make a person go crazy – so I’ll try to keep these posts few.

Another category coming soon.