The Sketchbook Project

I recently completed The 2012 Sketchbook Project, which is a traveling show of thousands sketchbooks. You purchase a book through the Art House Co-op fill it based on a theme you chose from a preset list (My theme was "Sandwich). Then you mail the book back and it travels with other sketchbooks from city to city and is shown in local galleries. You can see more info on the project and where the shows will be on the Art House Co-op website http://www.arthousecoop.com/

Below are images from my sketchbook and below that I'll write a little on the experience and the thought process behind what I've sketched. Enjoy.

This project was a lot of fun and really exercised my creativity. I began by free form sketching whatever came to my mind when thinking of the theme sandwich. When doodling I've always been a fan of repetition so for the next spread I repeated pickles as a sandwich topping and decided from there that I'd do a topping every other spread. This was great because it allowed me to have a break in between repeating an element over and over. In between the toppings are fun little scenes having to do in one way or another with sandwiches. Each element has a little bit of humor in it, which was a lot of fun because I am very much the type who will laugh at their own jokes.

I would definetly recommend this project to anyone. Whether you're the next Leonardo or you just draw stick figures on post-it notes, sketching can be a very powerful thing that helps you explore your own mind. My only regret was that I didn't learn about the project sooner. All the sketches you see were done in a month. I learned about the project only a few days before the deadline to sign up. Next time I'll be sure to sign up extra early to give myself time to enjoy it even more.

The Importance of Inspiration

I have a few works that I would like to share that are pretty old but were big influences in the way that I work. These works were done back when I was in high school. They're the first major experience where I consciously picked up on external influences and was inspired to transform it into a work of my own. The inspiration came from paintings, specifically the paintings of Odd Nerdrum. The color palette and textures of the traditional medium created a welcomed tension when brought into the digital realm. After creating these works my entire view on my surroundings had been transformed. I begun to look at everything as a new opportunity for inspiration. A texture, object, pattern, color, conversation could all be part of design or a concept.

Humor in Design

A few months ago my girlfriend and I took a trip up to Connecticut for no real reason other than to get away for a few days. My girlfriend went to university in Hartford, Connecticut but I had never been and was excited about having the opportunity for a new experience. We stayed at a beach house her friend was renting in the off season. The weather was very cold, which was actually a benefit to ward off the summer tourists from the restaurants and beaches. Overall the trip was very relaxing. I spent the days exploring the town, walking the beaches, and reading the local news paper. All of this is what I was expecting from the trip.

What I wasn't expecting was the tremendous amount of artistic inspiration I received, which I entirely owe it all to my girlfriend. On about the third day of the trip she was insistent that we find something to do other that browse around or take another walk around the community. So she spent the better part of the morning browsing the Internet and the newspaper looking for something to do. What she found was an impressionist art museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut called the Florence Griswold Museum. Florence Griswold was a woman who inherited a house from her family and decided she'd rent it to artists to subsidies the cost of this inheritance. More and more artists began to stay at the home due to its location ( being near both Boston and New York City ) and its beautiful landscapes. Eventually it became somewhat of an artist colony that had a heavy influence on Impressionism in the United States. I've always had an interest in impressionist painting. Primarily because every painting course I've taken since the age of 13 till today instructors have compared my work to Impressionism, so I have a personal connection with the style.

The museum had some great works of art from artists, who stayed at the Griswold mansion, including Henry Ward Ranger, Willard Metcalf, Matilda Browne, and William Chadwick. The Griswold mansion was restored to give a glimpse of things such as what a typical room looked like, the dinning room where all the artists had dinner together and how Ms. Florence's room would have appeared. This glimpse into their lives is what struck me as most inspirational. For one the artists painted everything in the house. Their canvases extended to everything from the panels of the doors and walls to pieces of furniture. Many of these works told a story about the individual in that space or a story about an encounter while staying at the house.

One of my favorite works was a panoramic landscape painted on the fireplace mantle in the dining room, where all the artists would have dinner together. The scene contained about a dozen people running through a field. The figures included a shirtless man painting, one guiding a cow, others holding bottles of booze, and people hiding behind rocks. It looked funny, almost like a cartoon. One of the employees at the mansion explained the story behind the work and that all the figures were artists from the house. They used this piece to poke fun at one another. The woman, who worked at the house, went on to explain humorous stories behind several other of the works painted on the doors and walls. The artists used several of these paintings to talk to one another and tell inside jokes while making great works of art.

When returning to Baltimore after the relaxing mini vacation I was given the opportunity to generate some design work that uses humor and story telling, much like the artists at the Florence Griswold artists' colony. A friend of mine had a birthday coming up and I wanted to send around an invitation inviting people to a happy hour celebrating the occasion. I wanted to produce something fun that would be personal to him but that others would still find fun and funny. My friend is Russian and growing up we had nicknamed him The Russian Bear because of the way he would shout when making a play or showing frustration in a sporting event. I included aspects of his background and his nickname into the emailer and short animation, which I've included below. Putting the design together was a lot of fun and I feel that's what made the final piece so successful.

Click the image to see the animation or watch in the embedded youtube video below.

Holiday Cards

The end of the year is always busy. With work trying to push out last minute projects and the hustle and bustle of preparing for christmas and the new year everything moves so fast. At this time projects operate like planes at an airport during the holidays they they come in and out fast and fully loaded in both directions often times through not so ideal conditions. I know that it's been a while now since the holidays have passed but I just got around to posting these unused holiday card concepts. They were a very quick turn around time to flush out concepts.

The concept behind the first video was to use Chinese tangrams as a way to talk about solving problems, which is a major goal of ARCADIS, while giving the piece a playful childhood memory tone. If you're unfamiliar with tangrams, they're a dissection puzzle consisting of seven shapes. The challenge is you are given a silhouette of a shape or an object and you must construct that object using all seven shapes of the tangram. It's one of the most popular dissection puzzles in the world.



The second concept was to play off of the Dutch's rich history in the arts. ARCADIS is a global company but is headquartered in The Netherlands and also work with bettering the environment. My idea was to find a classical work of art that could show all of these characteristics and create a scene where the natural and the human environment are balanced.

Why I don't want to be an architect.

Halloween weekend what a thrill. It's a holiday filled with ghost goblins and pouring with creativity. The best part of it is the holiday parties. Not just because it's another opportunity to drink with friends (though that's nice too). But because it brings out the creativity of those who would not otherwise consider themselves creative and because it gives you the opportunity to meet new people with their creative core on full display. So before a formal dialogue begins you have an in site to the type of person you're about to interact with.

In my socializing this past halloween weekend I was asked to answer the same questions we've all had to answer dozens of times before, what's your name? who do you know here? how do you know them? Where are you from? What do you do? Do you like it? Do you think that's what you do forever? I particularly like the latter three questions here because it gives you the chance to reevaluate your situation. It forces you to think about what you spend most of your waking hours doing.

The question that I personally have received several times when I reveal that I work as a graphic designer for an architecture firm is "So do you want to be an architect?" More often than not the answer is most definitely not, though there was some point where I thought that it would make a good subject to study for a master's program, but in retrospect I feel as though that was merely an overall desire to go back and acquire a masters degree in general. But I do not desire to be a career architect for two main reasons.

The first reason being the fact that it takes too long. If learned that architects entire working career may only produce one major project from start to finish that the architect can shoe off with pride. Sometimes an architect might have an entire career with no finial product to show for their countless hours of effort. So say if an architect does get that one dream job with a committed major client it will be a matter of years before they see what they've designed manifest itself in a tangible space.

The second reason I do not want to be an architect is that there are way too many restrictions involved in the process. If you generate the best concept known to man kind and make a sketch of a form that when created has an aesthetic that would instantly cause world peace. It has to be approved by the client, which is usually a committee that includes every single person that will ever or ever has the potential of going through the building, this may include but not limited to the management staff, the workers, the janitors, secretaries, the spouses of all the staff members and their offspring, security, and a group of randomly selected individuals that may never even be in the same country as the building but were consulted by the client. After that the building has to go through various engineers and has to be redesigned due to violations of safety codes and energy efficiency. After all of that the client will "value engineer" the project due to lack of funds cutting out most of the artistic aspects.

Nope the architecture field is not for me. But what I do respect and enjoy is the concept behind the physical space as being part of one big story / brand. A brand that extends from graphic design, architectural design, product design, interior design, staffing, and everything in-between is a beautiful thing.

Ok. That's the end of my rant. Try explaining that to a person you've just met while dresses as a character from the movie The Big Lebowski at a noisy Halloween party and see how quickly they finish the drink in their hand and insist they'll be right back after they get a refill.

Below is a project that illustrates these differences between graphic design and architecture. This was a project that was completed in a matter of a few days and practically unlimited in the means of artistic creativity ( aside from reflecting the brand ). There was no real brief aside from the fact that it had to be engaging enough so that people would read and interpret the information. The graphic art was unfiltered and went straight from my computer out to it's audience.

Motion Graphics

I remember being a kid in elementary school after school care program and one of my favorite activities they would do with us was to take a full pack of index cards and a binder clip and draw card by card to produce a flip book. Like every kid I loved cartoons but I was really fascinated in how they were produced. I remember being very fascinated by the show Samurai  Jack because of the elaborate hand painted backgrounds of the late night cartoon. In older age I remember getting excited about MTV's idents and the pop up graphics on VH1's pop up videos.

Recently I've been trying more and more to work with motion graphics. I really enjoy learning new things. A friend of mine tipped me off to a great resource, videocopilot.net. This site has really helped me learn Adobe After Effects. But motion is something that I've always been attracted to. The addition of timing, motion and physics give art work a human feel that people can relate to. Still images instantly become alive. They move the way we move.

Learning motion graphics has been very natural so far due to my work in flash. Currently I'm working my way through over 100 tutorials on the videocopilot.net website in order to master the tools of the trade. Hopefully soon you'll see some original motion graphic projects coming from me. 


But until then please enjoy this college project of mine using a scanner and still images mixed with Photoshop effects in order to produce stop motion animation. I used pieces from a broken VCR and images/scans of myself to create tension between man and machine. It's loosely supposed to be a narrative about robots. Could androids exist? Maybe, maybe not but it was a lot of fun to do and the process matches the concept (a little bit of hand work and a little bit of computer).

Graffiti and the Internet Repurposed

I was at the bar last night talking with some friends about graffiti art. I had to confess to them that I didn't know much about it, I didn't know any artist really aside from the really famous ones (i.e. Banksy and Sheppard Fairey) and the rest is from what I've seen on the streets and in books. But I did remember Blu (the artist above), who I really admire. My opinion on graffiti is that the medium has become diluted with crap. I think that the idea of quick tagging or illegibly writing your nickname in one color is truly vandalism. There is no artistic value in it and does nothing but kill the work of real artists. Then there is the style of graffiti that is performed over and over and over again. Whether is words with sharp angles that overlap one another or bubbly words with a gradient fill we've seen it done by countless amounts of people. This work by Blu pushes the boundaries of the medium and transforms graffiti into something new. He sketches and doodles and buildings become his paper.

The internet has fallen into the same scenario as graffiti. We see wonderful usages of the technology medium buried among terrible websites with bad typography and cheesy stock images. Then clean corporate websites are a dime a dozen with the invention of pre-made web templates. But there are a few designers and artists that take the medium and see it in a different light. Or artists that take technology and express strong messages in clear way like Banksy does with graffiti.