A design is never finished...

So I went home this weekend and showed my dad my spreads and he had some ideas for how I could impove/change my table of contents. The thing we really focused on was the box in the TABLEOFCONTENTS grid.

At first he thought a solid box was too much in the midst of all the letters.

So I made the solid box into just and outline.

And then he asked what it would look like if there was an "X" in the box.

And now I kinda like the one with the outline and X the most. But I'm not sure if which is actually better. I think that if the box is solid then it feels a little unbalanced.

Title Pages

The next step for the book designing is to make the title page. After designing a couple the class was told that the title page is generally more low key and that simplicity is your friend. As with most of this project, I think the hardest part is to bring the illustrators together or just to decide that it'll be focused on my guy.

 

I really dislike the above design. The fading is tacky and the diagonals don't make sense. I'm probably just gonna scrap this whole idea, as far as the title page goes. Maybe it's more of a cover thing.

   

I don't think this one's too bad. The background makes sense in terms of the title. But... I kinda want something graphic if it's gonna be in color.

   

This one's my favorite so far, except for the italics. It just feels cleaner and simpler.

    

I dislike the addition of color.

I really like this one because it gives a snapshot of each illustrators work and is really clean, but may be boring....

Every good book needs a good table of contents.

My next challenge that I have to tackle on the book project is the table of contents. I'm fighting between trying to make it a reflection of the whole book or more in synch with my artist.

Right now the spreads are kind of busy and a huge bomb on the reader's eyes but I'm going to work on that.

2nd Set

These are the second halves of the spreads. I'm kind of concerned by how few photos I'm incorporating but his have so much going on that I probably shouldn't be too worried.

Refine Refine Refine

I went back and made some changes to the spreads I posted earlier, namely moving text around, resizing and adding in some backgrounds.
I'm on the fence about the background colors. I put them in because I couldn't get the photos to come over across the median enough without losing the main subject matter of the image and I thought that adding in a color from the piece would help bring the composition together. But it might be too much.

MAKE ALL THE MONOPRINTS

In drawing media class, we got to try out monoprints and from the first day I fell in love. I love how unpredictable they are and how you can crank one out in 30 seconds and be done, and if you don't like it it's okay because you only spent 30 seconds on it.

I also love the texture that comes out of it so easily. As a young artist I find creating texture or even being able to imagine it difficult and monoprinting really makes it easy to see and create it by accident.

I think the concept of layering is really fun and creates an interesting dilemma because you have to figure out what the order should be and which colors mix well in wh
at order and such.

So I showed my friend some of my prints and he directed me to this woman and I think her donkey print is just amazing.
http://camillataylor.tumblr.com/

Book Makin'

These are my ideas for the first (of 2) pages of the double paged spreads that I have to do for my ThinkMake class. I'm really going for simplicity since Tomer Hanuka's art is so graphic and colorful on its own.

Updating!

I finally finally finally started updating my Behance profile. I have so much to put on from this semester already.

https://www.behance.net/otpuckett

Imgur CAN be useful..

I browse imgur.com all the time, mostly because it's a great procrastination tool but every once in a while it pops up with a golden nugget of awesome artistry. 

Today while I was browsing I saw this awesome corset that was made to look like female video game armor, which is notorious for being ridiculously revealing, but still the craftsmanship was awesome.

http://romancero.nethouse.ru/products/7929736

I looked at the rest of this man's work and all of it is just incredible. Everything he does is made of leather  and it's all so incredibly intricate. I just can't imagine what it's like to be able to think in patterns like that. 

One of my friends goes to The Art Department and he shared this link to a set of brushes that either one of his teachers or friends designed: BRNK BRSHS Drawing Set. After watching the video I a) want to buy them because they look like they'd be really useful and b) am really curious about whether he was using a mouse to draw with or if there's some sort of pen that one can buy to accompany Photoshop. 

I'd really like to start drawing digitally, mostly because I feel like it makes the creative process so much easier to start also, there's so many more things you can do with it. I'll never lose the love of getting my hands dirty with paint and charcoal but I'm truly entranced by digital drawing.

I went back to the list of horse paintings today because I never actually went through them all, after I found Ivan Biliban's work I got sort of side tracked. But anyways, as I was scrolling a painting by Gustav Klimt came up and it made me stop for a second.

I was taken aback by how rigid and unnaturally straight the golden knight is in comparison to the curved lines of the horse. As always I love how much gold Klimt incorporates and how the background is abstracted.

Illustration Inspiration

I find most of the art I like through social media, generally on my facebook feed from my artsy friends' posts and pages that I have liked. Today as I was scrolling though my feed I saw a woman named Irene Gallo posting a link to an article featuring tons of paintings of horses because it's apparently the year of the Horse now. 
Anyways, one of the paintings was an illustration by Ivan Bilibin for a book of russian fairy tales.

I'm attracted to these illustrations because of their flatness in comparison to other more realistic drawings. I'm also a big fan of the outlines of all the shapes and within each shape is one color, kind of like a Paint-By-Numbers.

And as for this last one, how could anyone not love a drawing with a woman using a skull as a torch and mushrooms popping up everywhere. 

As I was perusing my Facebook newsfeed I saw a link to a blog site called mymodernmet.com which apparently hosts a colllection of art based blogs. I originally went to it following a link for photos that showed a Batman figurine posed in everyday places but also found a woman who does amazing illustrations in colored pencil.

The artists name is Jennifer Healy and her work predominantly features women in fantastical situations. I really love her artwork because of her insane blending skills and the fact that her main subject matter is women. I myself really love drawing women because there's just so much easy beauty to the female form and because it's easy to show a range of emotions with the female features and figure.

 I'm attracted to this one because of the dewy skin tone of the woman, and the use of the page by the hanging knotted braid.

I really adore how this one shows her emerging from somewhere and the diagonal strip on her lip.

I love anything that incorporates bones into a composition. 

Twists on framed portraits are also a love of mine.