A saturday snooze

Soooo not nervous yet, but a little annoyed that I've gotten like 1% of work done today. I sat down to work on my poster, but immediately got a headache and decided it was a much better idea to fall asleep on Erick. Um, alrighty then, brain.

I'm starting production on my Posada-influenced poster, which hopefully will be mostly finished in time for 9:30 am on Thursday. I would also like to make good headway on my Art Nouveau poster, as well as the Estridentista poster. I think the Art Nouveau one will be the absolute hardest, since that requires a very strict sort of illustration style that my skills don't really measure up to. But I am sure as heck am going to try. I wanted to do my own illustration of a woman reading a book, seated, but she's a skeleton. It will be wonderful, according to the vision in my head. Now just to get it out on paper.

I also came up with a tentative sentence for the constructivist/Estridentista poster. "A renewed interest in the hand-done led to the popularity of linoleum and woodblock illustrations." I have to figure out the illustration for this one, though.

So that just leaves the Art Deco poster, for which I have no ideas for content.

I emailed Marina, and while I appreciate her advise and definitely need it for my project, I'm getting a little frustrated. She said she was too busy to respond to all of my email, and would get back to me this weekend, but said that my ideas were all over the place and out of order. Really, I want to do this right, but I have run out of time and I just need to move forward with all of this. We originally had the idea to create a matrix of images in order to be able to have a sample of general layouts and colors, etc. I figure I can do this for each era of my posters, Posada, Art Nouveau, Estridentista, Art Deco, and Indigenous influenced. Then I will feel a little more confident about what I'm doing, because I can show off my matrix for each poster and say, "I made this this way because of that."

Soooo anyway. Hopefully I will get more done tomorrow. My review is Thursday morning at 9:30 am, and Marina should be skyping in. I also found out that it will be Natalia and Rossi on my panel as well.

A thought

I need to be starting my internship work, but I keep forgetting to post on here, and I have things to say!

I'm reading an essay by my advisor Marina, about Mexican designers in the 1990s and how they started becoming more interested in the history of design in their own country, which really hadn't be researched that much--art history and other things were considered more important to research. So Mexico didn't start studying its design history until very recently. This makes me really excited--heck, I want to move down to Mexico and join in and be part of those efforts to learn more. Too bad I think my Spanish would hold me back. :P

But in her essay, it talks about the local vs. international design, and it really interested me, just thinking about how different design would have been if we had remained in isolation. I mean, I know the rise of design was largely driven by the industrial revolution, and the technological advances that came with it, especially forms of printing... and the technology also made it so that we could travel faster/easier and that people started leaving farms and congregating in the cities... so although I know design wouldn't be what it is without the technological advances... I just imagine how extremely different each regions design aesthetic would be if they couldn't influence one another and share resources and if they took only from themselves. I feel like there would be such variety!

So exciting. Anyway. 5 minute post, back to work.

A morning's work

Poster in progress

Finished poster, until critiques, I suppose

I worked all morning and had fun, but I am starving so it's time for lunch!! I'm really happy with how it looks, so I'm afraid to show it to anyone cause I don't really want critiques, I want to move on to my other posters.. but I need to email it to Marina and see what she thinks.

A poster finalized

Had a nice quick check-in with Natalia today. I actually did show her my poster, with the image idea, and she liked it, so phew. That's one poster sketch "finalized." I can go ahead and start coloring it, right now I'm seeing it in black and aztec blue (cyanish) with maybe some red details.

Here's the sketch, assembled from scanned pieces:

It will be 40x60cm, which is just under 18x24 and a little skinnier.

One of my main posters was the idea that Mexican design acts as a pendulum and swings back and forth between influenced by local design or by international design. Natalia favors the idea of creating a little mark or system throughout the posters instead that would designate how much the poster is influenced by local or international design. So I've decided on the scales as a "clever" symbol only because I'm a libra and my sign is the scale. :P It will be tipped one way or another depending on the poster. But that means that I've lost one of the ideas for my posters, so I've had to hash it out in a different way.

I've made a list of what each poster is: the design influence, the topic it covers, and how local/international it is. I'm also trying to come up with the text that will be featured on the poster. Here's what I have so far:

Posada – color (limited to red, yellow, black, and brown with some green and blue due to technological restrictions till the 30s-40s) –  balanced/slight international

The Mexican printer’s color palette was restricted until the 1930s because of technical limitations.

Art Nouveau – type (wood/handdone/lino) – international

Mexican typographers favored hand-done or wood type for much of the early twentieth century.

Art Deco – ?? – international+

            ??

Constructivist – treatment of image (woodblock illustrations favored) –  local-ish

            Ummmm something intelligent.

Indigenous influenced – intro poster – local++

            N/A

Art deco was the one I threw in there to replace my pendulum poster, so I will have to come up with something for that. And as for the constructivist text, I need to start reading more in-depth into one of the books I brought back from Mexico, which features that style almost exclusively... and luckily it's both english and spanish text! So hopefully I can read it fast.

And that concludes todays update. I'm hoping to color the intro poster tomorrow morning in illustrator, and I need to email alphagraphics about a quote--thinking about a print run of 50 posters of each style, and I'll just try to sell the extras.

A sunday post

I am often disappointed on the weekends as to how much work I actually get done. Especially now that my parents have gone to Argentina for 2+ weeks... I feel like there's too much to do.. dishes to clean, meals to make, animals to take care of... This all adds to my stress level, which makes my coping mechanism of sitting on the couch and doing nothing kick in.

Yesterday.. or the day before.. I had the idea for the graphic at the top of my first poster pop into my head.. it is definitely not deeply symbolic.. quite literal.. and a little too complicated.. but it's stuck in my head for a while now and it feels pretty right. It is an open book, pages turning, and from which springs a poster from one of the middle pages.. this represents how my posters are the work of lots of books. I have two other smaller posters flanking the middle one, and I'm thinking of having "arteDISEÑOhistoria" (each word) be on the posters.

I'm almost afraid to ask Natalia's opinion because she will just lament the fact that I didn't go through that Visual Communication class that Cornish has.. I transferred the credits.. and she will tell me she doesn't like it and I should come up with something else. Which, at this point, I would just like to move on. I have a lot of concepting and brainstorming to go on in my head for the other posters, because they are definitely not well defined yet, and I would like them to be in at least final sketch stage for my 11th week review.

A sleepy reluctant update

I am so tired and don't really want to update, but since my grade depends on it...

Today I emailed Marina about the topics for my posters, and the fact that I'm having problems trying to find the actual sizes of posters back in the early 1900s in Mexico. All the sizes are different, and are random numbers like 59.5 or 60.1 cm etc. She already emailed back explaining that there really wasn't a standard in place yet for paper sizes. I guess that means I can pick whatever I want? As long as they're all consistant. I was thinking 60x40cm or 23.6x15.7in seems like the best bet, and closest to what my original size of 18x24 was.

As for my poster topics:

1. Intro poster/BFA promo
2. Poster concerning the pendulum effect of local vs. international design influence in Mexico.
3. Poster concerning the limited use of colors in posters prior to 30s/40s due to technical limitations
4. Poster highlighting the type of Mexico: handdone/painted or woodtype or linoleum
5. Poster showcasing the different treatments of images/illustrations, especially woodblock

So I have a definite direction, I just need to move forward with each of them. I seem to have lost any reason to include Posada, which is a shame, but I'm sure I can find some way to fit him in there.

I'm still trying to figure out an appropriate image for the top of my intro poster, which is all sketched besides that. It needs to be something flat, graphical, highly symbolic, and easy to abstract. Some ideas have been the Cornish building, the Seattle skyline, the stairs leading up to the Cornish building, or perhaps the Cornish seal rising out of an opened book with pages turning. I know I should just sketch all of them and fit them in and see what I like, but I get such satisfaction from having a sketch, and having it be done right, and finishing it up, and fine-tuning it only in small increments. Not how it's supposed to go, but I guess that's just how I work.

This weekend I plan on finishing up the intro poster, and really fleshing out how the other four are going to look. I also need to email my other advisor and keep him in the loop. Only one and a half weeks til 11th week review.

A feeling

So I had this revelation this morning. I thought for a moment, and said to myself, "Hmm. It feels like 5th week reviews were just last week!" I then quieted, feeling this awful weight on my chest begin to settle. What had I accomplished since then? What had I to show for a months' worth of work? Certainly, my meeting with my advisor has given me a very specific and direct direction in which to move towards, but I now only have two weeks to finish my posters for my 11th week review, which is desperately important.

I am trying not to panic, but I did certainly scare myself a little this morning.

A distraction

So, in order to distract myself from the big earthquake that just happened south of where I just was... and where my in-laws are... I'll tell you about my trip.

I'm tempted to break this up into multiple posts in order to make up for my week of not posting, but that's... quite annoying, so I think it will just be one.

Lovely weather in Mexico City. It was sooo nice to have sun and 80 degree days, even if most afternoons we would get thunderstorms, and I didn't have a pool to lounge by and relax at. Really, I felt like this "vacation" was a lot more hectic; I did a lot of running around and seeing stuff, and collecting things for my DP, which while incredibly extremely wonderful for my progress, did not leave me feeling extremely rested.

As I went down there, I had a meeting set for Monday the 12th with Dr. Marina Garone Gravier, a professor/researcher at UNAM, one of the largest universities in Mexico. I also had a meeting set up with Gabriel Martinez Maeve, creator of the Lagarto font, for 1:30 on the 13th.

I'm realizing now I should have taken better notes of what I did. My brain is running all of the days together, but I'm definitely still distracted, there's been two different aftershocks after that big earthquake. Looks like the family's all okay, but still worried. Eek.

The family's apartment is in the neighborhood of Coyoacán, which is an old neighborhood where Frida Kahlo grew up. Lots of old buildings, cobblestone streets, one-way roads that don't make sense. It's about half an hour to get to the Zócalo, or the downtown area of Mexico City. That is, if you take the bus or metro--traffic is a beast down there. #1 City for Worst Traffic in the World, according to some msn survey or another.

Downtown I visited the Palacio de Bellas Artes, which was built during the end of the Porfiriato, the dictatorship that brought about the Mexican Revolution. Porfirio Diaz was trying to modernize Mexico to be more like the Europe and USA, but at the cost of his people's welfare. You can see a lot of Art Deco influence (and I mean A LOT) in this building, built nearly entirely out of marble imported from Europe.

Palacio de Bellas Artes

Art Deco-y font, but wondering if it's original??

Cool lamps throughout the lobby area

A peek at the murals on the upper levels

An illegal photograph I took of Rivera's mural, one of his most famous!

We also stopped by the huge and very elaborate bank that I believe was also created around the same time:

The teller windows; the bank is still working as an actual bank 

Upstairs area

Elaborate stairs

Baroquey or Roccocoy

My meeting with Marina went fantastically. I was sick to my stomach I was so nervous to meet her, but she was really nice and super understanding and really had some fantastic things to give me direction for my project.

Her main concern was superficiality--that it shouldn't just be a façade of Mexican clichés and that it really had to mean something, and educate, which I couldn't agree more. So she had the idea that I should create a matrix of images, so that I might be able to form some sort of record of things repeated in the designs--how many words used, how big the images are, how the images are created, colors used, etc. I could then make my posters and have a reason behind why I made them that way; I could point to my matrix and say that I made the image take up 2/3 of the page because that was the way most of the designs were back then.

So that was absolutely fantastic, but it also means a LOT of work for me to do. She was so nice and helpful--she let us look at all the books in her office library, brought out a camera stand so I could take pictures, and then the next day she invited us to her house to take pictures of her personal library, which was just fantastic. She specializes in a lot older stuff--more like 1600-1850s, so a lot of the resources were older than I wanted, but she had the great point to make that if I learned the older stuff, then I would be able to see where the origins of stuff from "my" time period came from. It was very true, and I was able to see that almost immediately, in the use of borders and the text.

1600s

late 1700s/early 1800s

Her cat was very helpful in making sure to get in the way of the photos, and being paid attention to constantly.

Dr. Marina's personal library

My other advisor, Gabriel, had to cancel on me the next day, and rescheduled for 9:30pm the next day. I wasn't feeling entirely comfortable with that, but we ended up canceling anyway because his father passed away. :/ So hopefully I can talk to him through email before 11th week review, but he does seem to be very very very busy.

I also got a chance to visit the Frida Kahlo museum, which was about a twenty minute walk away from the apartment. It's in the house where she grew up, called the Blue House, very obviously because of its color. I was slightly disappointed with the museum itself--they didn't have a ton of Frida's large/famous works, and they had change the original placement of items in the rooms to be more staged; I was hoping it would be how they were originally.

Inside wall in courtyard 

One of her last paintings

Her staged artist desk with sketchbook

One of many large paper maché creatures/skeletons

The inner courtyard area

My last tourist stop was to the Templo Mayor, which is the excavation of an Aztec temple that was found right in the heart of Mexico City. They thought it was underneath the Cathedral, but tunneling for the metro in the 1960s found it only a block away. Tons of cool stuff has been found there, and I felt like a lot of the aztec patterns and things made sense to me as far as the designs I've seen that were influenced by them.

Snake heads

Giant snake guardian

Frogs!

The tunnel was built that destroyed a whole bunch o stuff.

View of the cathedral from the Templo Mayor.

Some color is still intact.

Skull temple anybody? Apparently made from real human skulls with plaster over them.

Stamps.

Isn't she so pretty with her earrings?

I'm not sure why they put little faces on them, but I thought it was hilarious. 

Actual colors used in the wall murals. 

You'll notice, if you follow the top line of the buildings, that they go something like this: /\/\/\/\ but less steep. That's because Mexico City is built on a lake, and is constantly sinking! Obviously quite unevenly. Even the Aztecs had to deal with this problem!

@#$$%@#E

Ugh blogger just deleted my huge post about my trip that I just spent two hours on.

So nevermind. Will... try.. again.. later.. >(

EDIT: oh thank god, it saved.

An update from Mexico

Just a quick update while I have internet:

Things have been going really well. Finding resources all over the place, started by my first advisor. She had a lot of great suggestions, and it will kind of change the direction of my posters a bit, but I like where we're going. She had a ton of resources available; let me take pictures of the books she had, then let me and Erick go to her house to see her personal library where I took even more pictures. She gave me a book (!!) on Posada's stuff, I bought a book on post-revolutionary Mexican imagery/posters that is SUPER interesting even if it might be more modern than I want, and then she arranged for me to get this really awesome book that is illustrations in Mexico 1920-1950 that will be awesome as well.

SUPER thrilled to have all this new info, but I'm going to really have to get going on my posters in order to have them mostly finished by April 5th, my 11th week review. I hope they don't mind that I don't have the other stuff done (30 second spot, packaging, process book) but there should be time for that afterwards.

Due to personal interferences, I wasn't able to meet up with my second advisor, the designer of the Lagarto font, but hopefully I'll be able to skype him before 11th week reviews so that I can get his opinion before I get the final word for the review.

I'm 98% sure that Dr. Marina will be able to skype, but I'm not entirely sure about Gabriel, since I wasn't to meet up with him and he seems suuuuuper busy with his design business. But I guess if I have one advisor, then I won't fail. I also am supposed to ask Heather in the library to be another advisor.

Also, Natalia, if you read this, I haven't been able to update my blog daily because I'm in Mexico and haven't had internet! I promise I'll make up for it when I get back! So many new things to add to my DP...

HAPPY!!!

An excitement

Natalia is excited about my poster, so I am excited about my poster.

Just need to finalize it, and start on four more. And finish before 11th week review, preferably.

Hopefully my advisors are excited about my poster too.

Dear God, I am officially on spring break now!

A little quote

Have confidence that if you have done a little thing well you can do a bigger thing well too. —Storey 

I've had my confidence issues about my designing, especially after coming to Cornish where everyone is so gosh darn good! However I was lucky enough to have two great classes last semester that helped to bolster me up and feel like I can really do this. And an internship this semester that makes me feel pretty professional.

The BFA exhibition is a big thing. And we can do it. Because we are so gosh darn good!

A week before spring break

So, an update.

I'm hoping to confirm exact times for meeting with my advisors next week in Mexico City... looks like next Monday, and it will have to be a morning and afternoon appointment because they are in different parts of a very large city.

I'm hoping to have a couple finals (sketches) of a couple of my posters to show them--I went out and bought a sketchbook with the right dimensions (18x24 scaled down to 12x18) and will cart that around with me to Mexico. I figure since my in-law's house doesn't have internet, I will be able to get a lot of work done.

Otherwise, I've been bad. I never work on the weekends, I have been avoiding my posters in favor of other projects, etc etc. I'm hoping that I will get them done in one beautiful blast, and then leisurely figure out the rest: 30 second spot, packaging, process book, etc.

A picture