A little close for comfort...

Process book ordered! I got three saddle-stitched, and one perfect bound, just to see how it'll look. One for Natalia, one for Marina, one for the show, and one for me.

Now hopefully everything will go good with the animation tomorrow, and then I will also go visit the Bellevue Fine Prints place tomorrow on the way to pilates. Check out their paper, talk to them about their ridiculous policy of we only do (whole??) inches, and make sure it will be all on track for printing by Monday.

My process book should be here on next Thursday at the very latest. Need to get my paint, but will talk to Cable tomorrow and get his signature.

A productive monday

Process book okayed, posters okayed, exhibition space okayed, and got Natalia's and Julie's signature... now I just need to find Cable.

Feeling pretty good.

The animation will go down tomorrow. And then I will have no more production! Cool.

A cozy spot on the couch

Finished my process book tonight. Thanks goodness I did, it pointed out a few holes to me, including needing to scan my branding sketches and realizing I never added my symbol to the fifth poster! Aaarg! Terrible oversight there.

So hopefully I can get Natalia to do a walk-thru on it tomorrow, and then order it expedited through lulu. Not a big deal if it's late I guess, I don't really think it's necessary to add to my exhibition... and the last time I did a process book I liked, I was told it was badly designed by my teacher... so hopefully this one will go over a little better. But I'm still having Natalia check it out.

So tomorrow, scanning, polishing and printing B+W proof of process, and we're good! Oh, and adding the symbol. Cause I'm too tired to do it tonight. Whew.

I did finish two out of three of my humanities papers. Not bad! I just have to pick a movie to write about for the last one, and I should be geeeewwd.

A look into the weekend

Uuuh.. I need to take this weekend to work on my three humanities papers I have to turn in next week.

So hopefully things are going to be okay with my posters. Poster 5 needs to sit a few hours.. before I can decide what to do with it. I've been looking at it too much.

My postcards came, they look nice, I guess. I need to find where I stashed my business cards.

Need to buy my paint, after I get approval from Cable-annoying-face.

Need to figure out my statement... Julie was completely confusing today: "Your statement should be 1 sentence or two.. or a paragraph.. or two" uuuuuh-huh.

I think I need to reconfigure my gallery space... feeling cramped and I still don't have enough room for everything.

Signed up for gallery sitting and set-up task (painting).. gallery sounds like the most boring thing on the entire planet... but as long as I only have to waste five hours once... And Julie seems to think it will be 9-5 on Saturday for painting set-up? If it takes that long, I am seriously walking out of there. That is ridiculous. 9-12 is more reasonable.

Ugh.. today just kind of sucked... suckage was amplified by lack of food.. makes me crabbier...

Think I will order a test run of my process book while lulu still has the sale on.. won't make any difference, but it will be good to have multiple copies.

An ambivalent feeling

Sooooooo first rough done of poster 5.

I'm....... not sure I like it... there's parts that I like, but I'm kind of frustrated with trying to balance the simplicity of art deco style with the complicated intricate details in the ancient Mayan style.

But, I've worked for a few hours, and I need a break! So, time to pack up and go home, then eat lunch. Yum!

A wednesday morning

Aaaah, let's see.

This morning went through my pictures of my Mexico trip to see what I had from the Palacio de Bellas Artes, whose interior was very art deco-y, since that's the theme for poster 5: art deco and architecture.

I plan on doing something very simple and stylized, with a hazy feeling, including gradients. I see in very clearly in my head, but I will have to see if I can execute it. During my research I found this book that could prove useful: The Mayan Revival Style: Art Deco Mayan Fantasy. I discovered that Mexico's art deco movement, which would often incorporate indigenous elements, actually inspired architects outside the country, most prominently in the US, even Frank Lloyd Wright. This book is at the Seattle Public Library... which I don't have a library card for, but I figure I can stop in on my way to school and see if I can just sign up for one and pick up that book.

So I'm thinking my sentence for Poster 5 will be something like:
     Mexico’s design often took influence from international sources, but was reinterpreted with
     Mexican themes.

I feel like that's not doing justice to the fact that it was actually Mexican design that influenced other countries for once, but I can't really have a longer sentence than that.

Also worked on my process book... which just about wants to shut my computer  down, because it's so image-heavy... eek. Plan to have that done by Monday, and order it Monday night with expedited shipping.

Also, my postcards have shipped. Yay! Should be here by the end of this week or the beginning of next. Need to dig up my business cards...

A bit behind schedule

And now I am late. Bah.

I should really be starting on the three papers I have left to do for my humanities class... Only like a week to do them in.. Ooops.

A bit of slow progress

Ugh. I didn't get as far as I wanted, and Natalia bailed on us, so all of that kind of sucked.

But, I will have tomorrow morning to finish poster 4, and that will be that!

Here's as far as I've gotten today:

I've gotten all the text done, and tweaked to look better, and I just have the illustration left to ink. I think it looks pretty cool. Hopefully other people do too. I'm thinking of a red "background" behind this image, since the original was actually printed on red paper to give it "two" colors. I don't want to have one poster's paper different from the rest, so I just wanted to simulate it. Hmmm.. red... green.. blue.. yellow.. brown.. Will have to try some colors out, see what I like.

Also will have to add in my symbol, I think knocked-out on the wrist area.

Okay, time to go home and enjoy some sun!

A bright warm sunday morning

Finished hand-lettering the type on poster 4. I think it looks pretty cool, but I don't know if Natalia and Marina will like it. Hopefully.

Today I will go over the illustration, then Monday they will both be scanned and pieced together, and traced (inked) in Illustrator, then BAM! Poster 4 is done.

I'm a little intimidated by Poster 5, since I only have an extremely vague notion of what it's going to about and look like, but I need to get it done, like, yesterday.

Although I found out that the Bellevue Fine Prints place has a turn-around time of like 2-3 days, so that's good. Gives me a little more breathing room. But I need to finish them in order to send the process book off to print, soooo... yeah. Definitely doing expedited lulu shipping.

I am soooooooo excited to almost be done. I like my posters. I hope other people do too..

A few postcards anyone?

Okay, so went ahead and ordered my postcards from moo... They have a 25% off sale til the 22nd, and then I got an additional 15%, so that was pretty cool. I only got 300.. hopefully that's enough. I'm not very good when it comes to guestimating for these things.

Also, I'm assuming I may still have small tweaks to the first three posters after Natalia sees them, buuuuut I wanted them on the cards, so there they are, even if it isn't a final version.

They're due to be in May 2nd. That makes me feel like I need to get my process book and posters ordered, like, yesterday. Panic moooode!

A little bit farther

Uuuuum, been working on my poster 4, hand-doing the type, title is set and working on my sentence. Then I have to add in the illustration, which I've already picked, and scan and ink it.

Then on to poster 5! So close. :)

Looking at ordering postcards from moo.com... It's a little pricier, but I like the option of having different images for the cards, instead of one set one.

So, yes.

A morning of process book

Finished my process book up to 11th week reviews! Took a little longer than I wanted, but that's that!

Time for a well-deserved break for lunch and then back to work, this time on posters!

Oh Natalia, why must you be gone a whole week in the month before our BFA is to be completed?

A bit of progress

Well, I got up to 5th week reviews, that's got to count for something.

Now I am tired of this, so I will break for tonight.

I expect to have lots of time to work tomorrow, maybe I'll keep working on process book, or transition on to posters. Eventually my process book will require that I finish the posters anyway, soooo...

A process book started

Okay, so process book is looking something like 52 pages, could go a little higher. I have 1-16 pretty much done, and the rest is planned out, so I know what's going where. Most of it should be images, so I just have to drag and drop.

That shouldn't take too long.

Time for my get-in-shape-for-the-wedding-workout, and then I will be back to work on the process book up through 11th week reviews.

Tonight, hopefully, I can come up with some ideas for poster 4.

Also, this blog is only coming in handy for me to know what the heck I was doing in earlier months... but I could have made that up too. Mostly, it's useless, because I talk much too casually to copy and paste my text into my process book!

A post-dinner post

Uuuh.. so much for work this weekend.

But I do plan on getting both final posters at least finalized to show Natalia, and a good jump on my process book, by the end of this week.

That will be good, yes?

A moment

That moment in which you realize that all the cool effects you are applying in Illustrator to make your poster look old timey and inked are really just making it look like crap.

Oops!

A tweaked poster 1

Here is poster 1, with the new symbol.

An updated poster 3

Well, here's a mostly completed poster 3.

I changed the frame, inked and colored my skelegirl, and incorporated my "movement" hieroglyph cleverly into the frame, although I'm not sure that's... valid.

The text is still there as kind of a placeholder, since Natalia wanted me to hand-draw it.

I just want to move on and make edits to other posters before I do that.

My toes are cold.

A couple dreams

I need to stop having anxiety dreams about BFA. These past two nights I've been dreaming like I've been in some action flic, the bad guy's chasing me and I just want to finish my projects! And I keep doing things in my dreams that are on my to-do list, and then I am soooo bummed when I wake up and they haven't been done yet!

Gah!

A petty whine

I know this is just going be a whine, so please ignore.

I am just  e x t r e m e l y  f r u s t r a t e d  because I finished my internship last week, which I figured would free up three mornings that I could come in to school instead and work on stuff. Instead, we have lost our doggie day care and I end up staying at home and looking after them, which means I get no work done. Technically it's my own fault, I should stop sleeping in, stop watching so much tv, take the pups for shorter walks, and just get down to business. But I do work so much better at school.

So. I have been cranky this week. Hopefully we can resolve this somehow...

In BFA project news,

• I have found a better symbol than the scales, thanks to my advisor. She suggested the "movement" hieroglyph from one of the indigenous languages. Natalia approves.
• Started linework and coloring on Poster 3. Will finish that up, add in my new symbol, and hand-draw the type, as well as adjust the border.

Thus I just need to:

• Fix symbol on poster 1
• Dirty up border on poster 2
• Add in symbol in poster 2
• Fix type in poster 2?
• Come up with posters 4 & 5

Looked up postcards today.. they are pricey : /

A disappointment on monday...

Gosh, I got next to nothing done on my list. Geez.

Will have to put in a few hours at home!

A happy easter

Well, I transferred my process book layouts over to an appropriate lulu/blurb size today, and then just now went through and tweaked it, adding paragraph styles, etc. Most importantly, I ditched a really ugly font that was really tying it down, and I do feel better now. I have this guilty feeling that I should only be using Mexican-designed fonts, but it's not like they're widely available and certainly not free, so I'm just relying on old-style fonts such as Garamond and Eames, with a fun twist in Lavanderia:

I probably really should take a look at book layouts in the early twentieth century if I want a design resource for this stupid process book, but I'm not quite sure where to look. Will have to ask Natalia tomorrow.

On the docket tomorrow:

• email Marina a thank you for 11th week reviews, plus a recap of her comments to confirm
• email Tai from internship a thank you for my gifts :)
• keep plugging away at process book
• make (known) edits to posters
• talk to Natalia about old book design, and the scale idea
• print out current version of process book to see how type looks/reads
• uuuuh figure out posters 4 & 5.. quickly!

Hopefully I'm not forgetting anything. I'd like to keep working at the pace I have been, which is a fast one, because I like feeling like I'm getting stuff done, and I like getting stuff done because then I feel less stressed about it all!

Oh yes... will have to look into cobalt blue paint. That will be a bitch to paint over again.

A look back at my process book

Well, Nancy freaked me out enough that I've decided to dig up the process book I made at the end of last semester and determine what needs to get done to complete it.

I'm not... entirely pleased with the style of it, but I'm really not feeling like I want to change it all that much. I went through and found some places to publish it... lulu, blurb, mypublisher... All of those will have to be rush shipments, I won't be finishing my posters by next week, eek.

I had originally planned to get it printed somewhere local, however, I haven't looked into that at all.

I think making a process book is slightly silly--no one's going to sit there and read it during the BFA show. Sigh. I don't feel like it is showcasing any of my design talent, in fact, I feel like it kind of looks like crap, but not sure how to fix it.

So I guess I'll just get in the content in there, as much as I can, and leave it at that. I have posters to work on, after all.

A relaxing weekend in my sights

Well, thank god that's over. It went really well, and left me feeling full of hope and excited for the BFA show, which was a much better feeling than the kind of dejected feeling I had after 5th week reviews.

Here's the notes I jotted down afterwards:

First poster—good

Second poster—integrate type better

Third poster—redo border, make it more nouveau-y, ink illustration, add color, no all caps, fix the typography

Fourth poster—poem as text, add political themes, fix sentence--it was not about hand-done, but expressionism/poor-man's illustration

Fifth poster—art deco as Mexican, add music? Or architecture—Europe + America (Chicago) reinterpreted by Mexico with Mexican themes

Sixth poster—my own, what I have learned?

I thought it was immensely interesting that Ricky was the one that suggested the sixth poster of my own work, rather than copied from others, since it was him that said there was too much of me in my first posters from the 5th week review. Yay! Made me very excited.

Marina was there, and on time, and skyped, and was very supportive and helpful and totally hit it off with Natalia (I think their shared love for design history helped connect them). So that was fantastic, since that's the thing I worried about the most. And her English was quite good. :)

Here I am, beginning my presentation, with Natalia and Ricky, Marina via skype behind Natalia,
and Tiffany out of frame to the left.

I had a table full of resources, and two tables full of papers for each poster (inspirations and sketches) and then put up my three posters that I finished, tile-printed, plus the inspiration boards for all five posters.

Here's my third poster that you haven't seen yet!

I think it looks pretty awesome, although admittedly the secondary type still needs work.

A time for bed

In bed before 11 the night before my review.. Yay! Sleep is good.

I didn't get quite as far as I would have liked, but it is what it is. Hopefully my panel likes it.

I haven't heard from Marina confirming our skype date for tomorrow... so I'm just gonna have to pray.

Now let's see if I can quiet down all these loud thoughts in my head so that I can fall asleep!

A wednesday morning before the review

I didn't get much more work done yesterday after finishing my Posada poster, except for a little work on the art nouveau one. I found a Mucha girl that I liked, which I then turned into a skeleton. Lovely. So the main bulk of that illustration is done (if I keep it line work, which I could), I just need to put in a very simple background (in case I want to color it). Then I need to hand-draw the title "Diseno Mexico" and add in the info text at the bottom.

I just suddenly had the revelation that it's a poster about hand-done type anddddd I wasn't planning on hand-doing the info text at the bottom. Hmm. I think it makes sense that just the headlines/larger copy would be hand-done, but larger chunks of text could be type-set. At least it makes sense to me, probably because it makes it easier for me. Will have to pick a font, though; I'm not sure my Century 725 Bold Condensed will apply here.

I hope to have a very-nearly finished art nouveau poster, and a rough draft of the Estridentista/Constructivist/TGP poster for Thursday morning. That means a lot of work needs to get done in the three hours that I'm at school today. I figure I can probably make my PDF presentation tonight at home, but I want to tile-print the posters I have in final stages (intro, Posada, art nouveau) and the cropping and taping together takes time.

Today is my last day at my internship; I am sad. Even though it took time out of my schedule, I've had fun working on design that turned into real-life items! And my boss generally seemed very happy with my work. Hopefully my first job will go as well as this internship.

A couple poster options for poster two

My headache has finally gone away after a lot of sleeping and drugs, etc. Thank goodness. Woke up in a good mood this morning, and have been able to get some work done, which is more than I can say for the last few days. Bleh.

Here's a couple versions of poster 2:

This is the poster influenced by Posada's work. I took heavily from his style, including the border, font types, and the illustration. The layout would be... unconventional at best, so we'll just have to see what Marina says at my review. I have to decide which one to tile print.. hm.. black and white would be cheapest! Probably the Don Quijote one, although the lady being carried off is quite hilarious.

I also still need to work in my scale. But as Marina is not a fan of the scale idea at all, I might just wait til post-review. I also might change the headline to filled in rather than outline, even though that's not how the font went... but it is so weak looking right now.

So that's two posters down, three to go. I'm hoping to have two more in at least final sketch stage for Thursday morning. That means a lot of work today and tomorrow! But I have found peace leading up to my review... it's not something I feel like I need to stress about. I've worked hard, even if it's mostly been research and not 'making', and I would think it would show in my work and my thinking.

A godsend

I've had some setbacks today, including being woken at 6:15 by my schnauzers, discovering that my headache from yesterday did not go away, taking my prescription pill for my headache, which made me pass out and lose a couple hours to a delicious nap...

But. I just had a-maz-ing success. I was looking for the font in the secondary headline text on this Posada broadside:

And used identifont to try to find it. At first it was trying to tell me it was Baskerville, which it obviously is not. So I tried it again and came up with a font called Century 725. Now I have Century but it was not the same, as the one I wanted was a bold condensed version. Now Century 725 had a bold condensed version that looked just about right, or about as close as I could hope to get. Myfonts.com wanted $25 for it, which I could have shelled over, as this posters are important enough to me to be willing to put in the extra moola.

But a simple search for the font came up with a link to a free download of the exact version I needed, Bold Condensed.

Someone up there is looking down on me! :D

I also came to the realization that since 11th week reviews are going on, I wil have both Monday and Wednesday's class time to work. Yay! I do work better at school, with an actual desk rather than a couch/kitchen table.

So today I will go out and get some double-sided tape so I can tile-print my posters on Wednesday, and on Wednesday I will put together my presentation PDF as well. Marina emailed me back this afternoon, I think I will just have to email back and clarify my position, but, well, that takes time and I have to work on posters!