For my sound exploration I went and sat at a bench around city market. I honestly chose that spot just because I thought it would be fun to have some horse footsteps incorporated in my project. Other than the horse steps, I didn’t really hear anything apart from your normal city sounds. I could hear foot steps all around me, someone playing the guitar close by, car horns, birds singing, people talking and so on. I just closed my eyes and basically meditated on the sounds and I tried to display that through my sound map.

Andy Bialk is a character designer for Dreamsworks and has worked on movies such as Madagascar, Megamind and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. It’s so amazing being able to look through his sketches of all the different characters he has designed and seeing all the different ways they could’ve looked. It’s also inspiring to see how these sketches eventually become dynamic characters of which millions of people fall in love with. It kinda brings hope to the people who want to eventually work in the movie industry to see peoples work like this because it seems like it’s so far out of our reach, but in reality it’s right around the corner.

http://andybialk.blogspot.com/

Alex Pardee is my favorite artist of all time. I love the dark and crazy twist he puts on things and how he just puts everything that’s in his head on paper, regardless of how strange it may seem to everyone else. It’s artists like these that inspire you to kinda of let loose and really let your own personality show in your work. I love his blog because he explains what was going on in his head to inspire his farfetched designs.

http://eyesuckink.blogspot.com/

The following blog displays more than the work of just a single artist. It’s a blog with a collection of inspiring short films from all over. As an animator, I find it extremely enjoyable to see some other peoples work who are not professionally working in the field, rather than just seeing the perfect animations all the time from movies or television shows. Being able to see other peoples work who are close my my skill level really drive me to work harder and push myself.

http://shortanimatedfilms.blogspot.com/

For this project we had to get a map of anything and do everything we could to destroy it. Burn it, rip it, soak it, ect. However everything we did to the map had to mean something to us. I went out and got my map and started doing everything I could to ruin it, and had a great deal of fun while i was it, but I eventually got to the point where I lost my direction. By this point, we had been given part 2 which was to turn our destroyed map into a work of art. Looking at my map (if you could still call it that) I felt like I needed to start over. I got a new map, stained it to look aged and tried to make a super complex origami dragon.  This however, did not go well. The design called for reference line after reference line and eventually I just got lost, unable to differentiate reference lines from lines on the map. I then moved on to a new idea and a new map where I shredded it into pieces and then tried to put it back together making an image. I quickly found that I simply didn’t have a map colorful enough for the idea I had in mind. Frustrated at this point I began doodling little cartoon guys to convey my feelings.

I drew this guy and figured I could do some sort of 3′D thing with the map, showing him eating the map and then it spewing into pieces out of his head. I glued down a piece of the map in his hand and decided that I didn’t particularly enjoy the 3-D and just left it out. This is what I ended up with:

The lighting in this picture washes out the colors of the map, but I had them with red at the bottom, going to orange then green then blue,  using the natural colors of the map. The class seemed to enjoy my work and its simplicity. I had a lot of fun doing this project even though it took me much longer than I felt it should have with me continuously restarting.

For this project we were to find every letter of the alphabet and the numbers one through nine that were naturally occurring in the environment.  It was a bit challenging to find some of the letters, for instance I had a rough time finding a K until I was working on a project and looked down at my scissors and saw they made a K. It was really nice having two weeks to work on this because it took me that much time to find a few of my numbers and letters. I got a lot of crazy looks stopping on the sidewalk and whipping out my phone to snap a close up photo of the sides of buildings or benches, but it was pretty fun regardless.

Here are my pictures:

On my finished project I cut and pasted my photos to illustration board, having the majority of my pictures vertical but a few horizontal.  It looked kinda of strange having it this was, and now looking at my pictures as squares I feel I could have cropped them as squares so they would look more unified. Also, my printed pictures looked pretty dark once printed. I should have went back and tried to edit the brightness of the images so they would look better on paper.

For this Design project we worked in four man groups and were to tell the story of Jack and Jill within six frames using only the following symbols:

Limiting as it sounds, we had the freedom to use only bits and pieces of symbols in order to create more interesting designs.

We began brainstorming and sharing ideas of our individual twists on the story. Eventually we decided to go with the idea where Jack would be a mouse Sultan and Jill would be his right hand camel. Jack and Jill would be traveling through the desert in search of a fresh water source and they would stumble across an oasis with a small pond. The oasis, however, would be protected by an evil elephant who kept the water to himself. Jack and Jill came up with the idea for Jack to try and scare the elephant off (since elephants are supposedly scared of mice) while Jill would drink the water up and store it in her humps. Their plan went downhill as the terrified elephant ended up stomping Jack off the hilltop. Upon hitting the ground, the large ruby would fall from Jack’s turban. The elephant would then turn his attention to Jill and would furiously kick her down after Jack.

We started doing rough sketches and toying with the idea as you can see here:

I unfortunately misplaced most of my rough sketches so I only have this draft image.

Eventually we ended up with this as our final product:

During class critique, everyone seemed to enjoy our pieces as a whole, but their were a few sketchy parts. For instance, it wasn’t very clearly shown that the elephant was startled by Jack and that he kicks Jack down the hill. Also, in the fifth panel it was hard to tell that it was a ruby popping out of the turban.

Working as group went well for the most part. It was fun collaborating ideas and creating conceptual designs together, however I did not feel everyone shared equal weight overall. We had quite a bit of control issues from a group member and I feel our finished project suffered from it. The other groups seemed to successfully display ideas from every group member and it seemed to work in their favor, making them more interesting. Despite these setbacks, I think we were able to do a pretty decent job overall.

Today in design we had to arrange black squares in a plain in order to express the following terms: order, bold, increase, congested, playful and tension. Once I got going, this project was rather simple and was completed in a timely manner. Though the project was simple, I feel like each term had so much potential and could be completed thousands of different ways. I’m eager to see some of the designs other people were able to come up with.

Here are my designs:

This project was a little difficult for me because the motif I chose was pretty simple and could have easily ended up as a pattern design. I did pretty much the only thing I could think of to avoid this by going with a shotgun blast design. I felt like it wasn’t the most original or creative design, however people in my class seemed to like it and felt it served its purpose well. Inking the final design was a bit of a challenge as well. I had my nose about an inch from the illustration board the entire time and my back hated me for it. Also my felt-tip pen made some fuzzy outlines.

Today in Design 1 we received small stencils and were to use them to create designs containing concentration and isolation within square plains. At first I really stuck to my stencil shape when making designs but began to explore different shapes as well. These were my two favorite designs I did. Concentration on the left and Isolation on the right.

For our first project in Ms. Waldvogel’s Design 1 class we had to cut and paste black construction paper onto four 8×10 inch groundsheets in order to solve the following problems:

A.Using only straight horizontal and vertical lines, divide the page into a design that emphasizes line but develops interest in how the space is subdivided

B. Do the same thing using only diagonal lines

C. Do the same thing using only curved lines

D. Do the same thing using at least one vertical or horizontal, one diagonal, and one curved line

Before doing this however, we were required to do 25 preliminary sketches for each of the problems. These sketches actually took a good bit of time for me because I was trying to come up with ways to make all of my sketches look completely different.Also, once I got to the final part I found it really irritating cutting out skinny and curved lines with an exacto knife. However, everyone seemed to commend me on my craftsmanship so I guess I didn’t do too bad. They were also impressed with how I cut out all of my designs together as one shape rather than cutting out each individual line and gluing them down one by one. Everyone seemed to agree that my designs all worked well to solve the problems.

Here is my work:

After critiquing our projects we were to choose what we thought our weakest design was and create a new design for that problem. I felt like my straight line design was kinda weak and unappealing to look at  so that’s what i chose. My new design, as seen below, I felt was a more interesting and stronger piece. I like the strong focal point in the middle and how the bold black lines lead your eyes through the design.

I’m Josh. I hale from Archdale, North Carolina (a small town directly south of High Point). The majority of my time is spent drawing, playing video games, watching movies and driving. My favorite game would have to be the original Spyro the Dragon for Playstation. Favorite movie is a little bit more difficult to answer. Gladiator, The Empire Strikes Back, and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless mind are probably my top three. I don’t list driving sarcastically, I legitimately love to drive. I currently own a 2003 EP3 Civic SI which is fantastic to drive, especially down the winding country roads surrounding my home.  I’m pursuing a degree in animation here at SCAD and would eventually love to land a job at Pixar.