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/

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.

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.

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.

Here are my designs:

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.