The word ritual was very appealing to me and since I’ve always been a believer of energies, souls, spirits, mythology and all that stuff so I decided I was going to use the four elements of nature and the fifth one which is the soul/spirit. I wasn’t completely sure of what I wanted to do but I knew whatever it was had to be summarized with something representing me, since I am the soul of the project. I first cut my map into four pieces and decided to burn one, soak another piece in water, cover the other with soil and dirt and finally do a origami crown to the last piece to represent air. I thought of a thousand ways to put them together in relationship with me and came with the idea of free spirits and life meaning. The map I had in my hand was from a skiing trail but I needed something related with me. I faced a lot of challenges to come here to SCAD and a map of Savannah was the best way to express that connection. I went to the visitors center and checked all of the maps since I wanted to have color relationships between the maps and the elements.  I finally got a map which was printed in green (EARTH) and  blue (WATER) and as a plus, had a red (FIRE) trail. For my good luck I found another one which had gray (AIR) and purple (SPIRIT) which is also my favorite color. I now had to find a way to put them together and even when I was very convinced I would use origami for representing “air”, a crown was not really my style.

I decided to do my favorite animal, butterfly, which symbolizes transformation for its impressive process of metamorphosis. In many cultures the butterfly is associated with the soul, in the Roman and Mexican Aztec mythology it was thought that we were all on a long journey of the soul. On this journey we would encounter endless turns, shifts, and conditions that would cause us to morph into ever-finer beings. The grace and eloquence of the butterfly shows us how to take responsibility to make our way in faith, accept the change that comes, and emerge from our transitions as brilliantly as her.

I covered my hand with plaster to make a mold and then made a few more layers with glue water and toilet paper before leaving it out to to dry (air). Then I cut my maps in pieces and tried burning (fire) them, but the air was horrible so I couldn’t do it outside. I kept trying to burn them for the next two days but the weather was not helping, and since the maps were like plastified I had to be extremely careful not to destroy the whole thing. I got in trouble for trying to do it at the dorms’ stairs so I just kept on with the project and decided I was going to burn it at the end. I covered my dried plaster hand with the map pieces and glued them. That took me forever since I first had to get the map wet and be super careful of not washing or mushing away the color and letters printed. I left the Savannah River text on what I wanted to have as the front side of the sculpture and then I placed a compass on the middle of the hand pointing towards the index finger. I tried burning the hand and apparently the final  glue coat I put on was super strong because the thing never burned. I used hairspray and a lighter to create a huge fire flame and still it wouldn’t burn. *DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME* I gave up and decided I at least had the red trails on the hand to represent fire so I move to the next step which was the butterfly.  It took me two days to learn how to do the origami butterfly (spirit/soul) until I finally got it perfectly done and  I glued it on the index finger as if it where about to start her journey.

This whole assignment was very metaphoric and connected to me. I did put a lot of thinking in this to make connections and thought everything around me was helping me achieve the final result. The balance between energies, I believe. This really help me realize of how many times I look at other people’s art and never realize how much connections they can have with the artist. I feel sometimes people just paint for painting, or  sculpt because they are good at it, but I never think about how much meaning, feelings, and energies those pieces of art have. This was probably my favorite assignment of Design 1 class and I am very satisfied with my result. I added the quote and placed the hand on the black board to make it look more presentable and give people a little clue of what I was trying to say.

I got really good critiques on this work and people did mention how they liked all the thinking I had put on it. One of my classmates mentioned how he loved the  color contrast how he liked the tones. My professor mentioned it was beautiful, but she would have liked it better with out the board and the quote to leave the meaning vague and letting people curious. The hand could have been more dynamic and people would have been able to touch it and see all the sides of it, not only literally.

Thank you for reading!

The assignment ABCs and 123s for Design 1 class consisted in photographing the letters of the alphabet and numerals 1-9 as found naturally occurring in my environment. I had to go outside and look close at everything that surrounded me, training the eye. I ended up finding letters at the leaves on the trees, the cracks in the sidewalk and even at the ground soil. I carried my camera with me all the time for around 5 days everywhere I went and actually happened to find most of them on River Street. My favorite letter was “F” because was the only one I was missing and surprisingly I was at my friends house telling him about my assignment when I looked up and found out the tree of his house was a perfect “F” shape.

I decided to turn all of my photographs in black and white on Photoshop and put them together in different sizes. I made bigger the ones I  liked the most and the ones that were harder to read and then created this poster with Illustrator adding green color to it. I decided to use this bright green color, not only to attract my viewers attention but to use the best possible color representation of nature and illustrate how much nature has to show us if we connect to it. I also decided to scramble the letters so that people could look around and find the images’ meaning. I  had the feeling that if I had put the letters and numbers in order people would eventually know what they were going to read and wouldn’t be that much challenging. I wanted to show in my poster that you have to open your eyes and train the eye to find unexpected things, not just find them because you were expecting them.

“The hardest thing to find is what is in fron of your eyes” -Gothe

During critique I got very positive comments from my classmates liking my idea of color impact and specially the quote I used. Although, most people thought my poster would have looked better if images were bigger since some of them were very small. Mrs. Waldvogel commented she liked it and that she thought of it being in a children’s museum. She liked that I had scrambled the letters and numbers but thought that I should have added somehow the answer, so that people guessed the letters and then actually confirm it.

Thanks for reading!

Hello!

The following post is about my Jack & Jill assignment for Design 1 class which consisted in creating visual equivalents for each part of the nursery rhyme “Jack & Jill” by using the dingbats and punctuation marks given on the assignment sheet. We used some of these pictograms to develop a visual metaphor by transforming them into cartoons.

This assignment was made in groups and I really did like that because it made it easier and less stressful. We all shared our ideas and came out with a really cool story.

Laura Matteo has very good illustration skills and we decided she was going to be responsible of creating the drawings, also Taylor Sargeant helped and did some parts of them. Julianna Vargas and me traced the drawings and transfer them into the six separate 8″X8″ sheets of Bristol board and along with Taylor carefully traced them again with micro pens. We came to the conclusion that we should use color to emphasize the pictograms that were important in the course of our story. I was responsible for coloring the images and Julianna and Laura mounted them on the board. Finally Taylor made the cover and this is how our story goes.

At the circus, Jack and Jill

Went up the stairs

To fetch a pail of water.

Jack saw Mouse and he got scared

Then fell down and broke his leg.

Jill came down to laugh at him.

I am very disappointed to say that our work didn’t get very good critiques this time. While some classmates loved that we had used color, most of the group thought we should have sticked to a color palette and not have used brown for our ladder. On our last two drawings people commented we had a bad use of negative and positive space and that they also would have liked it better if we had drew our “circus” flags on all of our drawings. Some of my classmates mentioned they like the way the work was presented on sets of three and and that we had extreme good craftsmanship in our work. I have to say this is not what I would consider one of my strongest works and I do know it lacked of good composition.

Thanks for reading!

M.

As you can see I was outside of Anderson Hall between 11:31 and 12:40. I had never realized before how many bird sounds you are able to hear when sitting outside. I recorded some of the times when the sounds were more notorious but I can tell that most of the time I was in there I could hear birds tweet. Also I could not record all of the cars that passed since there were a lot but I emphasized in the ones that caught my attention. The girl driving a beetle with really loud music and really bad breaks, boy on a bike who has some kind of bells hanging from the bike and a bus rumbling very hard.

Thanks for reading!

ORDER

INCREASE

BOLD

CONGESTED

PLAYFUL

TENSION

Thanks for reading!

M.

My third assignment in Design 1 class consisted on creating a design combining  principles of form and repetition on complex grids and ink it  on a 10″x10″ white  illustration board.

At first we were asked to create a motif made out of two shapes combined together. I quickly sketched some options and the following photo shows what I came out with.

After I chose what I thought was my best option, the “M-inside-M” shape, I noticed I wasn’t going to have many ways to position it on the grid since I actually wanted it to look like an “M”. I created a sample of what my cell on the grid would look like and then created 25 copies of it. I shuffled them around creating different patterns and decided this were the 5 designs I liked the most.

1)   

2)   

3)   

4)    

5)   

I thought of design 3 as my strongest and chose it for developing different inking plans. The following photos show the inking plans obviously lacking of craftsmanship and exact measurements, but resemble a quick idea of what my final piece will look like.

I have to say that at the beginning I was truly disappointed with my choice of doing a 25 cell design instead of a 100 cells. I thought my motif was boring and that it wasn’t going to look that spectacular. Then, I thought that maybe if I worked really hard on my craftsmanship and did every line and every shape as it was intended to be my work could look really good and sharp and really do capture my viewer’s attention. As you can see with my past assignments, I tend to do repetitive lines and shapes and always end up creating groovy designs that make my viewer’s attention go around the picture.

In my final piece you can see the design I chose inked with extreme carefulness and craftsmanship. I came out with this repetitive pattern that in my opinion gives the impression of being in movement forming different pinwheel shapes. The following photo is a scan of my piece but since my work was too big for the scanner to detect it, the right and bottom sides of it are a little bit cropped and my margin doesn’t show. I used a 1 1/2″ white margin all around the design.

All of the critiques I received during class were very positive. A group of my classmates were assigned to do a critique of my piece and mentioned my effort in craftsmanship had pay off. My work was sharp and neat and that the border I had chosen worked out really good. They also commented that my motif had created a well executed pattern and that my job had a lot of variety because of the way the motif was positioned and how the shapes were filled or left blank.

My other classmates commented that I had worked well the negative and positive spaces and that it really attracted the eye. I had a wide variety of diagonals creating different angles and that it wouldn’t look good if I had rotated the cells differently.

One of my classmates said that my design gave her the impression of pop art and that she would have liked it a lot better if it had color. Another of my classmates responded that in his opinion it looked more objective in black and white and gave the impression of being stamped in the board.

Thank you for reading!

M

This is my design for concentration, as you can see the circles size increase on the outside and then they capture your attention as they start getting smaller and smaller leaving almost no positive space at all.

Now you can see my design representing isolation. i intended to draw love bugs and attract your attention around the design by increasing the size of the borders of some of them. Then I created my focal point by giving one of the love bugs a dark value.

Thanks for reading!

I first started with 25 sketches using only horizontal and vertical lines. The next 25 I made were using only diagonal lines followed by 25 designs made out of only curved lines. Finally, the last 25 had either a horizontal or vertical line plus a curved and diagonal line.

The following thumbnails show my preliminary sketches.

The next 4 photos are the designs I chose for fool-sized construction and I thought were my strongest.

Vertical & horizontal lines

Diagonal lines

Horizontal, curved and, diagonal lines

Curved lines

At first I thought making 100 sketches was going to be abominable and time consuming, but even when the time consuming part was actually true, I ended up loving the work. It was like doodling noodles over and over again!

Most of the critics I received during class were very positive.  My classmates mentioned they liked my whole set of designs. For  the one with curved lines a girl said that it kind of made her think about Dr. Seuss. It was also mentioned that I used correctly the negative and positive space and that my designs were balance and executed with good craftsmanship. My teacher, Mrs. Waldvogel, mentioned my work was really nice and the piece she liked the most was the design with only diagonal lines.

I think the design I liked the least is the one with vertical and horizontal lines. I chose these four sketches because I wanted to create sort of a same pattern. I used repetition of lines to attract my viewers attention to the lines rather than to the shapes they formed. I think the design I like the least does not match the details mentioned before, this is why the following picture shows what I redesigned.

Thank you for reading Doodle Noodle! Please leave your critique.

I was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, 18 years ago and I currently am an incoming freshman and an international student at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Since I was 4 years old I have known what I want to do in life, I want to work in the fashion industry. I remember the whole point of playing with Barbie was just for changing her outfits, I designed and handsaw  clothes for my rabbit out of my mom’s washcloths, and when  I was 9 I knew I wanted to become a fashion designer.

As I grew up I started getting more involved with this “fashion world” and as I began doing research for colleges I realized there were other paths in the fashion industry regarding fashion design. The best fit to my skills and my interests is Fashion Marketing and Management, my intended major. I want to be able to develop decision-making skills without limiting myself to only designing apparel, I want to expand my creativity and learn as much as I can from different areas; design, business, marketing, retailing, an coordination.

I decided to come to SCAD  for my college education to help me complete my goal of becoming a creative director of a well-known fashion house.

Thanks for reading!