Thursday, April 19, 2012

echo base are belong to us






I don't know why, but I've been on a Star Wars kick. It doesn't help that my girlfriend has also gotten into the same kick as me. Don't get me wrong, I think it's the best space opera ever created by a human brain. and it's super cool that my girlfriend enjoys it as much as me, but this just came out of nowhere.

I haven't done fan arts in a while so I decided to do a piece with the characters from "A New Hope" (which isn't finished yet) I haven't figured out a background yet. I moved on to vectorize a bunch of light sabers and make a chart type of design, but again, i'm just not happy with the end result so far, plus I couldn't get this other idea out of my head...

I couldn't wait to make a piece for "The Empire Strikes Back." I just went for it. I made it semi mid-century style. I love the snowspeeders and the AT-AT Imperial Walkers, so i made this diptych of the two sides about to clash. I think it came out great. I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I do. I also can't wait to make this into a framed piece cause it deserves it!


"Echo Base Are Belong To Us"
Adobe Illustrator CS3
Inspired by: Star Wars / May Blair
4/2012

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Four For Forty


The state of California has been cutting college classes left and right making it more difficult for students like myself to obtain a degree so that we can "make this a better place." At Grossmont College we had a lab class available for students to register for, this would cover Fridays and Saturdays lab time for a lot of classes.
These classes were cut in the fall semester of 2011.
Somehow, my photography instructor found a way to get the photo labs open for four days. For those four days students had to pay one flat fee of $40.00.
My instructor knew that I was double majoring in Graphic Design and Photography. She asked me to create a flyer for the new lab days, so I created the image above.
I loved the image so much that I knew I had to finish them as separate pieces. This would be a chance for me to unite the world of the "Darkroom" with the world of the "Lightroom." Photographers working together for the sake of photography. No more "Digital is for cheaters." or "Film is annoying to work with." Artists working their craft together... or just to get the assignments done so they can graduate. Either way I was all in, anything to support the arts.





















"The Light Side"
Adobe Illustrator CS3

"The Light Side" of course meaning working on a computer, the lights are on, no negatives. The stuff written on the board are things that I learned while in my photo classes. "Photo-Chop" is a term that my instructor uses constantly for Adobe Photoshop.























"The Dark Side"
Adobe Illustrator CS3

"The Dark Side" is pretty obvious, a dark room, the lights are off with the exception of a safety light, lots of negatives. I based the interior off of the black and white darkroom that we have in Grossmont College. I meant for the "character" to be just any background person as a silhouette like in most mid century art, but my instructor has claimed her as herself, I'm sure she's only joking.




 

"Photo Lab"
Adobe Illustrator CS5


This year I was asked again to make another flyer for the Spring 2012 classes. I was inspired by Kodak for the "Instamatic" looking camera and the 110 film cartridge. As for the DSLR I used my Nikon D60 for the inspiration.

Saturday, April 7, 2012

PROJECT peach 10 years


This year in August will be the 10th anniversary of my on going muse "Project Peach." I began working on it in 2002.
I was working on my other project, "Ichiban" which was heavily influenced by Japanese Animation, and I just got tired of it, so I decided to start from scratch. I took a few inspirations (The anime Project A-Ko; Sanrio's Hello Kitty; Hanna Barbara's Power Puff Girls and Jonny Bravo; my Ichiban project; and my personal life) I mixed them together. The result was "Project Peach."
As time went on the styles and motifs of Project Peach would change and grow along with myself.

For year 10 I plan to have a year long celebration. Nothing is set in stone, but I'd like to have a book of my Project Peach collection and sketches. Finish a documentary that I already started; and plenty of artwork.

The following are some highlights from the past ten years.



















I started designing the characters in 2002, but in 2003 I transferred the characters digitally for the first time through Adobe Photoshop 5.0. The time it took for each head was 45 mins.-1 hr.
This character is actually "Missy," the name "Christy" only lasted for about a year.




 
















My first Project Peach website was on CJB.net. The picture above is from my second page. I'm not really into making web pages. usually my pages would consist of one big jpeg and "hotspots" for the links to another part of the site. It had a major "home made" feel to it.






















"Cute Girl With Glasses for World Leader 2005" was the campaign that I created for the release of Project Peach. I made two sets of buttons to give away. There were 25 pink buttons, they were given to people on the first day of the release. 75 red buttons were given randomly throughout the year. I would carry a handful and just give them to people all over San Diego.
This was also the debut of my character Bettie Momo, poster girl for Project Peach. Her name was "Beau"



 

















In 2005 my friend taught me how to use Adobe Illustrator 5.0, Two days later I left for Navy boot camp in Great Lakes, Il. After boot camp I went to "A-school" for training in Fort George G. Meade, MD to how to be a Lithographer. I continued to learn how to use Illustrator there and I've been using it ever since.
My time for digitizing a head went from 45 mins.-1 hr. to 5 mins. each. This doubled the amount of work that I started creating.






















The Big Art Show is a traveling art show in the east coast. I attended in 2006 at the Otto Bar in Baltimore, MD. That was the first time that my work would be shown in the east coast.





















"It's About Art" was the campaign that I created for my third Big Art Show in Washington DC. This time I had gone from having a small card table with my work to double that size. I got lots of good feed back on the free stickers I made.





















In 2008 I was stationed on the USS Theodore Roosevelt CVN-71 (TR) and I had about seven months to work on art work when I wasn't working on anything media related for the Military. At one point I was so busy with my my military and personal work that I hadn't seen the sun in a month.
My biggest influences while on board was the stag magazine "Barracuda" and a book called "Meet Mr. Product." The book is all about old logos and mascots.
The picture above is based on a Bazooka Bubble Gum wrapper that featured Bazooka Joe.  























While still stationed on the USS TR, I decided to work on my portfolio since I would be honorably discharged as soon as we arrived back in Norfolk, VA. This started my series of Optical Candy "collections" This would be mini collections of my art work and what I would think was the best at the time.






















When year eight came around I began to realize that my work still had a long way to go and that pretty soon I would be hitting the one decade mark. I began the task of coming up with something special for when the time came. This taught me a valuable lesson, ideas change.
The biggest idea I had was to make a box set of all of my Project Peach work digitized and a book to go along with it. The entire thing would be in a box that would look like a record player. I later found that The Franklin Mint had created an Elvis Presley Complete Masters Collection 36 CD box set, that looked like what I wanted to make.

Franklin Mint: Elvis Presley Complete Masters Collection


















Summer of 2011 I decided to change the Project Peach logo and create a box set for my alternative photography class. Although this had nothing to do with photography, i fid use the techniques i learned.
This set would contain a card with an original piece from each year, a rag doll, a pair of wooden glasses, 2 wooden cards. stickers, a knit hair bow and some cut-out glasses all contained in a wooden cigar box. This would serve as a demo for a more complete set.





















Late 2011 and this year I've gotten really into Mid Century art work. I've always enjoyed it, but now I'm serious about it. My main inspiration for my mid century techniques is Mary Blair. She worked on many Disney films of the 50's, her style is all over Alice in Wonderland. all the dark shadows juxtaposed with bright colors are just out of this world.
The music, fashion, ads, way of live and the shapes of that time are a major driving force behind my work and have changed Project Peach drastically.

What was once something that was driven by character design has simplified into just the design aspect. To me this is great because I can really aim my art work to anyone of any age.

Archiving






The past month, I've been archiving all of my art work. This mean any loose pages; all of my sketchbooks; paintings; sculptures; notes; if I meant for it to be art work it's been photographed of scanned.
Another part to my archiving process is dating it. Most of my loose stuff is almost impossible to date to the exact day or month, same goes for my sketchbooks so these are archived by year. BUT my digital work is dated by month and year so that's good news.
While going through this process I have gone through a lot of old drawing with characters that I still like and some that I don't remember very well. There's cameo drawings and collaboration work too. This past week has been spring break and it's really helped with the process.
...Unfortunately I was supposed to be shooting photos for my Color Photo II class, Finish a drawing for Drawing class, finish my Spanish homework and writing a three page report on an art piece for my Modern Art history class.
My girlfriend says that it's because of my Modern Art History class that I got into this archiving madness, and she's right. Watching films about Picasso, Manet, and Degas and how much information and sketches they have on these guys is impressive. with our technology today there's no excuse why I shouldn't have my work archived. Heck even she got the bug, She's starting to archive all of her photography work.
Archiving is really good for any artist. I found some work that I want to "George Lucas" (redo) myself or that I'd like to see vectorized today.








 
My first set of paperback sketchbooks. 





 
 Collaboration piece by Raz Holly, Shao, Barrie Punsalan, and Michael Simpson
1998





  
Design notes for "Motoretta" t-shirts on torn card stock.
 2007