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.
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