Charity Water

Designing the postcards for charity water was fun because we knew that they would be actually used and sent out to promote donations to a great charity. The design needed to be able to turn into a stencil so I used solid shapes that could be cut out to form the stencil. African tree shapes help give a feel of the African continent and dry conditions. The pump shows what the organization is trying to accomplish by providing water to this area. A woman rejoicing under the pump depicts the graciousness of the people on the areas after Charity Water completes a project. I tried to show the woman almost flowing out of the pump building the idea that water creates life and life needs water to survive.

Chandelier

The waterbottle chandelier was an exciting project. It was fun taking ideas from fancy glass chandeliers and conceptualizing how to do something similar with waterbottles. When discussing shapes I enjoy the more traditional crystal chandelier shaps as shown below. Blown glass chandeliers are also appealing to me because of the funky shapes. In the conceptualizing stage, our team worked well together as we pulled some of our ideas into one design.

Process for Time Book

For the time project, there were a couple different ideas I approached to come up with content to include.

This first photo is a shot of a tree on Mt. St. Helens. It was knocked down by the force of the blast when the mountain erupted. This tree had a life cycle and at one point was a beautiful, live tree in a thriving forest. Even though the tree has been dead for over twenty years, it still has some beautiful aspects to it.



The drawing of a skier below relates to time in that during life, our body develops to be a mature machine able to handle strenuous activities. At some point in life our body begins to regress and can no longer do the things it once could. This picture shows a skier who's body is performing at top notch as he catches some air.





During this project we discussed as a class the fact that many of our pictures were of beauty and we were missing a whole other side of what is happening in the world. With the wars being over seas, we thankfully don't see scenes of children with guns and other horrible scenes of war. I also was hesitant to turn in someone else's photo, but after our discussion we decided that it was ok to use since we don't have access to take any of the photos ourselves.

The next few photos investigate the time involved in a process. Pictured below is Don stirring a boiling pot of wort. It depicts the time involved in creating homebrewed beer. We were working on creating a Beligian Wit recipie, one of the most mysterious and oldest beer recipies out there. One can go to the store and buy a beer already made, but taking the time to create something beautiful is a rewarding activity.

One can also go to a Walmart to purchase glass objects for a very cheap price. There are few in the world who take the time to use their hands to create blown glass. This picture shows Claude in the early stages of making one of his vases out at Edgefield.

This picture also from the Edgefield Glass Haus pictures the bucket of broken dreams. You can think of this bucket as a time capsule from the last 2 - 3 weeks of glass work. All trimmings, knob offs, and pieces that fall off of the pipe end up in this bucket.

In approaching this book it is easy to get caught up in the 'beauty' aspect of everything. In order to divert from this norm I wanted to show an ugly part of human culture. This is a drawing of chickens, hanging by their feet alive in the processing plant waiting to be slaughtered. I am not a vegitarian and do eat meat on occassion, but in today society it is easy to forget sometimes what went into that chicken tender you are eating. We are so far removed from the food chain as we go to the grocery store and purchase items.

Shelter was on of the topics we were trying to cover in the book. Below is a photo of a shelter at the top of McNeil Point up on the West side of Mt. Hood at 7,ooo feet. When the winds get whipping up there and the storms hit, this shelter just might save your life if you happen to get stranded. The stonework is really well done.

This is a picture of my good friend an Ex-Girlfriend, Tara. We tried a long distance relationship which struggled and eventually failed. This is a picture of her in deep contemplation from 3,000 miles away.

2nd Text Assignment

The idea of this assignment was to involve text in a design. This was the first one I did. I used a letter G and created this tunnel composition and tried to create a sense of depth.


This is the second composition. I used letter A and M and got carried away in a symetric, staind glass piece. I had fun doing this one.


This was the final piece I put together. I just let loose and put lots of objects on the page. It is almost too busy and has no real focus. I'm not thrilled about it.

Involving Text

The assignment here was to begin involving text into out designs. I was stuck trying to solve my problem of getting a breaking wave in to the computer. This is the first attempt at making a wave look more 3-d in the computer. It is very easy to loose much of the texture and interest gained from drawing by hand. This shape was created by translating and shrinking a shape as you build layers backward. I felt I could do better so I tried again:

This was a much more successful wave in my mind. It really pulls you in an creates the feel of a wall of water breaking. I misunderstood the idea to involve text as a design instead of involving text in the design and ended up with a possible surf shop type ad. The colors ended up looking great but I'd really like to get some foam and more texture in the design.

A friend and I went camping up at 6,500 outside Sisters on a very cold 20 degree October night. In the morning I saw some pinecones laying around the campsite and realized that this is what I'm searching for. Being a glass artist, this reminded me of the Italian technique, reticello, where you have cane and bubbles going in two opposing directions. People have mentioned the Fibionachi sequence to me after seeing some of my glass and paintings. After a bit of research I found that pinecones do follow the sequence for the most part. After tweaking curves in photoshop, I added colors and interest to nature's patterns.

3 Colors

For the 3 colors, I wanted to stick to the basics and give primary colors a shot. I was playing around with brushes, lines, and circles in Illustrator.

This work took consideration of the Northwest's volcanic landscape. This is no place in particular as it was created from imagination but reminds me of some places on Hood and St. Helens. There is one color brown, a light blue used for screening layers, and a dark blue used in the sky. It was an experiment in atmospheric effects, using a light blue layer to build distance between the 3 layers of the same color brown.

This is a wave I painted using watercolors with 2 shades of green, blue and black. Again, this is on my tagent of liquidity in art.

Assignment 2

The goal with this piece was to get a piece of paper to be as liquid as possible using two shades of oil pastel blue. My idea was to just have fun with the pastel and let it move as it pleased.

I then tried to take the energy of the fun pastel piece into the computer and create a turbulent, liquid environment.