Busy Summer, but Ready to Get Back to It

It has been a while since I have gotten on my blog to update you guys on my work over the summer. I am a golfer and am captain on the girls golf team at school this year, which means I had to work my butt off this summer to be the best at my game. I have been traveling around the country playing in tournaments, which means less time at my computer to work on projects. School starts in four days, so I need to be ready to get back in the groove of things.

GISHWHES PROJECT
In my last blog I had mentioned an event called GISHWHES (The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen), that I had participated in and had created the color scheme for. One of the 185 challenges was to create a sci fi movie poster including the actor/ man in charge of this event, Misha Collins and the Queen of England.  Using my creative skills, and two night of my life (while playing in tournaments during the day), I created a masterpiece shown below. 

The most time consuming part of  this poster was Misha's shirt. I painted each square/ tile shown in the picture I was going off of. Just the squares took me around five hours and the rest of his body took me around two hours to complete. His oldest son West (bottom left) took me around three hours to complete, and had some modifications for the painting. In the original photo I was going off of, West was pictured holding a bra. I had to paint his hands into a different potion than where they were in the original picture and make the bra in the original photo look like a blanket in the final piece. Misha's daughter Maison (bottom right) only took me around two hours to complete, because frankly I was just really tired and did not go into as much detail with her as I should have, which was a little bit of a disappointment to me.

The hardest part for me was how to put them all together, I am not a graphic designer, and I do not know how to equal out spaces in photos or drawings very well. It wasn't until 2:35 AM Thursday morning that I had finally gotten it, and it had turned out way better than I had expected.

POSTERS FOR CLIENTS

Today, I went into my Papa's (Grandpa's) optical shop, and noticed some really cool Ray Ban sunglasses posters/ads. I asked him if he would want me to make him one to display in the store, and of course he said yes.


These are some of the examples of the posters that inspired me to do this.

I started off of what I think of when I see Ray Bans, and frankly I think of the movie The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, old milk shake diners, greesers and Elvis, so pretty much anything between the years of 1950's-1960's. Though I enjoy classic styles and music from those eras, I also had to think, what about the people who enjoy or know the 21st century better than the 1950's and 60's.

The two images that I went off of for this poster was a 1958 Ray Ban advertisement and a 2013 Ray Ban advertisement.

One of the difficult parts of this project was lining up the two faces to somewhat match. The glasses on the right were also difficult to draw because they did not have a definite shape in the original image, I had to re draw them over ten times.

I honestly thought the 1958 model would be hard to paint because of the black and white coloring of the original image, but I now realize that even in black and white images, there are many shades of color, not just black and white.

I am not a graphic designer, nor do I want to be one, but doing these paintings is not a job to me, it is more of a relaxer. I love to sit and draw on my computer for hours at a time with my classic rock playing, just because it helps get my mind off of all the other stuff in my life. It also puts my life, feelings and creativity on
a page for others to see.


 When school starts, animation will be a big focus for me, and trying to decide what type of animation
is right for me. College is coming up in a year, and I still haven't made up my mind of where I want to
go, but I know animation will be my career and life.