Over Two Years

Over two years.  That is how long it's been since I last posted on this... thing that I had envisioned with a much greater impact than what it had.  Two years ago I was a Sophomore, but now I am a Senior.  I could never have even guessed two years ago that I'd be who I am today, and I know that I should simply stop trying to predict the future right now, as it will end up in vain.  Two years ago I thought I had so much of high school left.  Now I'm at the threshold of the end of my high school career and on the verge of the unknown beyond.  Where life will take me in the next two years, I wonder too much.  Where I will go in two years, I fear.  A sense of wonderment and paranoia seizes me and I am once more stuck in an unending cycle.

Where will I be in two years?

Major Project of the First Quarter, Number Two

Today, I just finished the "Sign Project" we had.  Basically what it was was to create a poster that advertises a certain product or service.  We had to pick two fonts that we liked to use in this project.  I picked was Vivaldi for a more fancy and formal font, mostly for headings, and Segoe Print, for less formal and descriptive and informative text.  The main purpose of the project was to learn how to do fonts, which is why they are such a big deal in this post.  We had to sketch out the ideas we had for the project, and get it checked off by our teacher.  I asked him if I could do it on the computer, and he said yes, as long as I did the idea planning and sketching on paper, since the point of the project was writing in different fonts.  I started with this idea...

Don't mind the sharpie that bled through the page.

Basically, my intention was to make an ad advertising vacations to Mars (The final frontier!) for only $10,000,000.  This is the basic idea I had, nothing much to see here.

The light pencil marks don't show up very well, unfortunately.

Now that this is closer to the final piece, I'll give a bit more explanation behind my motives.

On the bottom of the page is a long and short picture I found of a crater on Mars, which I would put the text "Epic landscapes" over, as to show the sights that they could see if they would go on the vacation.  I also thought it was a great idea for a base, to hold it all together.

To the top-right of that is a picture that a rover took looking put over Mars, with the text "Plenty of ROOM!", as to show the viewer that they would have plenty of Mars to go around, without pollution or restrictions.

In the center slight-left is a nice picture I found of Mars, a good one for the main focus.  Over that I would put the main headline "Mars; The final frontier!"

In the top-right corner was another picture I found of Mars.  Only problem was that it was fairly blurry, making it a great filler and fairly subtle place to put the name of the fake company, "Interplanetary Travel, Inc.

Right above the crater picture on the bottom is the text "A 6 month vacation; for only $10,000,000!"  Nothing fancy there.

To the left-center of the page, above previously mentioned text, was a place for any details that I wanted to include.

And above that, in the top-right corner, was the phone number "1-800-PLANET" and the website address "InterPlanetary.com".

The background behind all this would be a picture of a spiral galaxy, with the center hidden behind the main Mars image, as to give it an interest feel, and to draw the viewers' eye to the picture.

Here is the final product.  I really like the way it turned out.  Usually I have a great idea, but I have trouble making it look right.  This one worked out pretty good.  The text seems pretty simple, which to me makes the whole thing seem a bit cheesy.  Two other problems I have with it is the white spot underneath the main Mars picture.  I don't know why or how it got there, I couldn't fix it.  The other problem I have is that I think that the main Mars image is a slightly subtle, in a negative way; it should be brought out a little more.  Other than that, I think it's decent, at best.


That concludes this post.  I know I promised another post yesterday, but I didn't have the time I thought I would to get around to it.  I might be able to get around to it tomorrow, however.

Art up until now... Part 1

For my first "real" blog post, I figured I'd start by showing some of the things I have done in art.  I only have two for now.  Even if I was to put it all in one post, I'd feel like that'd make the post too long.  Also, don't mind the huge scans, as I shouldn't mess with the DPI of our scanner.


A word on the scans, as well.  The scanner doesn't scan the pages from the sketchbook very well, the reason being that the page doesn't get as close as it can to the glass.  The scanner also gives the pencil and whole page a yellowish tint, meaning that I have to convert it to grayscale in Paint.NET.  I don't know why, but I feel this information is necessary.

The first two pictures I am going to show you are my first drawing in my sketchbook, and my first major project of the quarter, respectively.

This sketch begins the beginning of my sketchbook.  My art teacher gave us a picture, not unlike the recreation attempt you see here, to try and recreate.  A piece of advice he gave us is to start small with a little thumbnail before making a bigger, final version, as well as to always start with the outline.  He said that you should always finish the basic shapes before shading and details.  The latter is sort of a given for most people, but a reminder is always nice.

The advice of starting with thumbnails and with the outline before shading and fine-tuning led up to the first project of the quarter.  What we did here is found a painting we liked and e-mail it to our teacher.  I chose this one.  He then printed it out in grayscale, and it was our job to draw out the outline of it.  Then, we traced what we had done with tracing paper, put graphite on the other sides, and then traced it back onto a clean sheet of paper.  We then proceeded to match the shade of the original grayscale picture with colored paper cut out from magazines.  After we had done this, we cut out the paper (we had done all this in our sketchbooks) and laminated it.  The final step was to outline the major boundaries with a sharpie.  All that is what went into the final piece, which is the picture you see above.  To be honest, I am not sure what the point of all that was, or what it accomplished, but it was still a fun project.

That's all for this post.  I'll do my sketchbook page by page in future blog posts, each one containing about two to three pages, and include a breakdown of what I was suppose to learn from drawing it, the techniques behind it that he wanted us to practice, and what ever other information about it that is important.  I'll probably post the next part tomorrow afternoon.

First Post: Why did I make this?

I highly doubt that this blog is going to be worth it, but my art teacher said I should make one for fun.  He said I could put up stuff of what I do for class, so here I am, posting on my blog.  I wonder who all will view this, and who all will find it interesting.  I'm not sure what I'll say on this blog; maybe I will do random rants on things, like the name of my blog says.  (Actually, to be honest, I just chose it to choose it.)  I'll probably scan my art projects and such, and maybe other things about school.  I'll probably talk about what I did, say when I went on vacation or such.  I don't know, I'll have to see what time will bring on it's fast wings.