Don't follow the shadows

For some reason, school started on a Thursday (on my birthday, of course) and all of my professors gave us a week’s worth of homework to make up for it. Thursday is most UWM students’ last day of class, so everyone was rushing to get everything done by Tuesday over Labor Day Weekend, including myself. :/ This was not easy to do on the weekend after my birthday. I also had a ton of work to do last week, and I just have two things to do today before I’m finally caught up. Today is the first day where I’ve felt like I had enough time to sit down and breathe, so I’m going to try to catch up on updating my journal, too. I also decided that this semester I won’t be updating anything on Twitter or COLOURlovers to give myself more time for homework.

* On that note, with LiveJournal’s new features, please don’t link anything from my journal to Facebook or Twitter! I don't know why anyone would want to, but you never know. I know most of my journal is public, but I still don’t want certain people I know to have an easy time finding it. ;)

This semester marks the beginning of my senior year, and I can’t believe how quickly the time’s flown by! I’m taking First Semester Swedish, Advanced Art History: Early Medieval Art & Architecture in the West, Figure Painting, Intro to Ceramics, and Visual Journals. Swedish is pretty easy so far because so much of it is similar to German. My art history class is once again online and mainly focuses on medieval Scandinavia, Germany, France, and the British Isles. I was told that it’s been several years since a medieval art history class that doesn’t focus on Rome has been taught at UWM, so I definitely feel lucky to be a student here at this time. I was a little worried about Figure Painting and Ceramics, but everything is going well so far. Loosening up my drawing has definitely helped relax my painting style. This is the second painting class I’ve ever took, but working from live models and having limited time to paint the poses helps inspire me and forces me to rely on instinct when I’m painting. Visual Journals is also online, and I’m basically creating an art journal/diary with a theme and using it to solve weekly problems that the professor posts. The theme I chose was body modification. I originally wanted to create a grimoire, but I think death is a bit too broad of a topic to make a journal on for only a few months. If I enjoy the process of making this visual journal, maybe I’ll do another one with that theme in the future. I actually have to create a page today for it, since it was due Monday. I hadn’t received any feedback from my group or the teacher before then, so I didn’t know if I should have just went ahead and started on it. (Apparently, I should have.) I also spent that day doing two paintings that my painting teacher decided the next day wouldn’t even be looked at until Thursday. Just my luck, eh?

At least luck was on my side earlier this week when I found out I won the contest at The Rave. I am on the guest list to see Katatonia, Swallow the Sun, and Orphaned Land for free tomorrow! \m/

This is also ridiculously late, but I just recently figured out how to convert my magazine project from an Adobe InDesign file to smaller (yet still readable) PhotoShop files.


I spent a month slaving over this project, measuring every letter and line of text in Print Magazine, so I figured I’d still post it. Intro to Design was a great reminder of why I decided not to major in graphic design, as I originally intended. I feel that with this project (and field, in general), I was very restricted in terms of creativity and expressing my point of view as an artist. The first two articles were required, and we got to choose from a list for the last two short ones. I wanted to do the one on Russian prison tattoos so badly, but the teacher said that would be the article that would ruin the project by shocking anyone in the graphic design field who saw it. :( The magazine design also had to be heavily influenced from an existing design magazine. I had free reign of font choices, images, layout, end bullet, and title, but that was pretty much it.

One good thing that has come out of it is that I now feel that I could put out a more professional d.i.y. music zine in the future if I can ever find the time. I also found a great small company printer on the East Side that only charged me $20 to print the whole thing out. Each page measures roughly 9" x 11".

Overall, I’m happy with how this turned out, but the layout for the Unger article could have been better. The teacher had a rule where we couldn’t use any pictures of him because he was sick of looking at his face and purple shirts, so it was hard to find any other images on the topic. I also started working on it a day before the project was due, which didn’t help either. There was also some drama when the teacher accidentally entered 10/100 for the presentation grade of this project instead of 100/100, which gave me a D- on the whole thing and a B- in the class. I had to contact the head of the Peck School of the Arts to get my grade straightened out, but everything has been taken care of, and I ended up with an A- in this class and A's and A-'s in all my others. :)

( + 14 non-dial-up-friendly spreads )

On Friday I finished the last of my exams and moved out of the dorms and back home with my mom, sister, and cat. I’m still anxiously waiting for my grades to be posted, but I’m optimistic that I passed everything. The class I’m most nervous about is offered during the summer, so if I don’t pass, I can just retake it next year. I’m actually taking my first summer class in a little over a week so I won’t have to take a full load of classes my last two semesters. I’m trying to do everything I can so that I will graduate after three more semesters. I can’t wait to be done with school! It’s bad enough that I’ll have to go an extra semester, and I’ll be taking a class next summer as well to ensure I’ll be graduating in 2011. This summer I’m taking a 200-level intro class in Jewelry and Metalsmithing, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. I hope I can actually wear some of the stuff I make because I love jewelry. It’s four days a week from 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM, so at least I’ll have the afternoon free as long as I keep up with my classwork. I’ll also be driving two hours round trip, so I’m slowly adjusting my sleep schedule this week so I can get used to going to bed around 11:00 PM instead of 4:00 AM. I hope I can make this work because I am not a morning person! The class is only for three and a half weeks, though, so either way I’ll survive.

I still have to photograph my series, and I probably won’t get around to posting it until Tuesday, since tomorrow I’ll be going to see Hypocrisy, Scar Symmetry, Hate, Blackguard, and Swashbuckle in ungodly 90-degree heat. In the meantime, here’s what I worked on all semester in Issues in Contemporary Art:

The theme for the semester was alternative art practices, and building off the idea that creating art by yourself and in isolation is becoming a thing of the past, the class was able to choose groups of artists they wanted to work with to address a variety of social and public issues. Obviously, since I care about the environment so much, I decided to help form the ecology collective. There were also collectives about street art, rural art, d.i.y. crafters and printmakers, pop culture, art education, the segregation of Milwaukee, housing and development issues, and a collective that documented the entire class and made a book that will be published soon.

Working with a group is always an interesting experience. Sometimes things turn out great, like they did with my collaborative drawing earlier this semester. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this one. There were five others in my collective, ranging from sculpture to graphic design to painting and drawing to art education majors. Three of them went to high school together and were more passionate about hanging out together during class than the ecology in our city. After kicking around tons of irrelevant topics, I convinced everyone that we should focus on water, as it is the source of all life and Lake Michigan affects a huge number of people living in the Midwest. From there, I helped everyone narrow the topic down to the bottled water industry, since it threatens Milwaukee’s brewing industry and is less safe and more expensive than the treated water that comes directly from the lake.

Not wanting to be too pushy, I let the rest of the collective choose which other ecology-related collective from anywhere in the world to interview. They chose a grocery store in the ghetto, to put it bluntly. While they do occasionally display art in the store, they aren’t an artist’s collective and we ended up being downgraded for that. I also wrote most of the interview questions, and everyone bitched when I couldn’t make it for the time they chose to do the actual interview. Then after emailing me absolutely no information about the interview the next week, they shoved the microphone in front of me at our presentation in an auditorium of about 100 people. My presentation got the point across, though it was very shaky, and the rest of the group didn’t talk to me until the following week. Thanks a lot, guys. :/

I decided that I had to take charge again for our final project to prevent another disaster. All the collectives, including ours, did some kind of non-permission (read: illegal), public art display for their final project. We decided to individually design fliers and tags that would be placed on or near where bottled water is sold and photographed for documentation purposes. This allowed us to work on our own terms and completely avoid any further scheduling problems. I made a WordPress blog for our collective and emailed everyone in the collective, asking them to send me their designs and pictures so I could post them. Although most waited until the night before the presentation to send them to me, I received them from four out of the five members. Two of them said they collaborated, but it reads more as laziness and apathy. I also came up with the totally lame name for the collective at the last minute, since no one else took the initiative. Overall, our final project was a success, though I would not choose to work with these people again. Finally, here is my design:



For the record, I did not choose that awful orange and blue violet color scheme; one of the art education majors in my collective did. :/

( + 4 of the flier in action )

Please check out the rest of the collective members’ contributions to our final public art project and collective interview here: http://milwaukeecologycollective.wordpress.com/

I whipped up this 11" x 17" poster for Issues in Contemporary Art: Alternative Art Practices last night in Illustrator. Everyone in the class had to bring two posters to class today so our professor could take them down to Chicago this weekend for the Version Festival. They will be displayed April 24-25. This is part of the WPA Today project, which revolves around the idea of if the WPA was around today, what would it be/look like. (I wish it were ‘cause I’d be much less worried about finding a job after graduation!) I’m pretty excited about the whole thing, since this is the first time my work will be in an art show outside of the UWM campus, and the fact that it’s going to be in such a large city makes it even more exciting. Our posters had to draw inspiration from 1930’s American WPA posters, and my color palette was particularly inspired by this one. Most of the WPA posters have simple, general, optimistic messages, and I wanted to continue that by encouraging people to get involved in their city’s music scene. I hope you guys and the rest of the public enjoy it! The second copy of the poster will be wheat-pasted somewhere public in Detroit in June. Since the city doesn’t have enough money to remove street art, I hope it will stay up for a long time like so much of Detroit’s illegal public art has.



I still need to post about the Overkill show from Saturday, but I probably won’t get around to it until after Monday, since I have four drawings on top of work for other classes to do by then. Expect a review of that show, along with the Finntroll show I’m going to tomorrow, sometime next week!

My design is finally up for voting on Threadless! It was just posted today, since there was some downtime on the site over the weekend.





( Original illustration here )

I wish I had more time to work on it, but it’s still one of the best out of all the Intro to Design classes, so I’m satisfied with that much. We also were only allowed to use the pen tool in Illustrator for the project, which didn’t help in terms of time management or the rendering of the illustration. I would rather have included some more painterly elements by using the brush tool or directly scanned parts of the drawing or watercolor. The next time I submit something, it definitely won’t be as cartoon-y or flat. Most of the other students just had solid shapes with an outline, while I at least tried to add some shadows in the style that Brian Ewing uses for his poster art to give it some more dimension.

I was also not happy that we were told we had to use Threadless’s 640 x 640 template with the background image as the design and a smaller version of it PhotoShopped onto one of their model's shirts. Our original designs were done in a very vertical format, so I would have liked to extend the template down further, which is allowed by Threadless. We also weren’t allowed to use the Flash option or display our designs any other way, which I’m worried is going to hurt this in the end because a lot of the detail is more difficult to see this way. We also could not submit our designs for a critique first. This would have been fine if we actually had a proper critique during class. His idea of a critique was to put up all the designs for five minutes, and point out a few things he liked in some of them. WTF! That is not a critique!

This is just another reminder why I switched my major from Graphic Design to Painting and Drawing. ( Cut for a rant of epic proportions. )

After class tonight, I learned that most of the students’ designs were rejected by Threadless, which makes me feel a lot better about the whole thing. If your design isn’t even accepted to be in the running, that’s a good indication that it totally sucks! ;)