KeenanThings

Sketches, doodles, paintings, and various exercises and projects for class; here is a growing collection of shapes, lines and other things created by Keenan Gress.

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Illustration 3

For my final Totoro illustration of the class I wanted to use ink, as it suits the animation style from the movie. I started off doing a quick pencil sketch then inked it using a dip nib pen. Next I scanned my drawing and took it into Photoshop for some image corrections and subtle adjustments. I didn’t want to go too heavy into colouring this one because my other two illustrations were already quite colourful, so I decided to do a blue background (used in the Studio Ghibli credits logo). I had a hard time deciding whether or not to add some sort of texturing to the background, eventually deciding to add a subtle watercolour effect, which also suits the animation style of many Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli) films. I think it also gives the image a little more of a graphic quality.

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Type Poster - Draft 3

I’ve made a lot of changes for the better this week. I paid close attention to achieving a bold contrast, while maintaining balance between each of the manifestos. It became evident that my last draft was lacking any sense of separation or space, and in general was just all over the place and difficult to read. I decided to drop several fonts from my poster, which really helped with the overall readability of the poster. I feel like the poster is easier to approach, read, and understand with the alterations that have been made.

This weeks critique left me with only a few minor changes to make, mostly some alignment and kerning issues. There is also an area on the right side of the poster that is too light to read on the white paper.

Overall, this project was an excellent learning experience. With the idea that good typography is difficult to spot because it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb, where bad typography does; this project really demonstrates how much knowledge and effort goes into anything involving typography or design. I think sometimes this idea or aspect of posters like these can be under estimated, but working on a project like this adds a new appreciation for typefaces, letterforms, words, and typography in general.

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Type Specimen Poster - Draft 2

I’m still having a fairly difficult time creating drama in the poster. I think to help with that I need to find a main focus and make it big, and then probably go even bigger. I’m still having a hard time creating contrast with scale, so this seems like a good idea to help fix that. It was also suggested I add more area with black background, this will help my poster be even bolder. I forgot to add in the type recipes, or at least label the ones I used. Making them more recognizable will help to distinguish my poster as more of a type specimen poster hopefully. It looks like I’m going to have to be a little more experimental for my next draft in order to get the overall look I’m hoping tom achieve.

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Type Specimen Poster - Draft 1

This is the first draft for my type specimen poster. I’m having a difficult time with the scale of this space and making sure I include all the requirements for the project. This draft was more or less an a first attempt at figuring out how I might start to layout out the contents of the required manifestos. I definitely need to work on creating more drama between the two manifestos.

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For this weeks illustration, the goal was to mix analog and digital techniques. I decided to make the basis of this illustration out of cut out construction paper. When I went to scan it into my computer, I decided to try and experiment with creating a background with the scanner also. I ended up covering my fingers in a bunch of charcoal and sort of just smudged and tapped around the scanner bed. Using Photoshop I made a few adjustments to the background and inverted it. I decided that having just the paper cut outs made the image seem to simple and flat, so I decided to try and make a knit work pattern using a layer mask. This ended up being a bit more challenging than it expected, and the pattern ended up with some odd spaces and irregularities. Luckily this helps add to the feeling of it being handcrafted and cut out. If I were to approach this style again, I think I wouldn’t use a layer mask but make the individual coloured shapes instead.

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The task over the next three weeks of class is producing artwork for an item you can hold in your hand. Here is the first of 3 different iterations of this little Totoro plushy I had on my headboard in my room. I made up the original artwork in Illustrator and added colour. Then I began to work in Photoshop; I wanted to add some light texture to most of the plushy, so that it would look more fabric like. The umbrella is made of a different fabric so I didn't use the same texturing on it. The little shapes on the tummy are stitched or embroidered, so I used more of a streaking brush to add some slight detail to them. For the background I used a salt brush from a water colour brush set on Photoshop for a texture that related to the umbrella he is holding.

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Here is an attempt at a portrait of someone currently in the news, Louis CK. I had a very hard time with this because my tablet stopped working so I had to use my trackpad for the majority of the portrait. I spent a lot of time layering and building up texture in the beard. Unfortunately I don’t think this really looks much like who it is supposed to, even after several attempts to fix it.

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Trying to focus more on composition this week, I decided to make this illustration have a distinct foreground and background. I also tried to include some pattern or repetition to help add movement, as well as using the owl’s wing and the trail to the house as leading lines. I knew I wanted to do an owl so I built the composition around that idea and Halloween, and ended up with “Owl-oween”.

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I had a bit of a harder time with this assignment, as I get extremely flustered with timed situations and repeating things over and over. I however feel it was a great way to build up a memory for the different steps. After scanning through the finished piece I had to make several adjustments with the right indent to address the rag and then fixed some of the hyphenation and added superscripts were I felt appropriate. I think exercises like this really help build my foundation in InDesign.

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Assignment D Feedback

After having 3 people try to read and give information from my bus schedule, I was given the feedback that it was nice and readable. All 3 people liked that I split the information up visually witch colour. I noticed that all 3 people were able to answer my questions with out any hesitation. I was initially worried the bus route information would be challenging to read because it was rotated, but the feedback I received was that this was a nice visual change to the information which didn't really affect its readability. The only suggestion I received for something to change was to add a # to the bus numbers, as they probably are on the actual buses.

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After watching a short video on quickly creating texture in Illustrator, I decided to mess around with some shapes and the pathfinder tool to make a weird little alien robot guy and a spacey background. I used various gradients, grains, and screen blending modes to add texture to things. The nice thing about working this way as opposed to Photoshop is that everything is vector work so it is completely resizable. 

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This Typographic Capsule library is the beginning of a growing collection of fonts and typefaces I feel would be useful to me and work well for various projects. I will briefly cover some of my decisions below:

Serif: In this category I’ve chosen both Adobe Caslon Pro and Garamond Pro for very similar reasons. Both have a fairly consistent stroke weight and a nice vertical stress. They are also both very legible and readable, even at small sizes. I also picked Sitka and Athelas for very similar reasons, the bracketed serifs which are emphasized in both these fonts add a nice flow to the text when reading. I am also particularly fond of Sitka’s high x-height when compared to some of my other choices. Finally, I chose Bodoni URW because I was drawn to it’s large cap height and thin unbracketed serifs, both of which add a feeling of class to the font.

Sans Serif: For sans serif, I chose both Aktiv Grotesk and Century Gothic for their smaller x-heights and humanist qualities. I chose Futura (T1), a geometric sans serif because I’ve always been fond of Futura and its clean, modern appearance. And just to switch things up a little I chose Balboa Plus Because I wanted a sans serif which was a bit lighter than my other choices, I believe it is all caps only however.

Slab Serif: With the slab serifs , I wanted to have a fairly good variety in my choices because I feel a slab serif is great at getting the audience’s attention. I decided to use Prater Serif Pro because of its fairly large x-height and heavy serifs. Alfa Slab One, I picked because of its thick stroke and smaller, chunk-like serifs. In, general the heavy, squared serifs and consistent stroke weight of all the choices in this category are extremely readable, making them all useful for many things.

Handwriting: For deciding on handwritten fonts, I wanted to have all of my choices look like a totally different personality or emotion wrote each one. Because handwritten fonts can evoke emotion easily in the audience, they each have an appropriate situation. Professor Minty is wacky and weird, its serifs seemingly chaotic. Blacksword is elegant and timeless, with flowing swashes and ligatures. KonTiki Lounge JF is relaxed and laid-back, with tighter looping ligatures. Both of these fonts require special attention when kerning and leading, as a result of the connecting ligatures. My last choice, Chaloops, is playful and fun, its inconsistent stress is almost childlike.

Decorative and Display: I had a very hard time narrowing down my decisions in this category. I decided to try and imagine I was making a poster or banner for an event, and base my choices off of fonts I would want to see really big. I like P22 Stanyan because of its erratic, scribbled quality. Folk OT is really choppy and inconsistent, which I totally love about it. I chose P22 Arts and Crafts because I liked how well it stacked and worked at various sizes. The variation in letterform is also nice. KonTiki Aloha JF is super fun, and really just makes me think of Spongebob Squarepants. I really like how there are several optional glyphs in this font for common 2 letter combinations, allowing you to be quite creative when using it.

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Just messing around with brushes again in Photoshop. I wanted to do something a little bit similar to scratch-board, while using a bit of colour for emphasis. I then decided to add some writing around the figure.

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Here are the black and white, and colour finals of my colouring book page. I wanted my colour palette to be fairly dark and gloomy, to help add to the feeling of loss the crabs have. I used a colour palette I built based off of 2 different compound colour palettes. In order to ensure the colours would work together, I used a common colour for each of the palettes I created, then selected the colours I would be using, limiting myself to no more than 10 colours (I think I used 8 for the final). After several failed attempts using different palettes, I settled on this one as my final.

(The flag is left intentionally white, as a means of surrender for the crab knights...)

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Here is the result of an assignment asking for an organized and legible bus schedule. I decided to have an 8.5″ by 11″ page in landscape that could fold down the middle, not only would this reduce the size but also allow for more information as a result of adding the space of a front and back cover. For the colours in the schedule I decided to use only blue and green at different tints to achieve a clean and energetic feeling while maintaining readability. 

When considering a typeface, I wanted to use a sans serif for the schedule to try and keep it clean and readable. For the other body text about transit passes, I decided to use a heavier serif so the text would be fairly legible. I also decided to use a serif for this text because it asks for a little more reading than checking the schedule does. I had a harder time finding the right sans serif to fit my other typeface choice, but ended up deciding on one I didn’t think I would, Univers. I felt it worked well because it mimicked the letter forms of my other typeface but had enough of a difference in stroke weight and consistency, and x-height to create a nice contrast. 

The challenge of learning how to use and format tables in Indesign made this an interesting task, but overall I think this schedule design is clean and energetic and pretty easy to read and understand.

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Sticking with the idea of Halloween costumes, I decided to do Squidward as a clown. I feel he would be especially unimpressed about being dressed up as clown (maybe Mr. Krabs forced him to wear the costume) and as a result he does not look happy. I wanted to use softer colours for the background and Squidward so that the red of the clown hair and nose would really stand out.

I used a colour palette made on colorsupplyyy.com, except I slightly adjusted a couple of the colours to better fit my needs.

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I wanted to something with a pumpkin because I got an orange marker. I decided to draw Mr. Krabs in a pumpkin costume which works great with it being October now. 

I just blocked the colours out with the markers as I went and outlined everything at the end.