Marbled Ecstasy

This project was a really fun way to end off this school year. I loved the whole concept right from the beginning! It felt like a little challenge: what can you make by throwing a bunch of random shit together?

So first, we chose our cool dollar-store objects! This was a hard decision because there was a lot of cool stuff there, but I chose some sweet marbles:

Then we got to choosing our band names, i.e., the title of a random Wikipedia entry. I went through a lot of them, and when I got to Ham Wall it made me laugh. It was such a weird little thing that I stuck with it.

I went through a lot of quotes too, courtesy of this website, and also found quite a few neat little album names. The one I decided to choose was "Ecstasy at Your Feet". I have no idea what the full quote was, or who said it, but those last four words were perfect.

After that was settled, I tried figuring out some cool stuff I could do with the marbles that could apply to the album cover, so I messed around a little bit, especially with the marbles that were translucent.

I started sketching out some ideas. I had some thoughts in my head about the material we were given. Marbles are really smooth, pretty, they sound nice when they clack together. They had a real sensual quality to them, and the title of my album was "Ecstasy at Your Feet" and I really thought it'd be cool to have something foot related on the cover too. Establishing the connection would really hammer in the meaning of the title.

I doodled some ways I could create that relationship:

I wasn't even sure in which medium I wanted to do this project. I was thinking of trying out gouache but I'm not confident enough with it, and I was running out of time.

One of the marbles I had kind of reminded me of a crystal ball, so I doodled a fortune teller hovering over a crystal ball, except instead of divining the future with her hands, she's got her feet there instead.

I tried out some other ideas but I started really liking the fortune teller thing, so I went back to it and decided to whip it up in illustrator, which was oodles of fun.

I had the basics of what I wanted done and began experimenting with background colours:

I really dug the pink! I decided to make the crystal ball glow so I threw in some gradients. As you can see, I used actual pictures of the marbles in the design to make it a little more dynamic than if it was 100% vector.

And I did indeed include the name of the album and band. I'm not surprised if you can't see them that well. I really liked the background colour but I also really liked the colour of the text and I couldn't find a compromise between the two that I liked, so I left them like that. In hindsight, I'd just make the text a lighter value while keeping the orange tone.

A couple final tweaks aaaaaannnd:

I'm pretty happy with this! I'm still new to Illustrator so it was a bit of a challenge figuring some things out, but this was so much fun!

I'd like to imagine that Ham Wall is an alternative rap group with some strong 70s funk and soul and 90s hip hop influences. I feel like they'd be wacky enough to enjoy something like this.

Some inspiration:

O Canada

So, here's the process work for my Canada project:

I found this project to be one of the most difficult to create conceptually out of all of them from the past school year. I kind of understood the premise, but  having to selectively simplify the wide berth of Canadian diversity that exists was a challenge.

Brainstorming was a nice way to start off, and this was a fun way start to the assignment:

After this I basically did the same thing in my sketchbook, trying to figure out how to represent diversity and contrasts in a way that would be interesting or at least pretty.

I was trying to pick something specific because choosing something really general would've been too complicated to design. At some point, I remembered that Canada has two official languages! The contrast between French and English within the country and against other countries became the basis of my assignment. But I didn't really know what to do with that idea.

I really didn't want to turn this project into an infographic, so I thought about turning it into a typography piece, but the idea wasn't original whatsoever. I screwed around with a few more ideas and resolved to making something infographic-y.

 So I had my idea, and I decided to do it digitally.

I was bored with it immediately. I also noticed that I was running out of room horizontally so I thought "Why not turn it on its side?"

I wasn't even finished yet, but I knew it would still be too boring. I wasn't crazy about where I was going with it, so I called it a night and decided to try again the next day. As I was laying in bed, I thought that if I added some more visual interest, some artwork and more colours, the whole piece would be informative but also kinda neat to look at.

I decided to add a couple Canadian animals into the mix, turning the columns of phrases into word balloons for each one, with definition in between. I liked this idea a lot more.

I created the animals and tried some different colours so the look wouldn't be so monochromatic. I fixed up the rest of the text and finished it up.

Since my project is based more off of words, I didn't find a lot of visual sources although I did look at some pictures. Here's a list of the websites I referenced for the slang included:

http://geekmom.com/2013/12/55-canadianisms/

http://news.travel.aol.com/2010/10/11/montreal-slang/

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_Canadian_English

http://www.gringaespanola.com/2009/11/the-quebecois-say-the-darndest-things/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French_lexicon

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexique_du_fran%C3%A7ais_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois

http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%AAtre_tiguidou

http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/10-quebecois-idioms-french-dont-understand/

http://cottagelife.com/73973/blogs/7-cottagey-words-youll-only-hear-in-canada

http://kaplaninternational.com/blog/fun-facts-canadian-slang/

http://www.cbc.ca/punchline/lists/10-uniquely-canadian-slang-phrases

http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/11-more-canadian-words-phrases-or-slang-most-americans-wouldnt-understand/

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/06/26/slang-words-what-words-do_n_3491739.html

http://www.acadian-home.org/acadian-words.html

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A9taine

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~steffan/canadianisms.html

http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/slang/canadian-slang-by-region.html

http://www.dictionnaire-quebecois.com/index.html

I googled some typography images:

And here is a collection of some pictures one finds when they enter "Canada" into Google's image search: