Rolled Together//The Antlers:

I start my internship at the art museum tomorrow and I’m a bit nervous – I have that “night before the first day of school so I can’t sleep out of excitement” thing going on. So, I decided to practice making swirly whirly type things in Illustrator and came up with this. The words are from the song “Rolled Together” by The Antlers, off of the album Burst Apart (they’re currently the only band in my life right now – check them out, they’ll change your life.)

Drink the rhythm:

My latest assignment for class (class, class, class.. that’s about all I’ve been up to lately) was to design an advertisement for a wine. It’s still in the works, but here’s a sneak peek:

How to cure a broken heart with a whisk:

Here’s a continuation of my object expression project. We were assigned to design a “how-to” for our objects; it was supposed to be something far-fetched or out of the ordinary for the object. So, I made a guide on how to cure a broken heart with a whisk. This project was designed to help us work with grids. It was actually so much fun; I traced my blind-blind contour drawing with the pen tool in Illustrator (which is how I drew the rest of my visual elements), which I think gives it a fun, hand-drawn feel. I also love the colors in this guy.

Round two:

8tracks is this pretty neat SNS (social networking site) that allows you to create & share music via making your own playlists/mixes and uploading them to the site. You can browse by genre or artist – this is especially helpful for college students during finals week (just search the “study” tag to find the perfect mix for cracking down and studying, or in my case just falling asleep..) Despite 8tracks being bombarded by people who mistakenly think that The Killers and Jason Mraz are “indie”, it’s still one of my favorite channels of finding new music. Last year, at the end of my freshman year of college, I decided to make a playlist titled “Goodbye, EL..” and it was full of songs that reminded me of my first year; each song has a specific memory tied to it, be it walking to class, going to a concert, studying, making new friends, etc. After a year, it has 3100+ plays and 319 “likes”, as well as very flattering comments. To be quite frank, that playlist is probably one of my proudest achievements. Since that was such a success, and also because I like the idea of tying music to memories, I made a new mix for my sophomore year, titled “Round Two”, which is the real reason behind this post! 8tracks allows its users to choose a photo to be displayed with the mix, but I decided to take it a tiny step further (below). The photo is one I took on campus a few weeks ago because I thought the sky was gorgeous. Anyway, 8tracks is a fun site (once you filter out all of the “playlists to have sex to” [???] and mixes falsely advertised as “indie”), and you can check out my personal profile, as well as all of my mixes, here:  http://8tracks.com/madelinegrace.

500 Days of Summer:

Here’s an old poster I made for class last year. We just had to re-design a movie poster using our own photo. Our directions were to take elements & ideas from the original poster but not totally copy it. 500 Days of Summer is one of my favorite movies, and I LOVE the design of the poster, so I had some fun with this.

 

The essence of a whisk (?):

Yet another assignment for my design class (my professor LOVES to load us up with work, and I love it and hate it at the same time). We had to make a collage using colors and values from advertisements of the “essence of the form and/or function” or our object, but it shouldn’t be obvious what the object is just by looking at the collage. That was all we got. I had such a hard time figuring out the essence of a whisk. I probably could’ve come up with something a lot better, but I was tired and desperate, so this is what I made. Whisks look like trees and balloons (a balloon whisk is a type of whisk), and they also add air to things like eggs and frosting and make food lighter, so I made a scene with trees, sky, and a hot air balloon to represent both the form and function of a whisk. I was so nervous that my professor would hate it, but she actually seemed quite pleased and went on about how you could design a whole ad campaign for whisks on the idea that they are “lighter than air” or something like that. I was ecstatic that she liked mine better than the studio art majors’ collages because she usually favors them. Maybe I won’t completely suck at this after all? (My scanner wasn’t working so I had to resort to taking a really bad picture on my iPhone – sorry! It looks a bit better in person.)

Navigate:

Another design assignment: Choose an action verb and, only using the letters in the word, black & white, in an 8×8″ square, arrange the word to portray its action (we could use as many fonts as we wanted, though). I chose “navigate” because I come from a sailing/outdoorsy family and I actually really want to get a tattoo of a compass rose at some point in my life. I love the idea of journeys and adventures – I want to travel as much as possible. This is still a work in progress; I need to think of better copy to go with the word, but I just wanted to put something on there for now.

Food prices & nutrition:

I had to take a biology lab this semester and our final project was to tackle some kind of food-related issue. So, my group chose the correlation between food prices and nutrition. We had to come up with a solution to the issue, and we decided to make an ad campaign, as well as write a letter to a congressperson. But writing formal letters are boring so I let them do that while I had fun making these three posters. My TA’s exact words to describe them were “righteous” and “bitchin”, and she also asked to keep them because she wanted to put them up in the TA’s office to brag about how cool her students are. Needless to say I was pretty happy about that, because, I mean, they’re pretty simple and I didn’t put a whole ton of work into them. But anyway, here they are, righteous and bitchin.

Late night fun:

Once again, I can’t fall asleep. But I’ve found that trying to be creative this late is extremely tiring, so I guess that’s what I’ll do now to encourage my body to please, please, go to sleep. Here’s tonight’s product. I don’t really know what to say about it except I think I hate it.

Cat:

Right now I’m very intrigued by collage-inspired art. Also, my family has an obsession with Siamese cats, so they’ll be popping up in a lot of my future work. (All of the cats are old family pets).