The perks of being an intern at a contemporary art museum:

I discover new artists every day. Artists like Andrew Kuo, who documents his emotional & personal life through infographic-esque charts. Charts like the one below; he does a whole series of charting music for the ArtBeats blog on the New York Times site. I’m in love with the idea, and his execution is brilliant.

 

Iron & Wine:

I’m going insane over how cool this Iron & Wine gig poster is, designed by Nate Duval. It’d be a dream come true if I end up designing posters for bands like this.

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.

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.

Drawing blind:

This summer I’m taking 13 credits. It’s already killing me but I love it at the same time because I’m FINALLY taking classes that I like and challenge me. For my design class we had to pick an everyday household object with an interesting form that we’re going to work with all semester for an “object expression” project, and I chose a whisk. An assignment this week was to do a blind contour and blind-blind contour drawing of our object. For the blind contour drawing we could only look at the object while drawing – not the object – while moving our hand with our eyes along the object’s form. And then a blind-blind contour drawing is simply drawing with your eyes closed (which was actually so much fun, but it made me dizzy!). Also, we had to use a pen, not a pencil, to commit to our stroke. My professor said that usually the BBC (blind-blind contour) drawings are a lot more fun and interesting than the BC (blind contour) drawings. I’m not sure if that applies to me, but I’m still quite impressed with my BBC (bottom). Keep in mind that drawing is one of my weakest areas of design.

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).

Pens, crayons, and a Moleskine:

This gallery contains 13 photos.

I finally started drawing and such again. I stole a Moleskine from Nic (well, I bought a 3-pack from him so I guess I just took it back) and I’ve been drawing with some crayons and black pens in my … Continue reading →

Diamond Eyes//Zoey Hardwick:

You can find more of Zoey Hardwick’s work, including the rest of this collection for the band Deftones, here.