Wonderful public-submission how-to site Instructables always has all kinds of contests going on, and with Halloween approaching, they unrolled a whole lineup of Hallow’s Eve themed contests. From costumes to jack-o-lanterns, they’ve got it all. But mostly, the photomanipulation one caught my eye. The deadline’s tomorrow, so sorry if you’re getting late notice, but I’ve been working on my entry for the past two weeks or so. Check it out after the jump.
This was my most intensely personal project all year. I began the year following assignment guidelines, making sure to give my best within the rules and try out new things, experiment and be a good, solid art student. In a way I was re-integrating myself into life, and certainly life around other people, and a lot of my time was spent simply getting to know my world and my surroundings, and the people I came into direct contact with.
Christmas break gave me a nice break from that world, and time again to process and have space from things. I spent time doing web work, and cooking. A lot.
Second semester I dove more into projects, thinking hard about the concepts behind them and making every part of my work represent or portray whatever the point of the piece was. This project was my final for Drawing 2, and was my long overdue confrontation of the last few years, what they’ve meant to me, how they have changed and shaped me, and how I’m going to proceed with life despite the hurt and cold they represent in my mind.
I mapped the song On the Brink by Coheed & Cambria. Starting with the waveform of the song, I mirror that with my emotional response to the song, be it the lyrics or the music or both, forming squiggly spikes poking upwards, making a bed for the symbols that form the meat of the piece. The majority of the symbols respond to the lyrics using imagery from the past two years that is significant to me, all in traced silhouette forms, meant as icons of what the lyrics and music are saying, what they’re meaning, and as a reminder to me.
Using the song as an intermediary, I am portraying and interpreting the last few years of my life in a synthesized and archival way, to record and display and finally just put down, so that I can move on with the things I’m coming into now, in this new phase of my life.
Assignment Proposal (PDF), Artist Statement (PDF), Final Piece (JPG).
Coheed & Cambria, Song (Video), Lyrics.
These are various web projects I’ve done over the last year that reached various levels of completion. There’s an all-code layout, some purely design pieces, but the ones that made it to code were pretty cool I thought.
First, obviously, is my personal blog layout. I don’t keep up with any blog well, but this one was an accomplishment to build. You can see it in action here.
The grungy typewriter musician layout made it to HTML code but was never adapted to any kind of CMS or WordPress or anything.
The parchment-looking portfolio minisite I was really excited about, and it made it to code and I’m pretty sure to some sort of WordPress thingy, but I guess I never finished it. Not sure why I never ended up using it… I remember having trouble formatting text around the image of myself at the bottom right, so maybe that was it. But I kind of also remember ending up with a usable, finished theme from it. Oh well. Oh no I did finish it, I just found it 
. I finished an HTML/CSS translation of it, but never took it into WordPress. Not sure why, but the coded version right now works fine.
I got really into cooking a while back, and still am, so I mocked up the food blog layout. It made it through to HTML/CSS.
I really like the blue portfolio idea. I never used it because just thinking about gave me trouble figuring out how to adapt it into a workable WordPress layout. It would be really cool, and I’d be super proud of it, but I’m cool with something simple like I’ve got at the moment. I tend to get wordy too, so having something that works large and small is probably better than this one.
All of this stuff is varied. Some of it is purely design, just a Photoshop file, some has been coded into HTML and CSS, and there are two or three WordPress themes in there too. It’s all early in the stages of my web work though, first themes or first attempts at a few different techniques and things, like all-code designs or integrating more interactive elements. A few of them are even up and running, like the film blog and the AV homepage.
I really liked working in dark palettes and hiding things when I made these pieces, and manipulating a lot of photos to make whatever came to mind as I was creating. I’d literally sit down and find a random photo and just start messing with it and some idea would begin to form, and I’d find new photos to add into the collage to manipulate and make into what I was envisioning (best example is ‘shiny’, the white-and-gray guy looking upward with fireworks in his chest). It was spontaneous and limitless, I miss doing that a bit, it was fun.
The sunset photo is actually two separate images, the sunset was taken outside my family’ apartment window when we lived in Colombia, and the photo of myself looking out at the lake was taken on a weekend vacation when we lived down there. It’s gotten fantastic response on DeviantArt.
