Steve Zissou

Here's my suicide print of Steve Zissou. I still might try doing something else in the background, I'm not entirely sold on the yellow.

Snowboard catalog.

I'm in the middle of working on my catalog right now. The rough draft is due tomorrow so I've been busy drawing coloring book pages and mazes. I was going to post the maze but for some reason it only comes up as a blank square. When I have more time I'll try to fix it, otherwise you'll probably have to wait until Thursday for my Steve Zissou print to be done.

Camera phones

I guess I'll start off with a couple pictures I've shot with my camera phone in the last week. This first one is of a van down in Orem that apparently gets a little bit too hot, so they installed a swamp cooler on the back. All it needs is the spoiler and you're basically set to start your own A team.

And this is a shot of beautiful Logan and its signature Inversion while I was on my way to school today. It had actually cleared up quite a bit at this point, though we still can't see the mountains. Anytime they call a red air day you know it will look about like this, which might have something to do with them not requiring emissions testing.

Anywho, Willie McMillion from Bluebird and Solid snowboards came and talked to us today about our boards. He said all of the designs were a lot better than most of the designs he just saw at the trade shows. It was pretty sweet, he gave us a lot of info on what all goes into making snowboards and a lot of background on Solid. It's got me thinking about emailing some more companies and trying to get some more feedback on some of my designs and how to break into that market (maybe do some freelance stuff?).

For the past 2 days we've had Karen Kunc up here doing a residency, which basically consists of doing a seminar and a workshop. It was really cool to watch her work, she makes good use of stencils and has figured out how to get this great fuzzy quality that you don't usually see in woodcuts. I'm already trying to figure out how to incorporate some of her techniques into my next woodcut assignment, which is a portrait of Steve Zissou. I'll try to get some drafts of it up soon, but we're probably looking at next Tuesday.

Oh, and just a heads up for anyone considering buying Turbotax this year, buy it at Best Buy where they'll give you a free movie of your choice. We just completed our Pirates trilogy.

Valentine's and President's Day

Overall, a great weekend. Thursday night was the annual Valentine's Ball at the Provo Library so since we were already getting Monday off because of President's Day we decided to take Friday off and make an extra-long weekend of it. We spent a lot of time with family and friends and surprisingly I actually got some homework done.

Saturday afternoon Whit and the girls in her family went to see Definitely Maybe and us boys went and saw Jumper. Both came home disappointed. It wasn't the worst movie I've seen, I'm afraid Eragon sits on that throne, but it was just very poorly done. It wasn't a character driven movie (they really did nothing to make you care about the characters aside from that basic human feeling of not wanting someone to die), nor was it a plot driven movie, it was based on special effects and it never explained anything. In addition it was only an hour and a half long. They really needed to take the extra half hour and develop the character's more and give the viewer something to relate to. I'd say it's probably worth seeing, but only at the dollar theater or rented from Redbox. I'm told the book is better so I'm going to give it a try.

I was extremely excited when I got home from the movie to find that Whit had gone to Target and bought me this awesome bottle of water and 5 bags of Sweettarts Jellybeans. I'm a sucker for cool glass bottles and decanters. I'm not sure what it is about them that I think is so great.

Saturday night we went up to Salt Lake with my parents, Mark, Lana and Gabe to eat some of the best Chinese Food I've ever had at David's Kitchen on 3300 South. My dad is a regular there and knows that basically everything's good, so when we were seated they didn't give us menus and instead we just leave it up to David to make something that we'll like. The only things we requested were three orders of Pot Stickers and some Walnut Chicken, which I would say is a necessity if you are going there.

I'm getting tired of writing so I'll end it here. I've got a busy day ahead of me, though things have opened up some since I found out the guys from Solid snowboards are coming to look at our designs on Thursday instead of today. Aside from my normal class I have today we've got the visiting artist Karen Kunc here to do a workshop and seminar, so I'll be busy with that for most of the day.

Well, I never got around to scanning this on a big scanner so my crappy little one will have to due. Whit keeps our camera in her purse and when she's at home I always forget to grab it from her so you'll have to put up with the wrinkles in the paper and the cropped image until later. I made sure you got the most important part, you know, my face. I'm getting close to being done with this print. There are a couple areas that I've got to work on and then I'm going to scan it in and try screen printing it, adding some colors and other stuff. We'll see how it turns out. None of that will be done by the Undergrad show so all I'll enter there is the finished looking woodcut print. I've got this weekend to work on it because I've been neglecting my other assignment. The album cover won't be until next month and we haven't decided if we're doing the year we were born or not. I think I've got it narrowed down to doing Billy Idol if I have to do 1982, otherwise I'm thinking about doing Bowie.

And just because I know all three of you that look at this page were dying from the anticipation of knowing what my final snowboard looked like, here it is:

I only made subtle changes, but I'm really happy with how it turned out. And I was really impressed with the majority of my classmates'. I took the class for about a month last year and saw the boards that they did then and I think these are much better. Now on to the catalog.

Is that really where rainbows come from?

Here are the postcards we did for the upcoming Undergraduate Art Show. In case you need some convincing of my artistic talent I'll let you in on a little secret: I drew the unicorn. I know, I'm pretty good. I'm kind of a big deal up here. People know me. Anywho, I've got to figure out what I'm going to enter into the show. I'm thinking that I'll do one of my new self portrait. I haven't got images of the work in progress up yet because it's 12x16 and my scanner will only do about 8 1/2x11. It's looking pretty good so far, you'll just have to trust me until I can get a hold of a bigger scanner (or a camera). But you can trust me, I'm the guy who drew the unicorn.

Tomorrow my snowboard's due. I've finished with the top, but I still haven't touched the bottom aside from getting rid of the Bluebird logo that shouldn't have been there. Chalk that one up to ignorance on my part. Once the board's turned in we get to start working on our next project, the snowboard catalog. We'll pick 7 boards from our classmates + our board and put the eight of them into a small 12 page catalog. It should be fun.