Big Block

I just got home from school a couple minutes ago. My fingers are getting pretty sore from carving but overall I feel like it was a pretty successful Print Jam. Just as I was leaving I snapped a picture with my phone of the block I'm working on. I'm really excited about it until I remember that it's mostly due in less than a week.

As a bit of a challenge, here is the first print for one of the portraits I'm working on. Any guesses who it is? If anyone figures it out I'll let them choose one of my prints to have or something of equal value (so maybe just a combo meal from Wendy's).

Anger Management

Well, I didn't get it loaded last night because the ink was still wet, so here it is. I'm glad to have it done. Now I can get started on my 25x37" print and work on my other portraits. I also found out that I won't be starting any more books until all my projects are done since my lack of self-control led me to finish The Subtle Knife in 3 days instead of concentrating on what really needs to get finished. Later.

Sticks & Stones

Today I printed my edition for our print exchange titled "Sticks & Stones." Later I will scan one in and post a detail of it. Now the hard part: writing an artist's statement.

Kathy Puzey

I was really excited to find out this morning that my incredibly talented teacher Kathy Puzey got her job! I don't know all the details of how the process works but she was a temporary assistant professor and now I think she's on tenure track. All I know is that she'll be back next year. She's one of those teachers that really make a difference in their student's lives so I'm glad that the administration was able to see that and do what was necessary to keep her here.

THRILLER

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova

I hate when I fall asleep on the couch. Without fail after doing so I can't fall asleep when I finally wake up and drag myself to bed. So here I am at midnight doing some "electronic scrapbooking." I had two critiques today and they successfully wore me out. My Thriller print is finally done and I'll get it scanned in and posted tomorrow morning. With that done I only have my magazine layout, a print for a print exchange, my 29x37" final print for relief prints and a bunch more portraits to do for my advanced class. I get a bit overwhelmed just thinking about that I only have 3 weeks to get it all done.

Anywho, one of my sibling-in-laws gave us the movie Once for Christmas (I thought it was Bree, but Whit says it was Trevor). It sat happily in our movie case for 3-4 months without us ever touching it until one day a friend recommended it to us and I thought "Hey, we have that movie. Maybe we should watch it?" And so glad that we did. It really was a good movie. I've found that I like those more Indie films lately, and this definitely falls under that category. The story is pretty simple, this guy plays guitar on the street but wants to make it big so he enlists the help of a fan who sells flowers and other street performers to make a demo album. Probably 60% of it is music and it's amazing. Promptly after watching the movie we acquired the soundtrack and bought the remaining songs off their album. Sadly, I cannot recommend the movie without a disclaimer: It is rated R. As far as I can tell this is basically all due to the opening scene where, thanks to Clearplay, two people's heated discussion is almost completely muted. Whit and I looked at each other with that look that says, "I hope the whole movie isn't like this otherwise we'll have no clue what's going on," I'm sure you know the look. Anyway, if you don't check out the movie at least check out the music.

Oh, and Whit started her own blog. She said she felt weird posting on here after I was the only one to do so since it was created in December, so check hers out here.

Hyoung Seok Kim

Well, I haven't had much time to post lately but I promise that within the next couple days I'll have some more work posted. I got nominated for a scholarship so I've been trying to put together the application that includes a mini portfolio of my work. Also, my Thriller print that I had hoped would be done by now needs to have the last layer reapplied because it didn't come out as rich as I had hoped. So first thing tomorrow I'll be doing that.

Now, if you ever get the chance to see the work of Hyoung Seok Kim, do it. Really, really cool stuff. He's been a graduate student up here for a couple years and I guess he's finally finishing up so this past week he had a solo exhibition in our crappy little gallery. I picked up a small pamphlet that had some studio shots of some of his work but it excluded my favorite pieces so here are my fantastic camera phone shots.


If you push this last one you find that it is balanced like one of those blow up clowns that we all used to have and always finds its way right side up, but unlike the blow up clowns it has a gong inside that resonates as it swings back and forth.

Scott Fife

In celebration of having turned in my catalog and also having been accepted officially into the Printmaking program, this morning I decided to take a breather from school work and spend some time searching the internet. Whit says I'm lucky that I'm an art major and can use that as an excuse, calling it research and I like to roll with that. Anywho, I was checking a couple blogs that my brother showed me and following some of their links when I came across this artist Scott Fife. He does these sculptural heads that are generally about 24 inches high and all he uses is archival cardboard, glue and screws. It's really amazing the level of detail he gets using the bare resources he does. If you want to check out more of his work you can do so here. The closest thing I've been able to find is this gallery's profile on him. I always love when people find these innovative ways to use materials, especially when they're somewhat uncommon materials to use as fine art.

Another thing I've discovered lately are Gestalten's design books. I was perusing the books at our library when I came across Illusive, a book on contemporary illustration. Come to find out the company that made the book, Gestalten, has a whole series of books that are beautifully designed and full of inspirational images. 4 or 5 of them quickly made their way onto my Amazon wishlist to sit until summertime when I make enough money to actually add them to my slowly growing family of resources to turn to when suffering from Artist's Block (I guess that would be the proper terminology).

The Whitest Boy Alive

The more I hear this band the more I like them. I've had one of their songs for a while now and just downloaded another last night, but I need to just get the CD because it's so good. I don't know if this is an official music video or not, but I do love Op Art and these little brain teasers.



Well, I'm finally done with my catalog. Done might not be the right word but at least it's turned in so I don't have to worry about it anymore. It does need a lot of refining but it's at least a good concept, I think. My whole idea was to bring a level of interactivity into the catalog. I wanted to keep things feeling very loose and casual so it would encourage the viewer to take part in the design of it to a certain degree. If I did something like this for real I would try to include a contest where you would send in your colored catalog and there would be prizes. Just like that coloring contest at Arctic Circle I won when I had the chicken pox. Anywho, I did all these coloring book page illustrations but I didn't incorporate the boards into them, instead just throwing the boards on top of the illustrations. It gave it a disjointed feel that I will have to address before it goes into my final portfolio. So, as a treat I'm throwing on the Connect-the-dots page I did.

BE KIND REWIND

Be Kind Rewind finally came out in Logan.

Anti-relaxing Spring Break

Well, it's been quite a spring break. Last night my hard drive crashed and left me with what little I've got backed up on my external hard drive from a couple months ago. Yeah, I haven't been really diligent about backing stuff up, that including the 4 songs I bought off iTunes yesterday. Anywho, I had hopes of at least getting some of the information off the old hard drive but it wasn't in the cards. So I've spent the night reinstalling what programs I've got and updating the files that I've got backed up. Sadly, my snowboard and the files for my catalog were not backed up so I'm back to square one with that. Luckily though I did this poster for a friend of mine and was able to send it off yesterday so that let me retrieve it today.


After having lost one laptop to theft and now one hard drive to Murphy's Law I'm really starting to look at updating my operating system to Leopard. That Time Machine feature really is the cherry on top.

Food Fight

SPRING BREAK!!

It's been a busy weekend. My sister-in-law is getting married this weekend and they had her bachelorette party and shower, and they went through the temple for the first time. I was finally able to play Rockband and quickly discovered that I'm not coordinated enough to play the drums. It's the foot pedal that kills me. Anywho, I've got this huge list of crap I've got to get done over the break and sadly I also have to go to work for a while. I just wanted to show you the shirt my brother got me at this show at Mode Boutique in Provo. I was pretty stoked about it.

Oh, and if you're interested in Illustration and Graphic Design, check out the book Illusive, which is huge and full of inspiration. I checked it out from our library but I'm trying to figure out how to raise enough money to purchase it.

Movie Poster

I really like this movie poster. The whole retro-style of it is great. Too bad the trailer doesn't look as good. On the subject of movies, I'm pretty upset that Be Kind Rewind hasn't come out up here yet.

Just found out that while in Switzerland we're going to have to share a room with another couple. Bummer. Not that that makes me regret having signed up to go in any way, I'll just have to invest in a pair of pajamas.

Not a whole lot to write. I'm kind of in the middle of a bunch of projects. I need to go talk to the printer about doing my catalog and see what their capabilities are. I'm thinking about doing one long panoramic illustration that will fold like an accordion, just to make it stand out a little bit more. I'm also doing a portrait of my good friend Matt, but I don't think I'm going to post anything on here until it's done.

Oh, the book for Jumper is A LOT better than the movie.

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.