Tag: Art

  • Cat

    Cat

    We watched someone’s cat for a week.

  • Voices of Art – CCSF Art 130A Final Project

    Voices of Art – CCSF Art 130A Final Project

    From The Artist

    “Where are you from?” Whenever I travel, I get this question. I’m from San Francisco! Simple, right?

    “But where are your parents from, originally?” China and Vietnam? But I’ve never been to either of those countries.

    The most traditional Chinese thing we do is letting our passed ancestors eat first before we feast. I’m not sure how they’d feel about our meals now though, it’s nothing like what they grew up with. Being Chinese-Vietnamese, we had our classic egg custards, banh mi, and egg rolls.

    But what is traditional? Banh mi uses a French baguette because of French colonialism. Chinese Egg Custards 蛋挞 were an imported concept from the Portuguese egg tart. The blistered egg roll was invented in New York City. Japanese shrimp tempura are derived from Portuguese tempura’d green beans. Hispanic churros come from the Chinese Donut 油条. Mashed potatoes were “invented” in the UK, but the potato itself originates from modern day US to South America. The Chinese fortune cookie was invented right here in SF Chinatown! What, if anything, is traditional?

    Just like the food in my life, I’m made up of a diverse and complex history. I was born in San Jose, raised in San Mateo, settling in San Francisco. I went to Vietnamese Buddhist preschool and then a private Catholic Portuguese elementary school, finishing off in public schools. My mom was born in China. When the cultural revolution happened, her family refugee’d in Vietnam. When the Vietnam War happened, her family refugee’d in North Dakota. My mom speaks Cantonese at home, but runs a Vietnamese noodle factory in Little Portugal, San Jose. My dad was part of the Vietnamese Navy before refugeeing in China, then New York. My dad spoke Vietnamese to me while my mom spoke Cantonese. I learned English from TV, Portuguese from school, and Spanish from neighbors.

    I was born in San Jose, California. Today it’s a part of the United States, but was Mexican land prior, and Ramaytush-Ohlone ancestrial land before that. We try to draw borders, define labels, and identify ourselves as best we can, but history is murky and complicated. Borders are a social construct. These black and white lines don’t reflect our shaded and graduated realities. However much we try to paint a black and white picture, we’ll always lose the details in the shadows and wrinkles of our realities.

    Prompt

    Topics

    • Immigration (Borders, Migration, Animals, Climate Change, Externalized Costs)
    • Neurodiversity (ADHD, Mental Health, Voices in Head, Learned Voices)

    Inspiration

    13 Artists On: Immigration from NYTimes

    I particularly like Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s “Portrait of My Father as an Alien,” 2018 because I remember seeing my mom’s Resident Alien ID card in her wallet once and thought it was SUPER weird.

    Kimsooja’s “To Breathe – Zone of Nowhere,” 2018 is inspiring because it’s a blend of multi-culturalism, though it doesn’t seem personal. It’s an arbitrary 6 country flags.

    Hayv Kahraman’s “Kurds,” 2018. The piece is not inspiring to me, but the quote is:

    Today I physically find myself on the other side of the line, struggling to keep my memories afloat. You have made it clear that I’m an “Other” but I refuse to be erased. This is my position as an immigrant and refugee yet I still share the same vision of water on the road as anyone else.

    Hayv Kahraman

    Multi-culturalism is super hard. Am I American? Am I Chinese? Am I Vietnamese? What about Portuguese? What about Mexican? What about Japanese? I’ve developed as a blend of so many things that I’m none of the above. Just like color labels only exist in a very narrow window of the full spectrum of light and pigment, identity labels ignore everything in-between and push them into an “Other” category. A category that means nothing and has no value other than “we don’t know”.

    I was thinking about the types of signs and sign systems that exist in communities throughout the United States. For example, “No Soliciting,” “No Trespassing” and “Beware of Dog.”

    Patrick Martinez’s “Notice No Soliciting,” 2018

    Edel Rodriguez’s “Strangers,” 2018 — Boat full of immigrant strangers. Really cool looking.

    Art Spiegelman’s “A Warm Welcome,” 2015

    .

    ‘People cross borders. / It’s been that way ever since / borders crossed people,’

    Antoine Cassar from https://artuk.org/discover/stories/eight-artists-looking-at-experiences-of-migration

    https://www.climatecentral.org/news/map-animal-migration-climate-change-20646

    The Two Fridas, 1939 by Frida Kahlo – Multi-culturalism, self identity

    Ideas

    • Family Portrait: My mom was a “resident alien”. Show my family tree as grandmother and grandfather being really Chinese/Vietnamese, my parents being aliens, and I’m “American” + Latin + Chinese. Born in China, lived in Vietnam, New York, North Dakota, Texas, and SF Bay Area.
    • Heritage Flag: Blend the national flags of my heritage, the ones I’ve really picked up. Mine would be China, Vietnam, USA, Portugal, Mexico, and Japan.
    • Line art of where my culture comes from: Migration map but for culture
    • Boat of me in my various identities in the various traditional art styles?

    Artist Profiles

    Edel Rodriguez

    Cuban-American, came during the Mariel Boatlift, lived in Florida, and studied art in New York. Currently 52 years old. Primarily works in painting.

    Why did the artist chose this topic? What events/forces prompted them to do/make the work they did?

    Select work by artist, describe the work, format used, issues addressed, and why did I chose them?

    • Mao wearing Louis Vuton
    • Che Guevara wearing airpods and a nike hat
    • Boat of immigrants

    Frida Kahlo

    Mexico, Died . Paintings

    Why did the artist chose this topic? What events/forces prompted them to do/make the work they did?

    Select work by artist, describe the work, format used, issues addressed, and why did I chose them?

    • The Two Fridas: The contrast between the european dress and a traditional mexican dress
    • Memory, the Heart: The contrast between the Spanish schoolgirl uniform and a traditional
    • Two Nudes in the Forest: the contrast between the light skinned woman and dark skinned woman, both comforting each other in nature

    Topic Research

    Facts and stuff, 3 sources.

    Proposal 2

    Table spread of a potluck

    As an Asian-American, our large family gatherings of over 100 people were full of food from all different types of cultures. This table represents what I remember from our potlucks during Thanksgiving, but also where my culture comes from.

    My father was born in Vietnam, my mom was born in Guangzhou, China and refugee’d in Vietnam. I was born and raised in the Little Portugal neighborhood of San Jose with an 80% Hispanic population snacking on tamales and duritos (con chile y limon) from the Mexican vendedores. I grew up on manga and anime, leading me to studying Japanese for several years. Now, I live in the Mission District of San Francisco studying Spanish and art! My life is a mosaic of cultures and histories. Today, I live on Ramaytush-Ohlone ancestral land decorated in a valley of Mexican mural art with food from all over the world.

    It’s important to remember our modern concepts of borders and identities don’t sit well on top of history. The land land was once Native land, then claimed by Mexico, and Spain, and then purchased through military force by the United States. Borders expand and contract, empires have rose and fell.

    • Egg Tarts – Chinese but Portuguese and English
    • Banh Mi – Vietnamese but French origins due to colonialism
    • Al Pastor – Mexican but introduced by Lebanese
    • Egg rolls – Purely Chinese American, invented in New York City, but strongly inspired by Chinese spring rolls, not to be confused with Vietnamese spring rolls.
    • Tempura – Japanese, but from Portugal through trade.
    • Tomato Egg – Chinese + Western. Tomatoes and Corn Starch come from the “New World” Americas.
    • Youtiao – Chinese dish introduced to Spain and Portugal that lead to the modern churro of Latin America and the Philippines.
    • Thanksgiving Turkey – A bird named after the Turkish traders who brought it to England, the birds are native from North America where they are survived by only 0.3% of their original population.

  • Lighter by yung pueblo book cover redesign

    Lighter by yung pueblo book cover redesign

    For our final project in CCSF Art125A 2D Design with Claire Brees, we redesigned some cover for some other art media. For example, movie posters, album covers, book covers. I chose lighter by yung pueblo.

    Observations

    Very silly busy. Too many book quotes in the back. Long quote on cover. Sticker.

    Then there’s a lot of simple stuff. Plain yellow which is eye catching but not very interesting once I pull it off the shelf. Says very little about the content. Text design is simple, supposed to be less intimidating I think to imply that meditation is simple.

    Things to take advantage of:

    • Figure Ground reversal
    • Color
    • Direction
    • Movement
    • Organization

    Brainstorm

    I want to make a gradient from purple to red to yellow, bottom to top. This will be a visual movement of getting “lighter”.

    Lighter font should be much lighter weight, maybe of it floating away? Could be a bunch of balloons lifting you up

    Figure of a meditation person in the middle, legs crossed

    Shadow cast by the meditator is full of words like ANXIETY, BLAME, JUDGEMENT, RUMINATION, AMBIGUITY, FEAR, STRESS, TENSION, DEPRESSION, GRIEF, PAIN, LOSS

    Sketch

    First Iteration

    Feedback from group and profa.

    Lighter letters for words

    Dark yellows

    Blues are too close to the blues.  Maybe mix them.

    Lighter is not readable

    Quote in front could easily go o

    To the back

    Make more gradient for yellow?

    Pile of words and letters is pretty cool.  Color is less readable.

    Hard geometry is counter to the text and image which is soft and yielding.  Uneven.  Maybe more radial.  Harsh and sharp.

    Bring in another image for the back?

    Iteration 2

    1. What did you learn from the first iteration and take forward into the second? The text was not readable. It felt very geometric and rigid, which is not zen. The pile of words is interesting but the idea doesn’t really come across clearly.
    2. What did you change in the second iteration? Why? How does this more clearly relate to your intended message? Instead of geometric lines, I decided to make a mountain-scape gradient to give a more natural feel, like retreating into the mountains to meditate, which is what the author did. I also altered the colors on the text to have a backdrop and sit between two background colors to make almost a figure-ground illusion to make the text look like it’s actually lifting up from the page, pushing the “lighter” feeling.
    3. What are the most successful aspects of your second iteration (in terms of communication). I think it’s far more readable and feels much more fluid. I’m feeling pretty good about the design overall, though I want to tweak the colors a bit.
    4. What are the least successful aspects of your second iteration? (in terms of communication). I completely removed the pile of words and want to re-incorporate it. I also feel like the back cover feels a bit empty. Maybe that’s a good thing, but it currently feels a bit unintentional.

    Iteration 3

    Here I lightened some yellows, centered the back text more, and added “…” ellipses to imply continuation.

    Overall, I’m happy but found the yellow to be too light. I worked on my piece at night so “True Tone” in my iPad made the yellow much more yellow.

    Final Submission

    Made the body more yellow saturated. Overall, I’m very happy!

    1. Discuss your choice of artwork to redesign – your response to the original design, and your relationship to the content (music, book, movie, etc) I chose the book cover for lighter by yung pueblo. I found the book kind of fun to read and I love the messaging of the book. It drew my attention because of it’s bright yellow color, it felt dominant, flashy, and interesting. However, the book cover did not really sell me on what it was about. It felt too simple to the point where it doesn’t convey enough to interest me.
    2. What aspect of the content are you trying to communicate with your design? I want to emphasize that the book is about meditation, self-love, and improving your own mental health. I want to keep the simplistic design because the book is very straight forward and the approaches in the book are easy to apply.
    3. How do your final design choices support your intended communication? (design choices = design elements and principles, ie color, image, value, balance, unity, hierarchy etc). I kept the strong yellow tones because it is what initially pulled my attention. I simplified the design elements to just be the title, author, a meditating person, and a gradual organic gradient going from a dark purple to a light yellow to symbolize a journey from darkness to lightness. I matched the design across the front, back, and spine so that the reader is lead across the whole book cover, rather than just one aspect of it. I added a lot more dark values (purple and black) to contrast against and emphasize the lighter yellows, making it feel even brighter and “lighter” than before.
    4. What did you learn from the iterative process and what were the most significant changes you made? The biggest change I made was to embrace a more organic and less geometric feel. Meditation is about relaxing, releasing rigidity, and going with the flow. Organic line shapes are much more fluid than geometric and was an amazing leap forward in my design. My biggest difficulty was making things readable while having fun with colors and I found I really just needed to keep playing around with them over and over again to find something I’m happy with.
    5. What do you find most successful about your final design? I’m very happy with how I kept the design very simple. I tried to incorporate a lot more information than before: self-love, meditation, enlightenment, etc. But I was able to actually simplify the design and remove much of the clutter from the page.
  • Design Analysis in Real Life

    Design Analysis in Real Life

    1. I really like the heavy saturated colors that almost fill the whole page that highlights the heavy bold title of the book. It feels like strong messaging. The colors are vibrant and uplifting as are the words “Be A Revolution”. Looking closely, the font is pretty sharp, all the curved shapes are actually a series of angled lines, almost like it was cut out of metal. Even the repeated letters have a lot of little variation: the hole in the “O” is rotated, the height of the “E” changes. The “I” and “L” wiggles around. I really don’t like
    2. The cover expresses a warmth and uplifting message about the contents in the book through the colors. The messaging is positive, but the layout of the title vs the subtitle is really confusing. The title line-breaks on “Revolution” and sprinkles two subtitles in-between. It reads really awkwardly, forcing you to look up and down and up and down. I think this was intentional to represent “oppression”, where one short but loud message overtakes a much longer but quieter one.
    3. Using the above discussion criteria (principles, elements) discuss how specific aspects of the design communicate feeling, mood, content appropriate to the content it is illustrating.

    I picked up “Be a Revolution” by Ijeoma Oluo from SFPL and absolutely hate the cover for so many reasons. First, lets’ talk about the stuff the library put on top of the book . They covered the author’s name with the barcode sticker and like 1/4 of the title with the “Lucky Day” sticker. The title and the author are the two biggest pieces of information on this cover and they’re both obscured.

    If we just focus on what the cover says, it’s a really weird reading. The focus is “BE A REVO LUTION” in big bold font highlighted with various bright, vibrant, slightly de-saturated colors. First, the text itself reads kind of weird because “revolution” is broken up into two lines, but after you process that, you realize that there’s a subtitle woven in between the lines: “how everyday people are fighting oppression and changing the world – and how you can, too.” I found this to be really unreadable because the different parts of the sentence is broken up by the big loud title. However, I almost feel this is intentional. It feels like the representation of oppression, where a few big loud words override the narrative but the longer, more detailed subtitle gets buried in the noise.

    I also think the design for the highlight on the title really interesting. The text goes the whole line height, leaving no highlight color on the top or bottom. However, the highlight stretches nearly the full width of the cover. It almost gives the title a heavier feel, like a stack of bricks when you also compare it to the thin full width subtitle text that separates the lines. By stretching the color to the full width, it becomes consistent with the width of the subtitles.

    1. I think the design of this cover is really fun! It pretty much just splits the cover into four rooms that all have something really weird going on, and you’re not really sure what any of it means. They’re all different colors but they’re all pastel. They’re all weird, but together, they are consistently weird. At the top, there’s a staircase that leads you downwards to follow the title text.
    2. What does this design communicate to you? I think this book is gonna be a real roller coaster of weirdness. Just based on the cover, I have no idea what the topic of the book will be, but it’ll probably be wacky and funny. The pastel colors are bright and vibrant, giving a fun feel, like we’re going to walk through an amusement park full of carnies and props. Beyond that, I think the design is really lacking in conveying what the book is about. After reading the book, they’re trying to invoke the idea that you can remember things better by visualizing walking through different rooms with weird memorable stuff in them. But if you don’t know that, the cover makes no sense.
    3. I think the font is kind of basic. It’s an all-caps sans-serif font that flows well with the room but visually does not really add much. It follows the staircase down so the rooms read with the title. The title itself is kind of like the visuals of the room: what does moonwalking with einstein even mean? It’s as wacky as the rooms we’re looking at! But, from a design perspective, I don’t think they really add much and there’s plenty room for improvement.
    1. This is a very dense poster with very little white space, but it really doesn’t feel very crowded to me because it’s very well organized, keeping decoration and information separate. The color palette is pretty warm, mostly red with some yellows, greens, and white and consistently used between decorations and text. The highlight red and yellow are distributed everywhere making me look all over the poster from trinket to trinket.
    2. I really like how the poster looks like a plant shelf, or maybe a bookcase you would find in some random Victorian flat in SF, covered in vases, plants, monsteras, and trinkets, giving the vibe that Outside Lands is in someone’s living room. There’s a strong emphasis on nature and SF themes; the bison/buffalo who live in GGP, a mini Golden Gate Bridge, the windmills, and Ranger Dave are all local symbols living in this intersection. Just like the festival, this poster highlights the best of San Francisco’s food, drinks, music, art, and nature.
    3. I love the title text “Outside Lands” because it reminds me of those giant archways when you enter an amusement park that could say “Disneyland” or “Great America”. I also love that it’s kind of incorporated into the plants, that it blends in, just like how the festival fits neatly into the park with all it’s trees and pathways. The text of the lineup could probably be a bit better. It’s a lineup and each name fits into the shelf but there’s a lot of names so it quickly gets away. I really like how they alternate the colors of the names using the same colors for the design adding to unity and readability. Overall, it’s a great design given how much they needed to include.
  • 1-point and 2-point perspective

    1-point and 2-point perspective

  • Color Design Project

    Color Design Project

    I started with a black, white, and gray design based around letters. That’s a re-design of a previous project on destructuring text.

    Based on the black and white design, I just started painting based on colors!

    1. complementary with red green, four colors with yellow red blue violet, and neutrals with a redish-brown, mustard-yellow, and a dark-violet.

    2. Because the base of my design is letter shapes, I wanted to emphasize those shapes through color. I tried to use lighter colors for the letter shapes and darker colors for the “background”. For the four color image with yellow, I found the yellow to be almost distractingly bright, so I used very little of it as an accent in lines that move the eye around the piece. In general, I tried to have high contrast between neighboring colors to prevent them from bleeding into each other to increase readability. Either the colors are complementary, or the tint was extreme.

  • Mix To Match online game to mix primary paints to match a target color

    As I’m learning color theory, techniques with acrylic, and practicing mixing real paints, I wanted a way to practice mixing neutrals and more complex colors to match what I see. I found this fun little website game!

    https://mixtomatch.org

  • Value Tenebroso Collage Drawing 4 elements

    Value Tenebroso Collage Drawing 4 elements

    In today’s episode of “what is mark drawing?”, I’ve been working on drawing a photo collage! It has some wacky movement and flow because I cut out a bunch of black and white photos I took that somewhat related to the four elements: earth, wind, fire, and air. I then overlayed a grid and drew from the collage at 2.5x scale to really emphasize the details.

    progress pics

  • Techniques for painting with acrylic

    Acrylic is basically glue and pigment. If it’s left exposed to air, it’ll dry hard. You can peel it off but not off clothes. Store brushes and tools in water. Add retardant to prevent drying. Leave in a pile rather than smeared to prevent drying.

    Colors like yellow, orange, and yellow-green can be almost transparent. Remember, colors at the top of the wheel are “lighter” in value and tend to be more transparent. Magenta and blue can be kind of light too because they are student grade.

    • Paint in layers. Let it dry a bit, then paint over it again.
    • Paint in one direction (not back and forth, not in circles, this can cause streaking and “pull” the paint off the paper)
    • Add a little bit of white to the light yellow. It’s not enough to notice the tint, but enough to add pigment to the paint so it’s not transparent.
    • A wet brush with water will make the paint more transparent, so make sure to wipe off excess water from the brush.

    When painting edges:

    • Use low tack tape. Artist tape can be too high tack. Pull off while wet. Only press down on edge that you will paint, not the other edge.
    • Use a flat brush and draw the edge. You can also tap the edge (stippling) or drag the edge. The round brush will make an organic line.

    For outlines in graphite / pencil

    • Use very light graphite
    • Erase if it’s too dark, and make sure to brush off all the eraser dust
    • Clean your eraser by cutting off the dirty bits, or by rubbing it on sand paper, otherwise it can smear the graphite
    • Recommend Hi poly eraser (white) over the pink papermate because it’s softer and cleaner.

    Acrylic paint darkens when it dries, just a little.

    When loading up a brush:

    • Use a brush that has been hydrated, but wiped off. Moist but not soaked. Definitely not bone dry.
    • Load up half way up the bristles. Should be even across the bristles to avoid globing.
    • Load up both sides.