Here's a Treat You All Might Enjoy

One thing I've been curious about over the last few months is seeing what out VisCom instructors' own portfolios contain; what do our teachers do as designers themselves outside of the educational field. What first began as a harmless Google search led me to find the personal designer site of none other than our good pal, Johnny Gialanella, founder of Machine Shop Design Co.

At first I thought it might be kind of fun to explore the site, but as I explored, I started to find some really pretty neat stuff. Turns out, Johnny from the Midwest does fidel around with projects similar to the ones we do in class. For example, here is an example of an infographic demonstrating the proper technique when it comes to making Beer Mac & Cheese.








Now something I've noticed about Mr. G's portfolio is that the majority of his work utilizes subtle textures and pastel/desaturated color palettes.  This poster above is a great example of these traits, as well as the combination of multiple typefaces. If you'll notice, the "Pasta" section uses the same blue texture in the background as the fill of the pot below it. The whole thing had a good, unified feel to it and there's nothing visibly out of place.


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As for his presentation, G uses a cement kind of background for multiple pieces, something we haven't seen much of, but an interesting and creative way of personalizing and connecting a variety of different subjects. The drop shadow helps make the logo pop, adding to the presentation.

I think that looking at John's work helps give us a sense of what to aim for, and it tells us a little bit about our professor. In my opinion, it's a great resource for brainstorming and designer's block.

NOTE:

All in favor of John making some Beer Macaroni and Cheese, please comment "Aye" below, in addition to your response!

CGHUB - The Social Network for Professionals in Entertainment

 
I just recently came across CGHUB and have been hooked since my first visit to the site. Basically, it's deviantART without the 13 year old anime fangirls clogging up the feed with their really quite terrible "artwork." This is a place where you can really find talented individuals with an eye for creature and character design. The majority of the work posted on the site is digital, both 2D and 3D, but you can still find traditional artwork on the site. I have found profiles of concept artists who post some of their work for films that have recently come out, like Pacific Rim, The Hobbit, and others.

If you have an account, you can post your own illustrations for the world to see, as well as comment, like, share, and favorite other people's work, and subscribe and follow different artists whose collection of work you would like to revisit in the future. When posting new works, you can ask other members of the site to critique your work. It's a helpful tool because better artists than you man stumble across your image and give you just the advice you needed. 

On the home page, the Editors Picks are featured at the top (a collection of really superb works of art), and below them are a collage of "Popular Now" works of different sizes, showcasing a variety of styles and content from different artists. Whenever a new image is posted, or some other notifiable activity occurs on the site, there is a tiny thumbnail at the very top of the page saying ______ left a comment on _______. While sometimes this might be a little useless, occasionally cool new artists can be discovered by clicking on this link.

CGHUB also hosts Articles, Forums, and Challenges for its users to participate in. Job postings are available on the site as well, so professionals in the field looking for work can post their availability or organizations looking for artists can put an ad on the site when they're looking for artists. When I'm out of school, I plan to use this to try and find some work.

If you like this kind of website, I would suggest you check out these other art sites: Behance, CGSociety,  deviantART, ConceptArt.org
If you're interested, my profile is at kilianmcmann.cghub.com.

Edward Gorey

            -EDWARD GOREY-              

Edward Gorey (pictured left) was an all around wonderful person. Not only was he an illustrator, but an author of 100 books and a poet as well. In addition to these amazing things, he had a pretty awesome life – that you can see here – where he was surrounded by cats doing what he loved most; creating. (Also check out that beard!)

Gorey's work was most of the time pretty comical and surreal; two things of which I enjoy myself and which only make works of art more beautiful pieces. All of these reasons are why I hold Gorey so high on a list of "Inspirational Artists". 






Gorey's illustrations all have great design technique and style incorporated into them. As you can with this piece of his to the right, each part of the piece has something interesting in it. Whether it be the stroke itself, or the composition. The whole piece has also got a very successful color scheme. Most of the pieces you see from Gorey are usually just black and white, wherein he greatly uses his space to pull off a piece of work. You can also see a part of his humor in this piece. It definitely is not as grim as some of his work, but the humor is definitely there and his style helps highlight it.

I also take Gorey's work into affect when doing design work. I feel that Gorey liked to draw things that he found comical, or that he just enjoyed while putting major thought into his style as well as using his space successfully. When designing, I try to model this attitude as to produce something that is as successful as Gorey's work.

Ten Paces and Draw

I found this really cool website: http://www.tenpacesanddraw.com/

 

Each week, the people that run the website sets a challenge for designers and illustrators to sketch and swap with others to make cool designs. So the whole website has designs from different people and sketches also.

 

And you can see all the different challenges that they had. One of the challenges that I like is Character Redesign because they had a Star Wars challenge and all the designs for it are awesome. Also when you design something for a challenge they put your information in like your website so if people like your stuff they get to know more about you. So if you're bored, you can contribute to the website and do one of the challenges!

15 Illustrators

I thought that this article was interesting because it shows the several different ways that illustrators design. Some of the illustrators in this article give me a new perspective. I enjoy it because the illustration go from super realistic to very cartoony and fun. It shows a lot of inspiration. I do like that this article also provides an explanation for each illustrator as well.

http://weburbanist.com/2010/02/15/dazzling-digital-illustration-15-artists-to-watch/