Week 40

My boyfriend is AMAZING at coming up with topics on what to draw. This time a giraffe in a big city, his head up in the clouds, from human point of view. Alright, so I failed a bit with that.


Taking a sunday stroll.

Week 39

I made a deal with my boyfriend that he would give me a topic each week and I would draw it, and vice versa. I was, naturally, fashionably late with the first one.


"A charging rhino with a real monkey on top of it with a spear!"

"Marakatti" was what he actually said, which would translate to something like meercat or guenon in english. Blue monkey is, however sinimarakatti in finnish.

Personally I'm not that fond of goldfishes.

They know too much.

Smoldering hot.

But out there it's not.

Mauno mursu.

Mauno was a very special walrus indeed.

Valkea sokeus

I was inspired.

I'm not the other anything.

I'm me.

Remake.

I'm sick. My dog isn't quite alright either. I needed something to not think about. And there it is!

Somebody to love

Paint it blue

I'm horribly deprived of sleep, so I was supposed to go to bed early today. Bollocks. Kept flirting with Painter instead. Apparently much, much more flirting is required.

We share the same biology regardless of ideology

Worked too long on his snout yesterday, then rushed it to just GET IT DONE today, so I wouldn't have to think about it anymore. So there.

I dream of gardens in the desert sand

More, I need MORE!

More art therapy.

I'm so out of practise with painting.
And I can't get what people see in these dogs. I can't get what I see in them. There's something adorably piggy about them.

We cats know who we are.

I was feeling pretty crappy earlier. I still do, but speedpainting gave my hands something to do and my mind an opportunity to ease onto something less complicated.

Happiness is to own a ferret

...or so they keep telling me. A birthday card for a friend.

WIP - Man's best friend etc.

Emma

Watercolours, touch-ups with coloured pencils.

I'm cranky, but the llamas are not.

In a flash it was gone

We're currently having a class on Flash at school. Today was the second day of the course, and... well.


Behold, the first Flash-animation I ever made. (CLICK HERE)

Don't be too hard on me - I actually did have a tablet, but no drivers, so it behaved like any mouse would. The assignment was, in all simplicity, to make an animation with several animated objects in it. This baby was slapped together in about two hours, during which I spent too much time going: "Oh, so that's how I should have done it in the first place. Another quarter of an hour down the drain!"

Tastes like winter

Not exactly on thursday, this post, pardon me for the delay.

On to the packages!
The assignment was to design a box for pastilles by the name Routa. Routa is a finnish word for frost, the kind that freezes the ground. All we had to work with was the name, some compulsory information that the package must hold, the manufacturer should be Fazer (and thus their logo should be included) and that the box itself should be the size of a Fazer Salmiakki -box. What kind of pastilles the package would hold - that was for us to decide.


(Sorry for the crappy quality of the picture - I took it with my cellphone.)
Here is my take on Routa. I was quite sure that the first impression for most people would be that these pastilles should be cough drops, as many such pastilles in Finland, at least, are given a very breezy image for their throat and voice clearing qualities. I wanted them to be something different - I associated Routa with certain clarity and intensity of the flavour, and most of all, Finland. So I chose very finnish flavours - blueberry, cranberry and cloudberry - and tried to keep the breeze and snowstorms to the minimum, without forgetting the origins of the name.

I also wanted to keep the packaging quite simple, with few colours and few elements. The logo itself was fun to design, and I think I succeeded in keeping it simple, yet including the qualities of the name. With the intense and sort of delicious, bright colouring on the berries I wanted to bring out the intense, sweet and delicious taste of the pastilles.

I got very good feedback on this and feel quite happy with the outcome, myself. :)

Oh, and on a sidenote - we also had to construct the packages ourselves. I bought a box of Fazer Salmiakki -pastilles and tore it apart, measured it, then proceeded to draw it in Illustrator. Then after a couple of tries on the constructing part I added the layout on the construction, then printed it on carton and cut it out and constructed the boxes using a utility knife, ruler, an ordinary blunt knife (the kind of utensil you use for eating, this time for creasing), and two-sided sticky tape. One of the criteria when assessing our packages was that the box should be well-constructed - it should open, close and stand upright without toppling over or leaning to side or anything.

The course was fun and I'm hoping we get to design more packaging at school in the future :D


As an added bonus - a friend of mine is going to Japan as an exchange student for a year, so our class prepared a little booklet for her to remember us while she's there. It included problems and things to do, such as crosswords and sudokus, as well as poems and, naturally, drawings. This was a page I did for the booklet - it actually doesn't look that much like the Iriomote cat, but it's the thought that counts, eh? On the other side was a short description of the species.

Judge the book by the cover - I do

Oh my, I haven't updated in ages. I've been meaning to, several times, in fact, but I've been busy with numerous projects...

As I have already mentioned in my personal blog, me and a student colleague of mine are working on the visuals for a fashion show. It's a show organized by our school's fashion design students, and linked to a bigger event. Very interesting, but challenging and time-consuming as well.

My class is also working on the illustrations and all sorts of amusing problems and assignments for a magazine directed to children. This is, for our part, nearly done.

Also I'm having a course on package design, and have been, for the past few days, designing a series of packages for candy drops which, for the purpose of the assignment, go by the name Routa. I actually just finished the layouts and shall print and construct the packages tomorrow - however, I'm not posting them here just yet, the deadline is on thursday so I'll post them here then ;)

I've been so excited about graphic design lately, and really thought that I'm just where I'm supposed to be! We made a few visits to printing offices and editorial offices last week, and I couldn't have been happier. I was on the verge of mental orgasm when I saw all the cool stuff you can do to your work when printing - oh the metallic shine and reliefs and glitters!

Speaking of mental orgasms, I don't know how I've never found it before, but anyone interested in packaging design - or graphic design in general - should definitely check out The Dieline. I've been crying tears of joy and swimming in pools of inspiration for the past week, spending my free moments geeking over the innovative and cool designs presented there.

And now, for something else than orgasms entirely - my schoolwork.


The assignment was to redesign the cover of S. H. Steinberg's 500 years of printing. Sadly I didn't use as much time on this as I should have, but I sort of like the clean-cut feel of it anyway.


Here we were to choose a book the cover of which we disliked, and redesign it. I hate the cover of the copy I have, so here's my take on Anne Rice's The Interview with the Vampire. I've always hated Claudia with a passion, though.


Aaand here's a close-up of the illustration. Sorry for the ugly watermarks, I'm that paranoid. I would have liked to work on this more, but didn't have the time for it. I actually made this with vectors at first, then realized that I can't get the look I want with them (d'uh) and so I went and digitally painted over it.

That's all I can show for now, I'm afraid. I'll come back on thursday with some candy boxes!

...well alright, have this work-in-progress-chihuahua-on-acid.