Hello again! Wouldn’t ya know, it’s the end of the school year. I fulfilled my promise from my last portfolio and made some more cool pieces this semester. I hope you enjoy them, just like you hopefully enjoyed my art last semester. (Spoiler alert - there are way more pieces, and there’s a LOT more reading.)
For this project, we were required to make a poster to bring awareness to 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline’s official phone number, using a popular design style from the last year. I chose to do my piece in anti-design, a style that revolves around (as the name suggests) doing things that any designer would cringe at. There are elements from several types of media, there are several fonts used, the colors don’t match in the slightest, and the layout makes no sense. My goal was to convey a feeling like that of early 2000s TV shows like Wonder Pets and The Amazing World of Gumball. I feel like I did that almost perfectly with this piece. I hope the audience will get a feeling of weird optimism when they see my piece, and also keep the knowledge about 988 as a resource for getting through mental issues. If you’re struggling, please do read the poster’s message. Things always will get better, no matter what.
For this piece, we had to make a piece that conveys some kind of pop culture theme in the style of Tim Marrs, a modern artist who makes art with a graffiti-esque style. I chose to create a piece bringing awareness to how big technology companies have practically taken over the world. The piece is covered in commonplace technology symbols (ex. WiFi) and logos of big tech companies (ex. Microsoft). I feel like my piece was pretty good at conveying this theme, though I could definitely have included a bit more variety of symbols. I hope my audience thinks twice about how much influence these companies have when they look at the piece.
For this project, we had to make a piece that conveys either an important person or advocates for a cause we believe in. I chose to highlight the disparity between the highest and lowest classes here in the USA. This piece is split in half down the middle, with the right side being a homeless person and the left side being a rich man. The split is in the form of a tear, representing the divide between the two classes. I consider this piece to be the best piece of art I’ve ever made. I literally felt like I was some kind of political activist when I was working on it, and it conveys the theme perfectly. Overall, I hope that my audience walks away from this piece with more insight on the horrific difference between our bureaucracy and our homeless community, especially since a huge number of US citizens live on the line with the latter side.
For this project, we had to make a piece entirely made out of font. I chose the option to make a robot entirely out of letters, numbers, and symbols. This piece ended up being six hundred and forty five layers of nothing but typeface, each one painstakingly placed in order to create a really cool looking robot. There isn’t any theme or anything; its purpose was to be made from just type. I honestly think this piece was worth the huge number of hours I put into it, though I do wish I had conveyed some kind of theme with this. I hope my audience looks at this piece and thinks, “Damn. That’s a really cool robot.”
This piece was meant to be entered into the El Paso County ‘I Voted’ Sticker Contest. I decided that I was going to make something nice and simple, since we were given only three or so days to complete it. The entire piece is composed of 4 layers: an American flag, the C with a circle inside it on the Colorado flag, and two type layers with a flag-like waving effect. I think I did pretty well on this. However, I forgot to submit it to the contest, and I actually want to scream every time I think of that. Oh well. I hope my audience considers voting this year if they’re of legal voting age, since it’s a pretty big election year.
For our final big project, we had to make a concert poster in the psychedelic style of the 1960s. I decided to make mine for a fictional artist that I completely made up, featuring a made up band and another made up artist, and even taking place in a made up location. It gave me some more creativity that way. In retrospect, I think it was a pretty fun-to-make piece. I followed some online instructions to make it, and I was hyper-focused the entire time, which is extremely rare for me. Overall, I hope the audience would have considered attending this concert if it were real.
Well, that’s just about every piece I made this semester. Thanks for getting all the way through this blatantly ridiculous amount of reading that I’ve put you through. Don’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet, though. I’m going to be in CGD 3 in the fall, and from what I’ve seen, those are going to be the most insane pieces of art I’ll have ever made. Do stick around for that, and once again, thanks for looking at my pieces.