in process

One of my professors was talking about how he is often more interested in the steps taken in the works of artist he likes, then the finished piece, so I thought I'd post my progress on my independent study;

This piece was inspired by the Bible. Exodus 17 verses 8-13; " 8 The Amalekites came and attacked the Israelites at Rephidim. 9 Moses said to Joshua, "Choose some of our men and go out to fight the Amalekites. Tomorrow I will stand on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hands."10 So Joshua fought the Amalekites as Moses had ordered, and Moses, Aaron and Hur went to the top of the hill. 11 As long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were winning, but whenever he lowered his hands, the Amalekites were winning. 12 When Moses' hands grew tired, they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held his hands up—one on one side, one on the other—so that his hands remained steady till sunset. 13 So Joshua overcame the Amalekite army with the sword. " also Mark 2:1-5 " 1A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. 2So many gathered that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them. 3Some men came, bringing to him a paralytic, carried by four of them. 4Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus and, after digging through it, lowered the mat the paralyzed man was lying on. 5When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven."

I felt like this has been how my life was for a while, especially when considering the emotional impact of dad's cancer on my life. I was getting so tired of watching, waiting and praying. and I knew that I would really be relying on my friends and also God to get through this time.























































This piece is inspired by my life. Of the time in between when you know God's will for a situation and him acting upon it to change your situation. My friend David is the model, he is able to relate to my situation a little too well.

pb

modern inconveniences

This is my latest piece.

Since "Prepare for Battle..." was selected for the Juried Student Exhibition, I've been thinking about what makes that piece better then my others. I think it may be the absurdly epic text, so I'm going to try and play that up more in my pieces from here on out. I'm planning on next week project being about caffeine intake. I need to decide whether is about the consuming or the purchasing. Opinions are welcome.

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affirmation

Greetings. (I was told that "hey ya'll" was absurdly southern... that's were I'm from, get over it.)

This Friday was the opening night for the Juried Student Design Exhibition! My Piece "Prepare for Battle..." will be displayed along with works from many very talented people. It's an honor to have been selected to be shown with them. It was so great to get this bit of affirmation, especially as I'm about to go look for a career doing this sort of thing that, yes, I do have what it takes to succeed in this field.

The exhibition runs only until the 30th I believe, so hurry over to the Anderson Gallery, which is in the alley between the Financial Aid building and Hibbs and prepare to have you face melted off!

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Createathon on Campus

Last week I participated in the school of Mass Comm.'s Createathon on Campus. This is something that has been happening in the professional arena for 10 years now and this was the first one on a school campus. Design firms would rally local non-profits with little to no marketing budget and for 24 hours would do pro-bono work for them. It was rough at times, but it was really cool too to see a bunch of people rally together and use the gifts and talents we have to help the non-profit companies help other people. It was a awesome feeling to know that I was helping to impact dozens of lives, maybe even more.

My group was working for Jackson-Feild Homes, which is an organization that helps neglected and abused girls in the Foster care system. These girl's stories are incredible! One girl never got a birthday present until she was in the program at 16. Another had her second kid at 17, and her mother didn't even go to the hospital in Petersburg to see her, even though the mother lives in Richmond, because she didn't feel like riding the bus! WHAT?!?! But despite their previous lives, and because of the work of the staff Jackson Feild Homes, these girls are incredible strong in character and are getting the tools and skills they need to make the choices that can break them out of this cycle.

Our assignment was to make for them a promotional video, which was made difficult because we weren't allowed to video tape or record the girls. So we created videos of other volunteers reading scripts from these girls' lives. We focused on their hands to address a more creative presentation and also to keep that idea of anonymity. We started at 9 am and finished all our work at 3:30 am the next morning, having completed not just one video but 5 different video clips and suggestions for their homepage.
I designed this homepage and also a suggestion for a mini page that could host blogs from the girls. The donors have been very active in Jackson-Feild and also the lives of these girls and we thought a blog would be another way that the donors could participate, keep in touch, and also see the effectiveness of their donations. I don't know if the videos are online yet, we suggested that they put them on Youtube, but I don't know if that's happened yet.

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For more information about Jackson-Feild Homes check out;
http://www.jacksonfeild.org/

new logo, new look

hey ya'll, well I had a pretty cruddy day yesterday, I tried all day, but I got nothing accomplished all day. So I thought I could at least make a post to have something to show for the day, go figure that the site was having issues and I couldn't post anything. But today is a new day, so this might work now.

This is my new logo. it hasn't been officially approved for my senior studio, but I've already been signing pieces with it, so it's fairly official.

I figured there was no better time to start trying to get my name out there, then when entering a contest, so I put the signature logos on all four of the pieces I entered into the student exhibition for this spring. I really want to get in, especially now when I'm trying to look for a job, it would be a great encouragement and validating experience to be selected for the show. The competitions really tough, we have a lot of very talent people in COAR, but I think I have a fighting chance.

You may be familiar with my entries, I submitted a photo of the portrait of my dad (yeah, a photo of a painting, that might not fly, but it still looks nice, especially if you don't know that it's a photo of a painting.), the senior project "Cheaper than Dentures" and also "Prepare for Battle..." I also quickly finished the corrections I was going to make to the third piece "This sucks."

I didn't make all of the changes suggested in class, but I did change some of the things that I thought were major problems. The text reads "cleanliness is next to godliness but chores are for suckers."

When prepping for the submissions, I was short on time (I learned about it that morning) so I tried the best I could.

we'll see how this goes.

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attempts one and two

These are my two newest senior project pieces. I didn't really like this first one, I think it just had a lot of problems with it, so I redid the project for this week. I'm still not very happy with the response I got for this one. I'm gonna bump up the color patterns and also fool around with the text some more. I think this one is a lot better though so I'm moving in the right direction. I get frustrated when I think I understand what I'm doing, what makes an idea work, and when I try to do it again, I still miss the mark. ARGH!


I was getting some conflicting feedback on this during crit. what people disliked about the text in the first image, that there were two type faces and they were disconnected, was suggested in this piece.

~pb

coulda shoulda woulda...now i can.

These are some images that I wasn't about to post earlier;

This first one is another one of the images that kinda introduce my work. This was a exercise for digital drawing using references.











This is another piece for my senior project class. I did this one before my last post, but I wasn't able to upload these because I had the wrong color mode. Thanks Hannah for clearing that up, you're a genius.

It was my second attempt at this idea of brushing teeth. The first was awful! I was actually embarrassed when getting it printed. Don't expect to ever see that one here. I had chosen the wrong elements to combine and emulate. This was really the first image for the class that was really successful in the way I merged my two inspiration sources, Art Nouveau and Ukiyo-e. For that reason I'm really proud of it. After that brutal crit., I took all the feedback and tired to really concentrate on the comments to make a better piece.


I think I might also be too cautious about posting, there are lots of things that I could post, but haven't because they aren't "good enough". But without a record of what I've done, how will I know how I've grown as an artist? or even as a person? I'll post more things soon, promise.

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