Afishionados,

My iPhone posse and I arrived at our local AT&T store around midnight last night. This included my brother-in-law, both stepsisters, and my friend Ross. The parents, who also wanted iPhones but did not want to wait in line for them, arrived and cut in line around 7 A.M. We packed a camping table and collapsable chairs, along with some blankets and pillows to make ourselves as comfortable as possible. We also had doughnuts. Yum. Everyone managed to catch a little sleep. Well, everyone but me. I didn’t sleep a wink, though I finally managed to get in a quick nap around 11 A.M. this morning.

Here is a breakdown by numbers of our little outting:

24 How many doughnuts we had with us.

13 Was my place in the line.

8 Was the number of hours we waited in line.

4 The number of 16 GB iPhones we bought.

3 The number of 8 GB iPhones we bought.

400 million How many people were in line behind us. Well, not really, but it was a lot.

We also managed to make all the local news stations. Here’s me curled up in my comfy chair, guarding the precious doughnuts with my brother-in-law.

It’s a good thing we did decide to camp out at midnight, because the store sold out of iPhones wihin the hour. We wouldn’t have gotten them otherwise.

This was the first time I’ve ever camped out for a product. Considering how damn tired I am, I’m not sure that I’d ever do it again, either. Well… At least until the next iPhone comes out.

Afishionados,

A shameless plug for my brother tonight because I think he deserves it. My brother, Narrow Dweeb, was in the market for a didgeridoo but discovered that affordable ones are $70+ in the catalogues. The cheaper ones are made from PVC piping and not wood.

So, what is a desperate ex-Marine-gone-Army-Reservist to do? Buy some PVC pipe and a heat gun is what! Yes, Narrow Dweeb has been making his own didgeridoos and playing them on his college campus because he’s crazy. He also has a talent knack for leaving me didgeridoo voicemail messages. At least, I think it’s him because I don’t know any Aboriginal Australians.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, are just a few of his didgeridoo creations. They sound just as good as the real (wooden) ones but look a lot cooler. Especially the flying tiger version, which is my favorite so far.

If this one has a model number, it would be “P-40″.

This one is also quite good and looks a lot like wood after some sanding, staining, and branding. I think it came out nicely.

Here’s a close up look at the “wooden” didgeridoo. It looks great!

I think it people are willing to pay $70 for a didgeridoo that my brother should sell them. I know at least one person who would like to see a Darth Vader or Halo 3 didgeridoo… But I… I mean “he” shall remain nameless.
:-X.

Afishionados,

Lotsa folks out there are big supporters of Barack Obama. They’ve all got their reasons, but I’m here to ask you just one question:

Is another black man in Washington D.C. begging for change really what this country needs?

Do the right thing. Vote Polanski.

The first project for my typography class is due tomorrow. I just finished it a few hours ago. It took a lot more time to do that I thought it would. I didn’t think that shaping oneself with individual characters of a font would be so tedious. This is the photo that I selected for the project.

The next step is to take the photo and create a line drawing from it. Aside from the hair and eyebrows, I regret shading in the other dark areas. It ended up just being a distraction later on. The line drawing is on tracing paper. The idea was to trace as many shapes and features as possible while still keeping it a simple line drawing. I ended up tracing more detail than I needed, as did most people I think.

This is the final part of the project, the typographical representation of oneself. The assignment dictated the following:

1.) Only black and white.
2.) You may use symbols and numbers.
3.) You had to incorporate words that go with the what you are trying to say about yourself.
4.) You have to give credit to the artist if you use song lyrics.

Since I have a small¹ obsession with Missy Higgins, I chose to use her song “Steer.” It’s about taking control of your life and knowing where you want to go. I can’t think of any better song to describe my life right now.

The hardest part of this project was the hair and eyebrows. My first mock up had lyrics overlapped to the point where they were illegible. The plus side is that it created a darker look to it, but it made my hair look curly. I changed it to the Agency font because it’s straighter. I lost some of the contrast of the overall image by doing this, but damn it if the curly hair look didn’t drive me nuts.

To see a larger version of the final image, click here.

¹Huge

Back to Chicago, baby! And this time with a couple of friends and an extra day to see some sights. Woo hoo!

Rasputin International Poetry Exhibition.

Nice and R.I.P.E. this year, folks.

I have always loved Ellen Page’s performance in anything I’ve ever seen her in (She’s GREAT in Hard Candy and Mouth to Mouth). If you’re scratching your head and asking yourself, “Who’s Ellen Page?”, then shame on you, because it means you haven’t yet seen Juno.

Juno is a indie movie from Fox Searchlight Pictures that was quietly released this holiday season but is really generating a buzz. And for good reason, as Juno could (and should) be the dark horse for the Best Actress Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards. It is, without a doubt, the best film that I have seen all year and, as far as I am concerned, should win the Oscar for Best Picture of the Year.

The film is about a sarcastic and cynical 16-year-old girl named Juno MacGuff (perfectly portrayed by the wonderful and adorable Ellen Page) who finds herself pregnant after her first sexual experience with her quirky best friend, Paulie Bleeker (who goes by “Bleeker” and is played by Michal Cera). After tossing around the idea of abortion, Juno instead decides to give the baby up for adoption to a loving and well-deserving couple, the Lorings (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), whom she discovers in a local newspaper with the help of her girlfriend, Leah (Olivia Thirlby).

The film follows Juno’s trials and tribulations with her pregnancy, family, the Lorings, school, and everything in between. Juno’s father (J.K. Simmons) and stepmother (Allison Janney) aren’t exactly pleased with the news of Juno’s unexpected pregnancy, but agree to help her deal with her situation as best they can. Simmons is as wonderful as ever as Juno’s father, and Janney plays the part of stepmother beautifully. I can’t imagine a better choice in the casting of Juno’s parents.

It’s Ellen Page, though, that makes this film truly shine. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, could have been Juno MacGuff except her. She’s always tremendous in her roles, but this is by far the best of her career. She’s absolutely fabulous, and I wouldn’t be surprised if her career really “took off” from here. (Ellen already has a successful career, but I mean “take off” in the sense that more people will recognize her and cast in in more mainstream films, as the majority of her work is independent films.)

Another high point is Juno’s dialogue, which is actually written as though a real 16-year-old would be saying the words that come out of Juno’s mouth. It’s rare for Hollywood to accurately portray teenagers from the real world, and even more rare for those teens to have true-to-life dialogue. Thankfully, Juno doesn’t suffer from either of these Hollywood plights. And not only is the dialogue well written, much of it is both positively hysterical (or touching, when the scene requires it).

Juno is the most fun,
most humorous, and certainly the most touching movie that I’ve seen in a long, long, LONG time. It will make you laugh, and it will surely tug at your heart. I can’t even remember the last time that I saw a film that literally made me feel good after watching it, nor a film that has made me so quickly want to watch it over again. Juno is a welcome breath of fresh air in a world of ongoing special effects blockbuster disappointments, and a painful reminder that I live in an area of the world without a really good indie theater.

There’s simply no other way to put it: Juno is outstanding and definitely a movie that shouldn’t be missed.

Four Bundles of Joy out of Four.

I hope everyone enjoys the new header image at the top of the page. Yes, it’s very similar to the “old” one but I can assure you this one is brand new. “Why?” do you ask? What an excellent question!

Last night I thought I would change my screensaver for the first time in five or six years. I found one that I liked and tried to install it. Words cannot express how truly poor that decision was on my part. A part of me died last night at approximately 9:30 P.M. EST. There’s a good chance that you might have heard me screaming, too.

The screensaver devoured ALL the files on my desktop, including the Photoshop files and templates for this web site. All gone in the blink of an eye. To make matters worse, I didn’t have backups of everything and the REAL salt in the wound is that the screensaver didn’t work anyway!

This is why there is no God. God would not punish a Mac user like this, especially by trying to install a simple screensaver. Windows users on PCs? Absolutely. God would hate them. If he were real.

I have backups of all of my personal files, but I didn’t have backups of all the Photoshop files for the Ministry. Fortunately, there is a software program out there called Data Rescue II which I will vouch does just that. I was able to recover the majority of my files, with the exception of the header image and the Ministry logo file.

When I work on my projects, I save my files as I go. If I make a drastic change, I save it as a new file. This way, if I later decide that what I changed was bad, I can go back to where I started from. I consider most of my stuff (especially the images on my blog) to be works in progress. While I lost the “final” version of the Ministry logo, I was able to “finish” one of the work-in-progress versions that I had backed up. ::Whew::. And Data Rescue II recovered the parchment and cloth backgrounds of the Ministry.

So although God doesn’t exist, Santa had better because I need him to bring me an external hard drive so that I can back up my stuff with Apple’s new Time Machine feature.

And if Santa should fail in his quest to bring the Ministry a hard drive for Christmas?

Afishionados,

Tonight was my last night with the Photocopy Queen. A BIG HOORAY to this, as I will never take another one of her classes ever again. What an uppity bitch she is. She works in Cincinnati at some design firm but lives and commutes to Dayton to teach. So she is always¹ in a FABULOUS mood when she arrives for class at 5:30 P.M. Tonight was no different. I’m pretty sure that my class is the worst she’s ever had, which isn’t really fair because most people do their work and turn it in on time. There are a couple of people that seem to have ruined it for the rest of us. I think the real problem is that most of the students in my class have personalities and the Photocopy Queen (PQ) doesn’t.

My final project was to create an brochure or pamphlet for my musician (Mozart). The way that the PQ wanted us to design the project was just as retarded as all her other “ideas”. Create a really nice comprehensive mockup and then (any guesses?) photocopy it for the final piece. If you have to, you may glue additional elements to your final piece as necessary.

I love this post

No, I didn’t make a typo. You read that correctly. I said “glue”. Who the hell glues things into a FINAL brochure project? I can understand gluing two prints together to form a brochure, but I would never in a million years glue something inside a finished piece.

There is also a serious problem with students using images they found online inside their brochures. Copyright issues aside, the biggest problem with this is that the images are typically at resolutions of 72 dpi (dots per inch). This looks great on your monitor, but looks like total shit when you print it out. But nobody seems to be able to grasp this concept and of course the PQ never explained it to anyone. To better understand how poor 72 dpi is for printing, consider that a newspaper is about 150 dpi and most printed material you see (magazines, photos, books…etc.) is 300 dpi or better.

My classmates can be thankful that I am not their professor, because I would fail you instantly for using pixelated images in any final work that you turn into me. Instant F, no questions asked. I am a resolution Nazi.

I created my whole project by cheating with Photoshop at 300 dpi so it looked perfect when printed. I created a cover and back from scratch using an old leather texture. The cover should look familiar, because it’s what I was working on when I decided to redo Old Fish and Lemonade’s appearance. It even uses the same font.

All the burns, stains, and “spine crease” were added by me. There is also a gradient and burnt effect added to the text, in addition to separate stains for the W and the A (Wolfgang Amadeus, in case you were wondering). I “carved” the corner pieces out of a brass texture and added stains and cracks to them to make them look older as well.

There were 16 panel pieces in total, but these are the parts of the brochure that I like the best so I’m not showing you the other 6. The brochure unfolds to this “mini poster” made up of the interior 8 panels.

Notice the return of my flowery violin pattern! I wanted to use it somewhere in my final project and I’m glad I did. Also notice that the treble clef is stained inside and slightly blurred to look like an antique drawing or print. The text over Mozart’s head is a snippet from a biography paper we had to write about our musician and is typed in one of my favorite fonts. I added a slight golden glow to the text to make it look older, stained, and easier to read. The quote is from Mozart and is meant as a jab to the PQ and her ignorant beliefs about photocopying everything. I think my approach is better than hers.

The final brochure is 8.5 inches high and 17 inches wide. I printed the two parts on a plotter and used a spray adhesive (Barbaro in a can) to stick them together. I trimmed the edges so that they lined up then folded it together so it ultimately became a 4.25 inch brochure that unfolds into a poster. No glue or photocopying required!

Perhaps I am too conceited, but my brochure was one of the VERY few brochures that didn’t suck horribly. It really did look better than everyone else’s and I’m glad that I used the computer and Photoshop, despite the bitching of the PQ.

¹Never

Afishionados,

I thought I’d share a little bit of what I’ve been up to in my Design Basics 2D class this past quarter. At the beginning of the quarter, each student randomly drew the name of a musician from a hat. We weren’t allowed to trade our musician for anyone else’s and we couldn’t redraw if we didn’t like who we picked. The musician we selected was to be the focus of all our projects (whether we liked it or not). I ended up choosing Mozart, which ended up being both good and bad.

I don’t dislike Mozart’s music, but I don’t listen to it either. Other students had the benefit of incorporating song lyrics, photos of their musician, and album covers into their projects. Mozart, of course, doesn’t have much to offer in this regard.

Click for larger view

One of our later assignments was to select an object that represents our musician and design five different styles using that image, including: negative space, outline, line drawing, weighted line drawing, and stylized. I went with a violin.

I found a high-res image of a violin on a stock photography web site that I belong to and used that as a reference. Here’s a scan of my stylized image. It’s completely stippled and, unfortunately, doesn’t show up well as a scanned JPG. I used a really fine point marker to make it and it looks much crisper in person, but you get the idea. Of the five required styles, this was my favorite. This and the other four violin images would serve as the basis for future projects as well.

For whatever reason, my professor is obsessed with photocopiers. A later assignment involved taking the original violin images and creating both plural and compound designs from them (Plural incorporating multiple copies of the same image and compound including two different violin images together).

Click for larger view

I mention the instructor’s love for the photocopier because she stated that we were not to use the computer whatsoever for any of our plural and compound assignments. Instead, we were supposed to use tissue paper to trace and crop or original violin images and then (of course) photocopy the tissue paper to resize it we needed. From there, you can photocopy your photocopies, cut them out, and arrange them in your plural and compound layouts, then photocopy THAT image to create a final piece. Have you ever tried to trace a stippled image? I don’t know about you, but I simply don’t have that kind of fucking time, not to mention the cost of copying. I bent the rules to my favor and ended up using Photoshop anyway. I scanned my original stippled image, then arranged it in Photoshop to create my final piece. We had to do five compound designs and five plural designs. This image is one of my plural assignments, as well as my favorite of all ten pieces. The “flower” formed by the violins was a happy accident, and I ended up using this on my final project for the class (which I may post at a later date). There is simply no way to get this kind of result by using a photocopier (you can’t overlay the dots!).

Before “bending the rules”, I tried pleading with my instructor to let me use Photoshop. She wouldn’t hear of it. When I asked the logic behind her retarded decision, she said “Not everyone knows how to use Photoshop and the computer, and I want the class to be on a level playing field.”

Oh really? I suppose that’s true, but why should I be punished just because I do know how to use Photoshop and a computer? I tried to explain my logic to her. “Yea, but there’s a regular Olympics and a Special Olympics, and I’m not retarded.” I don’t think I need to tell you that she didn’t appreciate my analogy.

Click for larger view

Here’s another one of my projects, this time an example from one of my compound images. I scanned my weighted line drawing and used Photoshop to arrange it with my stylized (stippled) drawing. I really like the contrast between the two images.

If I had to do this project over, I would redo the weighted line drawing to look less like a “horror” violin. If Time Burton had a violin, it would look like this. But, in what little time I had to draw it, I think it came out okay, and still ends up working in the end.

The final assignment that I had to do with my violin drawings was to create a repeating pattern. Again, Photoshop wasn’t permitted but you can see how long it would take to do this by photocopying image after image after image.

Click for larger view

Here’s my final tiled piece. It’s the same as my compound image, but around a quarter of the original size (Each assignment had to fit within a 6″ x 6″ square).

I saved hours of pointless photocopying by using my good friend Photoshop once again. Although it only took a few minutes to do this, I’m really happy with how it turned out. If Mozart had to wallpaper his bathroom, this is the pattern he’d use. Or if he had gifts to wrap, or needed a Hawaiian shirt… I suppose I could throw in a couple palm trees to really make it work.

The instructor and I are civil to one another, but I don’t think either of us likes the other very much. She’s the only professor that I know of who teachers 2D Design and prohibits the use of the computer, so I’m sure this will be the last time I sign up for a class with her. But I don’t think the class was a total waste, as I’m really happy with how a lot of my assignments have turned out, not to mention that I’ve gotten really good grades on all my projects. So hopefully I’m doing something right!