The Art Gallery - Our Final Project

In Design 2, our final project was not an art project, but it was a project that used our already existing artwork. We put together a gallery display. Most of mine was photography, but I did feature a few paintings as well. I took pictures of the process so you can see what all we did.

The first thing we needed to do was to get the photographs ready. We have a large photo printer in the Mac lab, so we were able to get all our photos printed for free right at school. We then attached the photos to mat board with a special paper to get them ready to be vacuum sealed.

This is the machine that seals the photos. It seals any kind of artwork, but we mainly used it for photographs.

Joel is covering the photos with a non-stick board that protects the inside of the machine. The paper that we used to seal the photos to the mat board is melted after all the air is removed to make the pictures perfectly flat. If the non-stick layer weren't there any paper that shows under the photo would be melted and could stick to the inside of the machine.

After everything is in place we close the machine and start it up. It takes around 5 minutes to vacuum all the air out and melt the paper.

After the photos have been sealed, we remove them and use a large paper cutter to cut off the excess mat.

And the photos are done!

My Beanie Baby display. I have two posts dedicated to these pictures on my photo blog. You can find the dinosaur storyline HERE, and the cats HERE.

Some of Joel's artwork.

More by Joel.

Pieces by both Joel and I.

Getting this gallery ready was a lot of fun, but showing it off to our friends was even better. When we went to see Brave in Omaha we stopped by the school to show them our gallery. I'll have a post about that soon! :)

Cardboard Jungle

 

The biggest projects I have ever been a part of were the projects in our Design 2 class. There were only four students, but it was the best class I've had. The biggest project of all was the 3rd one. It took us weeks to plan and build, but it turned out great.

Every year the Design 2 class does some kind of an art installation in the Reiver room at the student center of Iowa Western for Earth day. We all decided right off that we did not want to try to make some sort of political statement with our project, but we wanted it to be something more about appreciating earth. Eventually we came up with the idea of doing a project that you did not see with your eyes. The idea was to make chambers that mimicked different environments. We had many ideas but in the interest of time we narrowed it down to two, The Jungle and the Arctic.

The cardboard structure in my LAST POST was the first stage of design. Eventually we tore off a bunch of that and rebuilt it. I took pictures along the way as we worked on these for a couple weeks.

Finally after we had finished building, came the day of the installation. We arrived early and were at school all day.

This was the first one. You can't tell by looking, but it's actually a jungle. :)

When you were inside you had headphones playing jungle ambiance on a continuous loop, while there was a humidifier running, and a bucket full of water and dead leaves for smell.

The second chamber is the arctic.

Inside here was an air conditioner and a fan, while the headphones played the sounds of a blistering wind.

We took turns pushing each visitor in on a rolling chair while they put on headphones and closed their eyes. I had brought materials for blindfolds, but no one wanted them, so we stopped offering, and just made them promise to keep their eyes closed.

One of the ladies from the offices heard about our project and came by to try them and take our picture. She went back and told others that she worked with, and we were kept busy all day.

Left to Right: Deb, Joel, Sonoka, Me, and our teacher, Jesse.

We had a lot of fun, and everyone loved our project. Over and over we were told that ours had been the best Earth day project the school had had.

Beanie Babies

So, as promised in my last blog post, today's post is all about Beanie Babies! Actually I have been planning on writing this for the last few months, because my first project for Design 2 was all about Beanie Babies. Yes, Beanie Babies. I have a very large collection of them.

"Jonathan, you're almost 26. Why do you have a very large collection of Beanie Babies?"

Well, it all started many years ago...
My Aunt Linda gave me and my brothers each a Beanie Baby one year. Mine was a dalmatian named Sparky.

We had never heard of them before, but soon afterwards, Beanie Babies blew up in popularity. They were the "It Thing" to have. Mom started buying them for us for Christmas, other family members bought them for us, and if I saw a Beanie Baby of some animal I really liked, I bought it for myself.

I think this was the first one I ever bought myself. Is anyone really surprised that it's a giraffe? :)

So over the years I amassed a rather large collection, and they all ended up stuffed in a giant plastic tote and put away. Who would have guessed that they would one day resurface to become the focus of the first half of my fourth semester of college?

This project was based on the book "Creature" by Andrew Zuckerman. The assignment was to study an artist and make a work that was a tribute to their style. Mine ended up more of a parody than a tribute, but everyone loved it and my teacher is encouraging me to have the pictures I took made into a book of my own. I won't be able to share all my pictures on my blog, but here are a few, just so you can get an idea of what I did. I may post more to my photography blog at a later date. (No, I haven't abandoned that blog, I've just been too busy to work on it.)

That's all for now, but I promise, this is not the last you have seen of my Beanie Baby collection. :)

So Much Stuff…

I have been neglecting my blog lately. I have quite a bit I’ve been meaning to write about but school has gotten in the way. My Design 2 class has kept me very busy working on my Beanie Baby project that I showed you a glimpse of the other day. I finished that project and turned it in today, so I hope to get that on my blog soon. In my Digital Drawing class I haven’t been quite as busy, mainly because I’ve gotten everything done in class. I will have to export a few of those files into publishable pictures so you can see what I have made there as well. Aside from my Beanie Baby project, the class that has kept me the most busy has been my online graphic Design class. There are so many projects in there that it’s kind of ridiculous. They are all pretty fun though, so it’s not like I’m miserable doing them, it’s just kind of hard to juggle everything sometimes. One of these days when I get some free time I’ll make all those files into images so I can share them here as well. My last class is my Painting 2 class, and of course I’m having fun with that. I have some sketches that I will scan into my computer to share one of these times, but the paintings themselves will have to wait until I get them back at the end of the semester.

Speaking of paintings… I have not yet shared the ones I did LAST semester! Today I finally got them all out and took pictures of them, so as soon as I get them ready I will be sharing them on my blog. For now I will share a couple of the early ones with you, and hopefully I’ll get the rest up by tomorrow. We’ll see what happens with my Graphic Design class. I still have a lot to work on for that one.

These were the first “Two” paintings I did. They are color studies of an orange and a stool. You may have seen the orange already, as I took a picture of it the week after I painted it.

       

First Week Down

Well, my first week of school is done. It was pretty busy, but more happened than just school.

First I’ll start off with the school news. I have class every weekday but Friday. Monday and Wednesday we have Digital Drawing, which is going to be all about Adobe Illustrator. I am very glad for this. Learning Illustrator was one of the classes that I took at ITT Tech that I was very disappointed in. It was combined with Photoshop, and I never felt like I learned much at all there. As I’ve told a lot of people, you could tell the teacher was there basically just to earn a paycheck. The teacher for this class is completely different. You can tell she’s a graphic design genius, and all her students love her. Most of them have had her before, and it seems as though they are all one big family. They are always cracking “Inside” jokes about things that have happened in previous semesters. It’s kind of amusing to listen to sometimes. But my point is, this teacher seems a LOT more friendly and helpful than my teacher at ITT Tech was. I hope that this will be a very profitable learning experience this semester.

Tuesday and Thursday is Design 2. I’ve already told you that this is the same teacher I had in my very first semester over a year ago. He’s one of the best teachers I’ve ever had, so I’m glad to have him again. This semester there are only 4 students in the class, Joel and I are two of them, and there are also two other girls. The teacher told us that since the class is so small he wants to have our assignment be more personalized to our own styles, so he’s going to try to come up with assignments that are similar, but different for each of us to do.

Wednesday we also have Painting 2. The same teacher as Painting 1 last semester. Like I have said before, he is pretty new to teaching, but he is still pretty good. I like him a lot more than most of the teachers I had at ITT Tech, and they were all a lot more experienced than he is. I look forward to doing more paintings. (And yes, I still need to show my paintings from last fall, they will be coming soon… I hope…) And like Design 2, there are only 4 students, Joel and me, plus two other girls. The one girl is a girl from our Painting I class last semester, and I am assuming that the other girl is too. The second girl missed the first day, but she had already contacted the teacher, so I think she’s not going to be one of those students who flakes out and misses most of the classes and ends up failing. It would be pretty sad if that happened in an advanced class like this with so few students.

My last class is an online class, and it is called simply Graphic Design. I will not be able to access the class till Monday, but from the e-mail the teacher sent out it sounds like it may be more Illustrator. I am hoping that it will go beyond Illustrator though, as I would like to get into the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite as well.

Okay, now onto “The Other stuff.”

The biggest thing actually started a few weeks ago, but I hadn’t posted about it yet. I have been upgraded to “Checker” at work. (No, this did not come with a raise, that would be nice though! :) ) I still do courtesy work sometimes, but lately I have been working the cash registers more than I have been sacking. Last night I was on the express lane for about half the time, which was new. I’d never done that before. I think I prefer the regular checkout lanes. It’s a lot easier to check out the groceries when you are handing the items off to a courtesy to sack, and you don’t have to worry about running out of counter space when some one reads “Twelve Items or Less” and thinks it says “Twenty Items or more.” Plus the express checkers have to worry about cigarettes a LOT more than the regular checkers. If it was just a matter of which brand they wanted, this wouldn’t be a problem, but there are about 57 varieties of cigarette per brand and it gets very confusing.

A few days ago my computer decided that it wanted to spaz out and it began shutting down my anti-virus programs, spitting out pop-ups all the time, crashing every single internet browser, so it was completely impossible to get online, and just generally having a complete melt down. I think I either got hacked, or it caught a virus, either way it was a mess. I ended up saving my important files to a hard drive and completely erasing the memory, essentially starting my computer over from scratch. On the plus side, it runs a whole lot faster now, but on the down side all my files, programs, settings, favorites, and everything I had customized is gone. I’m still trying to get everything back to normal.

I got a new camera this week as well. This is not a fancy DSLR camera, but I wanted a small camera that I could carry around with me at times when a DSLR would be very inconvenient. I got a small Canon PowerShot with 12.1 Megapixels and a 14x optical zoom.

It also has a GPS function, which “Geo-tags” your pictures, and can plot out a map where they were taken. Normally I wouldn’t really care about this feature, but (And this brings me to the next bit of news) there is a very good chance that I will be going on a road trip this summer with some friends, and I will take full advantage of this camera setting if I go. :) I’ll explain more about the trip when the time gets closer to say for sure. Right now I’m almost positive I’m going though. :)

So, that’s all my news for now. I have more stuff to blog about, but it will have to wait for another time. If I have time tomorrow, I will share what happened last week at the zoo. It was very out of the ordinary! :)

I’m Done!

With school! For now!

Digital Photography! A!

Biology! A!

Painting! A!

Geography! A!

History! B!

But, a B is still amazing considering that was the absolute worst class I have had so far, and I was fully expecting, and had made peace with the fact, that I was getting a C. On all 5 of the exams throughout the semester, there was not one that I completely finished. As I got to over halfway done each time, a little message would pop up saying “There is two minutes left. Please save your work as it will be submitted for grading.” And I would panic and quickly race through the rest of the test franticly clicking random answers hoping I would get some right. I never did. On the very last exam, however, I only had one single panicked click. One. And I missed three questions. I was fully expecting to get another D or a C on the test, because normally I always missed so many. I never had trouble on any of the assignments. I got full points on just about everything, except the exams. But since I did so well on the final, it pulled my grade up instead of down, and I ended the class with a final score of 84.66. I am very happy with that B.

My second worst class was Biology, but it turned out to not be nearly as bad as I had expected. The “horrible” teacher who made Joel and I split up in lab the first day, turned out to not be nearly as awful as she seemed. In fact, by the end of the class, I felt sorry for her because just about everyone else in the class talked about her behind her back, using language that, 70 years ago, would have gotten them 12 bars of ivory soap crammed in their mouths. She may not have been the greatest teacher in the world, but she did not deserve the names they called her when she couldn’t hear them. The only thing that made her “awful” was the fact that they didn’t like her tests, mainly because it was obvious they didn’t study enough, and half of them didn’t show up on the time, if at all. By the end of the class, 6 people had failed just because they missed so many labs, and most of the rest came very close to failing. It was their own fault they didn’t get good grades, but of course they blamed her. They were all adult age, but they acted like babies. It was very pathetic.

On the day of the final I was sitting outside the class studying, waiting for Joel to get back before I went in, and she came up and told me that she just wanted to tell me that it had been a pleasure having me in her class. I’m sure if Joel had been there she would have expressed the same thing to him, because out of all the other students, I’m pretty sure we were the only two not to either give her any grief or gossip about her with the other students.

Geography was an okay class. I took it because I had to, but I did choose it out of a bunch of other classes because I don’t think I know enough about geography. I still don’t but I know a lot more now that I did, and I plan to keep learning. You may recall THIS post, well, I still have that coloring book, and we actually only used it during the last two weeks, which is a shame since I think it really helps you learn. So I plan to just keep working on it, and I’ll just keep on learning as I color in it.

Digital Photography was my best class. besides the reports I shared from geography, that was the class that I shared the most on here from. I learned the most, and it was the class that in the long run will probably benefit me the most career-wise.
My other favorite class was Painting 1. I had a lot of fun in that class, and now that class is out I have all my paintings back, so I will start sharing them on my blog. I just need to get them set up and photographed. That will have to wait for a little while though because most of my free time will be spent getting ready for Christmas. Thanks to my Digital Photography class, I will be using my newfound knowledge of Photoshop to restore more pictures for my Grandma’s Christmas present. (See! It’s already coming in handy!) :) She knows I’m restoring them, as I had told her a few months ago that I needed to for a class for school, but she probably isn’t expecting me to get them all printed up for her for Christmas. So if I have time before Christmas I might get some of the paintings up on my blog, but otherwise it will have to wait until the holidays are over. Either way, I’ll get them up here eventually.

Next semester I am taking a graphic design class, just a basic one to brush up on the subject, since it has been about 4 years since I went to ITT Tech. That will be an online class as it wasn’t available in a classroom setting. Not sure how it will work, but I’ll find out I guess. I am also taking my LONG awaited Design 2 class, with one of my favorite teachers. I loved taking that class in my first semester. If you’ll recall that was the class where I learned how to use a sewing machine and I made a kite that wouldn’t really fly, except to swoop down and attack the person who was launching it. :p You can re-read all about it and see the pictures HERE if you’d like. :) This time Joel and I will be taking Design 2 together, as he had a different class to take during that semester and he took Design 1 the following semester. Joel and I are also taking a class called Digital Drawing, which is another graphic design class. Due to the name of the class we are hoping it will be making use of drawing tablets, (The computer kind). The other class we have together is Painting 2. No waiting over a year for the second class here. :) I loved the first class, and we had a great teacher, so I am really looking forward to this one as well.

Well, that’s all my news for now! I’d better get busy on Grandma’s pictures, only 6 days left until Christmas!