Stuff that I did

Seeing as how I'm feeling pretty sick today and have had to miss class because of it, I figure I might as well post some of what I've been up to in my classes this term.  Although I really like to complain about how busy life is this spring, things could definitely be worse--after all, everything I'm doing is at least mildly interesting to me.  Some of my classes even had me entertaining the idea of switching to graphic design, though I very quickly came to my senses.  At least part of my typography class has been interesting--I have to admit that I'm not very into our main project of redesigning a magazine, but our other project is to redesign the deseret alphabet, and that's actually been pretty fun. 

For those who don't know, the deseret alphabet is a phonetic alphabet that the Mormon church used for awhile once they came to Utah, but before they became a state (apparently it used to be all the rage to come up with new phonetic alphabets, since spelling was so un-standardized back then).  They used to publish their newspaper with it, and there were even some tombstones down in Cedar City written in the deseret alphabet, though I guess the families removed them and replaced them with modern, English ones (lame).  The problem is, the deseret alphabet was really, really ugly.  Some of the letters were so dissimilar that they don't even look like part of the same alphabet.  So our job was to redesign the letters of our name in a modern typeface, preferrably one without too many thick and thin lines because those would be really hard for us to design.  We were also supposed to make upper and lowercase letters, since another shortcoming of the deseret alphabet was that it only had uppercase, SO IT PROBABLY LOOKED LIKE PEOPLE WERE SHOUTING ALL THE TIME.

This is what I came up with, though blogger seems to have stretched it funny.  My name is written down at the bottom.  Like I said, lots of fun.

I'm also in a painting class.  We've been doing a lot of work in this class (probably more in the last few weeks than I did in a whole semester of my non-major painting class I took a couple years ago).  Our first assignment was to paint a bunch of squares in the style of Paul Klee using as many colors as possible.  My teacher said mine was "beautiful", so that's good, I guess.

Our most recent assignment that we turned in was to do a grisaille still-life.  I chose my Kitchenaid mixer that my grandma gave me for our wedding (by the way, thanks Grandma!  I hope Mongolia is a little bit warmer these days!).

Maybe I should learn to use the school's really big scanner--then maybe I wouldn't always be so disappointed in my image quality.  Oh well.

In graphic design we've been designing a logo for Ugmo, a company that makes underground monitoring systems for lawns that monitors water content and hooks up to the sprinkler system so that the sprinklers only go off when the lawn actually needs water.  Kind of a cool concept.  This is my most recent design for that:

Yeah, that stretched funny, too.  Imagine that they're actually circles.

Finally, I'm in a digital illustration class.  Our first assignment was to make an illustration based on a fortune from a fortune cookie.  Mine was "buy someone a thoughtful gift of love."  This is what I came up with:

Man, this stretched funny too!  Maybe blogger just hates computer art.  I didn't really like how this one turned out anyway, but I did learn a lot about using Illustrator.  Oh, and pretend that I actually finished it.  Anyway, our next assignment (the one due today, that I'll probably have to drag myself out to turn in) was to make the front page for an Independent Study course on speed reading.

For this I kind of went with the idea of a pop-up book.  Interesting that this one didn't stretch funny.  Maybe blogger just hates Adobe Illustrator?  Oh well.

This is pretty much what my semester's been like so far.  I have major projects coming up in basically all my classes, so we'll see how much blogging I get done between now and June 17th--maybe not a lot.  I'll try to post something every now and then, though.

Oh, and this is a side note--has anybody heard of Vienna Teng???  Because she's my favorite singer/songwriter ever, probably, but nobody's ever heard of her!  If you have time, look up Blue Caravan (one of my favorite songs), Shasta (Chris's favorite song that she sings), and Gravity (everyone else's favorite song).  Anna Rose and Lullaby for a Stormy Night are both lullabies, but they're both really good, too.  I also love My Medea, The Tower, Antebellum... well, a lot, really.  Look her up.