New Camera

It was my birthday yesterday, and as I'm a big bad twenty two year old, I went and bought myself a camera. Specifically, the Canon EOS 450d, aka Rebel. (I wanted it when I heard about it last year, but i'm only just now able to afford it.) Just the body kit though, as apparently the basic lens kit it comes with is rather crap. I'm no expert on the technical side of cameras, so I thought this would be a good starter SLR for me.

My first camera, a Fujifilm Finepix s5700, has and is a lovely, simple, no-nonsense SLR wannabe, perfect for the novice who thinks himself a cut above the happy snaps sort of camera - I will always have a soft spot for how easy it was to shoot with and understand (did I mention it was also so wonderfully cheap!). However, at 7.1 megapixels with a rather dinky zoom around the shutter button, it's more or less reached the ceiling of its' usefulness at this point.

I now have to buy a lens to start using my new camera - which means I'll finally be rolling up my sleeves and properly learning all the arcane and esoteric details that lie just beneath the surface of camera use - no more blissful ignorance with a built-in lens and an auto everything for me!

Murals

This is a thumbnail of the image that went to print to show to a client, pitching towards the development of a mural at the Mckellar Centre a few days ago. We were to design a mural which depicted 50 years of the Mckellar Centre in some way. I decided to theme the mural around growth, specifically in terms of its' development in terms of buildings and the people whom made it what it is. As can be seen, the mural is sectioned up in to ten year periods, with the buildings in the background roughly representing the time periods shown. in the foreground, different leaders of the institution are shown along with their name, so that a continuous stewardship is implied.

The image was, as you might expect for a pitch, made mostly with placeholders with an eye to overall composition rather than specifics, but nevertheless a couple of glaring flaws stand out to my eye: The year '79 is missing, and the colours used in the duotone are too dark to really work thematically as an uplifting piece. furthermore, in retrospect the use of stormclouds in the background was something of an oversight.

A CD Cover

We're to redesign a cd cover - the choice is up to us. The brief was to do something original and interesting - not just another jewel case - with an eye to recycling.

This design will incorporate the use of two stocks (gloss white card and brown recycled paper) and die cutting - the head will fold out, acting as a tab to pull out the cd and displaying part of the cd itself prior to opening. The small piece of paper at the neck should act as a peg to keep the head in place when it's folded back. The presentation is thus both structural and textural thanks to the interlocking stocks.

I'm still not a 100% on the text placement, but this gives a fairly good idea of what i have in mind.

OP SHOPS FTW

This was taken early in the morning, and thus I had no shoes. Try not to stare at my pasty white toes.

I got a Very Ugly Chair That Is Superbly Comfortable, and what is apparently a captains' shirt from some defunct airline. Comfy!

an ugly new font

When I had just started my course, we were told to create a font using a small number of shapes cut out of paper. Rather naff, eh?
This year, we're making a digital version of the aforementioned.

Here it is:

Blurry Eyes

It's occurred to me recently that I've not done any photoshop work for a while, so I thought that I'd do something simple and learn something new.I went through and tried out a few of the blur tools, and balanced the colour/shading so that the pupil was more prominent and the skin looked grittier.

ZYMIC is down

So apparently the nay sayers were right - zymic is pretty unreliable. Oh well.

In other news, i've been learning some flash, and doing some technical illustration.