Sunday, January 8, 2012

Christmas Break

I'm reaching the end of Christmas break, which has been great. I've had a lot of R&R, hung out with a lot of friends, watched a lot of How I Met Your Mother (the entire series, actually...), and been to the theater way too many times. BUT! my break hasn't gone without doing a little design work too! The great thing about it is that it wasn't really stuff I HAD to do (aside from one recent project, which I will hopefully get to tell you about in the near future). Pretty much all of what I designed this break was just for fun and for friends. If you didn't know by now, I enjoy designing things for my friends that I think would be funny/cool/whatever. Perhaps its a form of stress relief from other more serious project that I'm usually working on. With these side projects, I do them of my own accord, so there's no pressure involved. This leads me to the first image below. I have a lovely friend named Halsey who is just the sweetest person. A few years ago I drew this design you see below on a shirt for her birthday. Halsey will tell many people that her name sounds like "Hall C," because so many people say it wrong. So that is what kind of sparked the connection between that and Hi-C in my head. Skip to now, I finally decided I had the skill enough to recreate the image digitally. This version looks a heck of a lot cleaner and refined if you ask me, and I'm excited to get it printed on a new shirt for her!


 This next design is a birthday invitation for my nephew. This one was equally fun just because it was obviously very kid-centered. The theme of the party was Sesame Street. My sister-in-law came up with the main tagline (This birthday is brought to you by the letter Z and the number 4), which was off the bat a genius direction to go in. With such a popular topic like Sesame Street, I had the fortunate advantage of all the elements of the card falling naturally into place.
One of my absolute favorite types of design styles is the kind that parody's a popular icon. This is why I am in love with basically any type of Star Wars art. Some may say its not being original as a designer, which, in a sense its not (since somebody else came up with the original concept, and you are just tweaking that.... which I guess is what art and artists have done to a degree for a long time... but that can be a debate for another time since even I am on the fence about it). However, the thing I like about the style is that artists and designers are implementing their specific style to the icon, which is what makes it new and original to me every time. But, I digress...
On a side note, my wife and I got Zeke Sesame Street Chutes and Ladders, and a Spider-Man mask to go with the Spider-man Vans shoes we got him for Christmas :)


 This particular design was really fun as well, because I've been hosting Lord of the Rings marathons for a few years now (this will be the 4th, as you can see below), and every year it seems to get just a little bigger. I've moved this marathon from my parents' basement to the small theater that my church has, and each year the turnout is pretty strong. This year I decided to make an flyer for it.
I'll tell you what, I stinking LOVE hosting this thing. And its not just the theatrical versions, oh no. These are the extended versions which add at least 2 hours to the marathon. Sweet LOTR goodness! What makes this year just a bit bigger than past years is that the big wigs have finally decided to release the extended versions onto blu-ray, which I of course got my hands on. The movies on a theater screen is cool enough, but when the screen gets that big, the picture quality is important. Needless to say I was extremely excited for the blu-rays to be out well in time for the marathon.
As you can see, I added that minimalist flair that I love so much which, as I said before, naturally fell into place, seeing as LOTR is such an iconic movie.


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