Topic: school!

The things I do for school!

I had the fantastic opportunity to work on StoryTails, an interactive, electronic garment as part of one of my classes in SIAT called Body Interface. We wanted to see if we could create the experience of touch from a “socially acceptable” distance. So someone can stroke one of the stroke sensors on the ‘tails’ of the garment, and the wearer will feel it around their waist and neck. Tingly!

My main roles were conceptual/visual development and research, but I helped with other stuff like the programming or sewing when needed. Huge kudos to my three other team mates who worked so hard on this!

It was great to get out of my comfort zone with this project, but I still found a way to work drawing into the process. Most of the coursework at SIAT doesn’t involve drawing, unless I can find some way to make it relevant. In this project, I developed the form of the garment through iterative sketching and helped explain the piece with some illustrations.

Here are some of the sketches I made throughout the project!

I also wore/modeled the garment at various points, either to get some first hand experience with what it felt like to wear, to serve as a mannequin while others worked on it, or for photos.

An early prototype! I had way too much fun prancing around wearing these things…

Beep beep boop.

Me with team lead & all around awesome conceptual artist person, Winnie!

And lastly…

While we were taking photos, I noticed that the tripod happened to be wearing pants. … Photo op.

Posted on April 25th, 2012
Filed under: Creating, Exploring, Featuring, Learning, Living (All Posts)
Topics: art, concept art, interactive, photos, project, school, sketches, wearable

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A recent school project that I got to use my illustration skills on! The task was quite different from what I’m used to doing – I typically stick to characters and bold lines, but in this case I was designing environments and patterns and colour! So it was a great exercise. I’m super pleased with how it turned out!

For our Body Interface class, the concept for our project was that we were going to create an interactive performance system based on Dai minority dance. We had a member of our team who was trained in this style of dance, and another of our team members implemented our idea by programming it in Max MSP. I got to fill the role of artist!

The style of dance we were going to work with (truly beautiful):

Our idea was to live-capture the dancer on camera and convert their form into a silhouette that would be part of a virtual set (kind of a “living painting”). Their silhouette would show a pattern through it symbolizing that they are embodying an element of the Dai culture. Our software would also track the gestures of the dancer and change the set to match which movements they are currently doing.

I created the art for three different sets, working with the themes Fish, Peacock and Blossoms. I tried to make the art inspired by traditional Chinese art, but not try to pretend that it IS traditional Chinese art – I kind of interpreted it through my style. I tend to be wary of appropriating elements from cultures that aren’t my own because I’m afraid I’ll totally butcher it and offend someone, but my team member helped by providing reference photos and feedback and approved my images. So, great!

Here are the sets:

These are placeholder silhouettes I used to help me compose the graphics, the silhouettes in the final piece were dynamically generated from the performer. This is probably my favourite set out of the three! The orange & purple pattern is inspired by this dance costume.

For the final sets I applied paper, watercolour & pastel filters to make them look a bit less “computery”, but here is the peacock one with no filters.

It took quite a few tries for me to get the colour composition for the above set – everything kept being too light-coloured and the figures weren’t standing out from the background enough. I wanted a light blue background for the sky, but I had to darken it enough and lighten the figures enough so that they would be different enough. But it still looks “light” because of the greenish hue and in comparison to some of the darker elements on the page. TRICKERY! An overall Levels adjustment laying in Photoshop helped me bump up the contrast as well.

Here are the underlying patterns for the different sets in full:

Posted on February 14th, 2012
Filed under: Creating, Featuring, Learning, Living (All Posts)
Topics: art, dance, illustration, pattern, project, school

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Come see my work and vote for it at the SIAT Spring Showcase!

Location: SFU Surrey – it’s by Central City Mall (Surrey, British Columbia, Canada)

Date & Time: Saturday, January 28th, 2012, 12:00-5:00pm

Facebook Event

I’ve got two projects in the show: my infinite-canvas multilinear comic FLOCK, and an animated short that I made with my team called AWAKENING (I did the human characters).

I won’t be able to attend myself (arg!) because I’ll be at the Vancouver Global Game Jam that weekend, illustrating up a storm, and I can’t be two places at once unfortunately (but if I could be in two places at once, this is where I’d be). Still, go take a look at the quality media/design/interactive projects from my classmates and say hello to my lovely assistant who will be monitoring my comic project!

( And vote for me! ;D )

Posted on January 26th, 2012
Filed under: Creating, Featuring, Living (All Posts)
Topics: animation, art, comics, event, school, show

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Some of the graphics I made for my team’s animated short! Most teams didn’t even bother with making interesting titles or credits, but I thought it would really add to the overall package in terms of professionalism and graphics are more my thing anyway so I volunteered!

The main character hermit crab’s name was Kerp. The title logo and our team logo were placed over a montage of the scenery. The movie is basically about Kerp giving away a whole bunch of items that he has collected on his shell, and getting the girl once his true self isn’t all covered up. Apparently, ladies dig minimalists. Bling is not the answer!

I made our team logo a parody of the MGM lion. ;) An epic whale sound plays when this goes up. I kept the style fairly minimal since these graphics were just a nice extra.

For the credits, I created three illustrations of some of the characters in the film showing ‘what happens after’, inspired by Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks credits. They were a big hit!

(Heeheehee, my sea slug!) During the film, Kerp gave these items to these characters. I originally thought of drawing the turtle trying to play chess with the sea slug, but they wouldn’t have had enough pieces so it didn’t really make sense.

For the drawings, I tried to show a bit of character development in them rather than just drawing the characters standing plainly. The ones with the crabs are probably the most successful in that.

Posted on August 13th, 2011
Filed under: Creating, Featuring, Living (All Posts)
Topics: animals, animation, drawing, graphic design, illustration, school

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On Monday, the magazine photo & graphic design project I was working on all week was due for our class critique.

I got to school a few hours early to print out my pages, but my photos came out REALLY DARK. You could barely see anything in them, which meant that the structure of the entire page pretty much vanished – you couldn’t make out that the rest of the elements on the page were in alignment with key points in the photos. (Many others had the same problem. Bonus lesson learned: things come out darker in print. Err on the side of being too light. Always test on the actual printer you’re using.)

I still had a couple of hours before our critique began and I had to appear in the room, so I decided to try and lighten the photos in our school’s computer lab and then reprint. I was unsure about how it would go because I hadn’t brought the original photo files, so I was counting on being able to extract the pictures from my Adobe Illustrator file.

However, I started having problems from the beginning – I couldn’t open my pdf OR the original illustrator file without all of the text on my pages being messed up, because the computer didn’t have the fonts. Something was blocking me from installing the fonts on the PC, and while I was able to install them on the Mac, it still wasn’t reading them, so when I opened the files my carefully sculpted text just went BLAH.

After bashing my head on it for about 40 minutes I resigned myself to just handing in my prints the way they were and possibly failing the assignment. I reminded myself that, really, it doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. Even if I failed the WHOLE COURSE, I don’t think it would affect my life all that much.

I just needed to remember that there is no need to worry. There’s no point in wallowing in negative emotions. What will happen will happen. Let it go.

And then I figured out the solution.

I tried opening the pdf in Photoshop and it miraculously converted all of my paragraphs to pixels and they were perfect. And I could edit the images without having to take them out, adjust, and plunk them back into the pages. I was done within about 5 minutes.

It turned out to be a BETTER way to do it than what I was even attempting to do before!

The more you try to pound at one specific outcome, the more things will push against you. Just let it go and the solution will appear! The trick is to not become attached to a specific way of how things MUST happen.

Oh, and my instructor said that my photos may have been the most beautiful ones of the entire day (out of about 60 projects that he had seen so far). And two teams asked me to join them afterwards. HOORAY. I hope things will continue to flow with this class.

Posted on January 26th, 2011
Filed under: Creating, Featuring, Learning, Living (All Posts)
Topics: graphic design, lesson learned, letting go, school

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