Wonder Wandering with Words

    For this project I wandered around the city of Winnipeg to find the best spots where graffiti laid. Winnipeg has a ton of awesome street art all over the place. Graffiti art and murals and other types of art styles on buildings....and even on trains! I took a lot of photos and picked the best ones to put in a little book with my poetry. I also vectorized my paintings and put them behind the text of my poetry. If you love city art photography and poems check out my pics below:

Building a Board Game Instructions Manual

    This week I got the chance to make another poster but for the 50th year Special Edition of any board game I like. This was a mock-up of course but it was a fun project!

    I love building posters. Every time I have the opportunity I research new techniques and tricks to push myself in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. I now know that if anything is pixelated, a simple surface blur that isn't very high will soften that and make it look more appealing. I am also getting more comfortable designing my own lettering and logo designs and using the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator.

I chose the classic and simple game called, "Guess Who?"  I love how it doesn't make my brain work too hard and I can actually sit back and enjoy it. There is no violence, it is all about guessing who your mystery character card is. And in this day and age you can even customize your character tabs on the gameboards to your liking. There is also a commercial version made in 2019 that has a wider range of diversity in their characters' features.

Here are a couple of pages from the 6 pages manual I made:

Digital Typography

    My teacher adores Jessica Hische's lettering designs. Yesterday I was told to design my own letters and words and to choose a book title to revamp. I chose to re-design Laini Taylor's "Daughter of Smoke and Bone" book title. 

    The book is a fantasy novel by author Laini Taylor. The narrative follows seventeen-year-old Karou through a fantastical war between angels and monsters. It is a modern, urban fantasy spanning human cultures and monster worlds. Karou, the protagonist, perfectly balances both her roles in life; one as a normal art student and the other as an errand runner for a strange creature who she sees as her father. Her family is made up of chimera monsters and they have been with her since birth. Karou begins questioning her existence and being when she meets the fierce, serious and beautiful angel, Akiva.

My original lettering design

    I made the letters and words of the book’s title more interesting. I researched glitchy font styles and was inspired to try and recreate my own version of glitchy font. The word daughter is in my all-original designed font. The colors cyan and bright magenta around the white letters are feminine yet visually exciting because they have breaks in the letters. Broken pieces seem to hover around them as well which makes the word appear as if it’s glitching. I wanted the word daughter to have a glitchy effect because Karou, in the book, is the daughter of Brimstone, a chimera and her birth in the human world is kind of a glitch. An unexpected gesture of mercy but also an act that made some beings in the chimera world angry. The word smoke was made in photoshop. I liquified and added a smoke texture to the letters. I also distorted and skewed the letters, transforming them to my desired shape. I was inspired by smoke. Smoke is fluid and very wispy. The word bones were easy to create. I chose a bold, thick font and added white lines that I sometimes attached little white balls to the ends to make them bone like.