“¡Quedados Chinchilas!”

I’m glad to have time to post now that the Spring Musical is over (see my “The Big Bad Musical” post), and this one’s special!

This poster, dubbed “¡Quedados Chinchilas!”, was inspired by a math lesson my Dad taught about population growth by using an example of a chinchilla farm. The questions in the lesson asked how many chinchillas the person would have in two years and how long would it take for there to be ten thousand chinchillas. When he got to the part about the ten thousand chinchillas, he began to explain that the chinchilla farm would actually be a chinchilla ranch and that squirrels would ride the chinchillas. Ten thousand chinchillas is a large number of chinchillas, and according to my Dad it would be apocalyptic. He told of how the chinchillas would wreak havoc over the countryside and how in their wake, a lone surrvivor and a few signs would exclaim one message: “¡CUIDADOS CHINCHILLAS!”

Of course, this called for a poster. So, while I was at Carolina Bible Camp last summer, I drew a sketch of the poster you see above. I thought Dad said “¡QUEDADOS CHINCHILLAS” instead of “¡CUIDADOS CHINCHILLAS!”, so that’s just what I wrote.

A few months later, I scanned the sketch into the computer and I had loads of fun tracing it with the pen tool and coloring everything in. The sun was the hardest part, I had to trace it into a hemicircle and then unite it with black rectangles so that I could use the expand command so that the different segments could be different colors.

After it was finished, I showed it to Dad and he loved it; quite frankly, who couldn’t crack a smile while looking at a squirrel riding a chinchilla into the sunset?

“The Big Bad Musical”

In the recent weeks, I have been rehearsing for our school’s musical “The Big Bad Musical” as Pig 3. Our drama director told us that we needed to start creating publicity for the show now and I was thrilled to have an opportunity to use my Adobe Illustrator skills to promote our musical! I decided that the best style to get people interested in the show would be to create a psychedelic wolf head made of the words “The Big Bad Musical” surrounded by information about the show; ticket prices would be put below the image in an image description since I intended to use the image to promote the show on social media.

It took several revisions to make sure that all the text that I crafted with the pen tool was readable, but the people I got to look over the image certainly liked the design. Later, I changed the dimensions of the Illustrator document I used to create a poster version of this design so that I could print it out in class.

UPDATE

In the posting of my “Fire On The Mountain” Design, I said that I would do a series of Grateful Dead designs and that more would be on the way soon. As I am currently trying to broaden my work and working on other projects, this shall no longer be the case. Even though my Grateful Dead series of designs has been cancelled, I hope that you shall enjoy much of what is yet to come on this portfolio!

“#321: Wailord”

Today, I was trying to craft a vector of a shark, yet as soon as I looked at the first half of the body, I realized that it would actually make a great body for a Wailord from Pokémon coming out of the ocean and went to town making that instead. Here’s the result and I really like it! The waves were really interesting to create because they are really just rectangles that I used the crystallize tool on to make them stylistic waters. I have a Wailord myself in Pokémon HeartGold that’s level 71, but that’s about it on what I have to say about Wailord. Hope you like the design!

“Fire On The Mountain”

The Grateful Dead’s 50th Anniversary is this year and being a huge Deadhead, I could not pass the opportunity to create many graphic designs based off of my old favorites! This poster design is based off of the Grateful Dead song “Fire On The Mountain” from one of my favorite Grateful Dead albums “Shakedown Street” from 1978. I highly recommend the entire “Shakedown Street” album for everyone, the whole album is loaded with classics, but for right now I have just embedded “Fire On The Mountain” since that is relevant to the design. More Dead-related designs are on the way soon!

“The Eye-Roller”

This surreal design is one of my personal favorite creations that I’ve made thus far! In Advanced Digital Media, we were told that we had to create an animated gif in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, using Illustrator for designing the art for the GIF and then using Photoshop to create it. I’ve animated in Photoshop before at an animation camp a few summers ago at the Contemporary Art Museum in Downtown Raleigh, so I already knew this was going to be very time consuming. Since we had a week to work on it, I decided to go with something short and sweet, yet still very creative. This “something” that I created is the animation above where rolling eyes on a face drop their pupils onto the face’s mouth so that the pupils roll off the mouth and the cycle starts all over again. Sounds pretty gruesome when you describe it on paper, but nevertheless a nice experiment in surreal art. After drawing everything in Illustrator with the shape tools and the pen tool, I spent the rest of the time I had to work on the project animating all 34 frames of the face and figuring out the frame rate until I got the animation that we have here today!

“Hamsa Shirt Design”

Note: This design was first posted on my original portfolio on Weebly on February 23, 2015

The Hamsa is an Middle Eastern symbol for peace. I used this opportunity not only to show a wide array of peace symbols, but also to put as much cool stuff as I could on a hand with an eyeball!