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Hypenotic

Woooh, just finished the first day of my work term at Hypenotic!
Best start with an encouraging note from the last intern and a coffee. I feel incredibly blessed to have this opportunity at such a great place.

Drawing People??

What's that? Drawing people with skin and clothes and everything? Shock.
Boy was I rusty. But here are some layouts with the sketches I liked best. The idea was to create some sort of relationship or narrative between the characters but I'll leave that to your imagination.
I went for a sort of dark and mysterious layout for the first one. I gotta say, the scratchy, bold, collage [somewhat Dadaist] style was a great push for me. I enjoyed getting into it immensely.
In contrast, the second layout has a light, romantic feeling. For some reason the models really liked poses with their chins tipped up so I played around with the mood of that for the second layout. Lovers from different centuries? Haha.

Best: The models we worked with were amazing! They all gave such striking, dramatic poses and were such stars about wearing uncomfortable costumes and wigs. I really enjoyed listening to fitting movie ost's while I drew. It doesn't get better than listening to POTC ost while drawing a pirate.
Worst: Having to suck up how rusty I was and just dive into it. You know, those first warm up sketches when you end up with a page full of crap and you just have to tell yourself to keep at it because in 20 minutes, better things will be landing on the page [just me?]

12x12

Hey guys,

So all the third year illustration students at Sheridan got a 12" x 12" board to do anything they wanted with. The boards will be on display together as an amalgamation of 3rd year insanity creative prowess. When deciding what to do with my board, I tried to combine several things that I care about: Scientific/medical illustration, typography, and coffee, as well as connecting people's random thoughts. Detailed explanation and final photos are coming soon. For now, here's a sneak peek of what I did:



Q: My friend walked in on me working on this and said, "I'm no longer surprised to see you drawing dead things." haha, made me laugh.

The Human Body

Warning: May contain traces of nakedness .


Here's an old piece that I just realized I never put up. You may have come across it on my portfolio site.



Best: I love the human body! Discovering new things and drawing them is always fun. Even the most mundane things like where is the gallbladder and what's the texture of the pancreas are interesting.

Worst: Figuring out origins and insertions. Henry Gray and Frank Netter were my best friends for the duration of this project.

Harvest2o

Revisiting mr. namib beetle! These are products for harvesting and filtering water based on various animal techniques/physiology.
Namib Beetle - harvesting water through fog condensation
Shark Skin - Bacteria resistant
Lotus leaf texture - Dirt resistant
Aquaporins - filters for water molecules

Lack of clean/drinkable water is slowly becoming a huge problem in the world and it's something to look into protecting. After all, we'll never not need clean water. This hypothetical system looks at natural solutions for the water shortage problem. The Harvest Hut has the dual capacity to collect water in dry climates as well as rainy seasons and is made for quick assembly and disassembly. 


 

Also check out The HydroPack at Ready Set Drop. This great innovation is being used to make a difference in majority world countries where it is really needed. Kudos HTI!

+ Here's an inspiring talk on Biomimicry by Janine Benyus, courtesy of TEDtalks:

Take Off

Here is the final product of the plane model . I figured I might as well milk that Boeing model and render it from a bunch of different angles. And then I got this great idea to work with it in 3D at the print level as well. So I did that second part just for kicks, it was fun. And this project totally made me want to fly a plane [better in my head than in reality I suspect].

[reboiled] Eggs

I recently pulled up the egg timer project from fall and tried rendering it in C4D. [It was modelled in Sketchup and rendered in Kerkythea before]. I have to say, now that I actually know C4D, I cannot believe I tried to make that thing in Sketchup. Anyway, this was pretty fun just exploring file transfers [I used Colladae because I don't have sketchup pro, although obj would probably have worked better] and seeing the difference between the quality of C4D and Kerkythea.
Results!

Flight in progress

Hello Folks,

Here's a quick update on a project I'm working on. The idea is to take a set of existing blueprints and render/paint a 3d image from them. I chose a Boeing F4B4 (P12) because flight is such a fun topic and there's something about those old, colourful, somewhat unreliable airplanes that I really enjoy. So here are some process images. Final renders sooooon!

Ahaha I accidentally left in this backwall that I just noticed, is casting a weird shadow on the bottom-right plane. It looks like there's some insanely huge monument that it's flying past.

Landscape Painting

Trying to digital paint a landscape. I have never stared so hard at rocks before. I have a new respect for concept artists! I used the Isle of Skye for reference. Such a beautiful place! I'd love to go one day.

!deas Gallery Proposal - OSC

Here's a project proposal for the !dea Gallery at the Ontario Science Centre. The project was a collaboration between Jessy Chung and I. I felt really blessed to have had such an amazing partner to work with. We kept the design aspects consistent through constant communication and that really kept the project on its feet.
The in depth explanation of different elements is in there but basically, the exhibition was designed to explain to the public, what scientific illustration is. We tied together the themes, timelines, and subject matter with DNA. We felt that this would be appropriate because scientific illustration deals with the natural world and life sciences and DNA is common to all living things. Overall, we tried to make use of the many screens in the space and address the issue of interaction with viewers of different ages.

BEST: The best part of the project was definitely having someone to hash out ideas with and build on top of existing ideas to make them better.

WORST: I can't say there was anything that I didn't love about this project except for the timeline. We had to complete it in a pretty tight time frame considering that it was a group of two. That was a little bit stressful but it definitely made it an unforgettable learning experience.

Business Cards [arrived]

They're here! They actually came within a week of the order but I was in the midst of chaos at school so I hadn't had time to post them up. So overall I am very pleased with how these turned out. 
- The material [regular, I didn't think it was a good investment at this point to go for the more expensive cardstock] is very good, sturdy and not too thin. You can read the details of their card stock here 
- The photo I took looks blurry because, unfortunately, I left my camera in Oakville so I'm stuck using my phone. However, the printing itself is actually came out very crisp. If your images are vector based, be sure to save and upload to moo as pdf's not jpegs.
- I loved that the rounded corners did not cost a ton extra. Double-sided, rounded cornered cards are upwards of $24 dollars for 50.
- I also appreciate that their paper is sourced from sustainable forests and the packaging is 100% recyclable.
- The customer service was also amazing. Moo sends updates when things have been sent to the printer and when they are being shipped.
- All in all, these came out great, and it was fast. Thumbs up all around.

Get 10% off your own cards by following this link
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Upright Piano [cutaway]

The piano is done!!! Screw you gradients, bane of my existence.

Best: Watching the parts fall into place and seeing some dimension appear as the texture and gradients were added. Also, I have to say, I am really loving those red arrows in the bottom right diagram.

Worst: Adding the texture and gradients.

Namib Beetle

Hello Mr. Namib Beetle: My first experiment on Sculptris [parts imported and assembled in C4D]. If you haven't heard of him, the Namib desert beetle has been the inspiration for many water harvesting biomimicry innovations. He sticks his bumpy bum into the air and the special hydrophilic bumps on his back causes water condensation. The droplets run down his back and into his mouth. Thus, he drinks by mooning the world. Classy.

He won't be sitting in the pristine, clean, lab environment for long haha.
Thank goodness.

Subway Safety again

Okay I upgraded the suicide poster from last year. After further research, I thought it would be more informative to provide information that would discourage people from contemplating suicide.
One thing I found really interesting is that in parts of Asia, not all the stations have suicide prevention glass but studies showed that suicide rates still decreased after some stations got the barrier glass because it "delethalized" the subway system. Something else that was pretty harrowing was reading interviews with drivers who experienced hitting a jumper and how traumatic that was for them. It seems like people underestimate their own ability to affect others sometimes.
The most annoying thing about this project was probably having to explain to people why I had notes under the heading, "suicide" in my sketchbook.

http://www.moo.com/share/xxxxg9

Do you need business cards or other print promotions?
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I just ordered a pack of classic cards and some round stickers.
I'll do an update when I get them. Woohoo!

Piano [work in progress]

B

A

Hey guys,
Winter term has been nuts but I just thought I'd give this update. I'm working on a cutaway view of a piano and lemme just say, I'm in gradient hell. Image A is with a second layer of gradients to bring out the structure of the key mechanism. Image B is with only one layer of gradients that demonstrate texture.
The second layer really makes a significant difference in terms of clarifying depth and structure.
Woohoo. Hopefully I'll finish this before I pass out. 

No promises.

Piscivore [old+new]

A reworking of an old project. You can compare the two just to see the different approaches I took. In the old version, I was basing a lot of the shapes on the swooping motions that each of the birds used in fishing. I also chose to show the full body of the birds in their water environments but stylized the water [which was an experimental approach] to draw together the organic birds with the geometric backdrop.
In the new version, I opted for a closeup view of each bird because I felt that a more detailed view of the actual fishing mechanism of each bird was more important than seeing their full body. Additionally, I went for a lighter palette so that the background did not overshadow the main content. Finally I cleaned up the sequential diagrams, turning them into vectors just for clarity's sake. There's a time to use pixels and then there's a time for clean, crisp, vectors. I actually learned a lot from making myself go through this exercise. I'm very pleased with the new version.

New

Old

Intrinsic Elements of the Hand

Some media explorations paired with hand sketches. This was exploratory on almost all fronts. I haven't tried anything like this before, aside from the first pencil sketches, so it was very fun. Backgrounds were made with tea, coffee, chalk pastel, and watercolour.

Best: Fiddling with textures digitally and physically.
Worst: Carpals. After pisiform I've got no landmarks.

+ one of our profs just shared this article. Here's a small exerpt:

"In this country, there are almost twice as many neurosurgeons as there are professional illustrators. There are eleven times as many certified mechanics. There are SEVENTY times as many people in the IT field.

So, given that they are less rare, and therefore less in demand, would it make sense to ask your mechanic to work on your car for free? Would you look him in the eye, with a straight face, and tell him that his compensation would be the ability to have his work shown to others as you drive down the street?

Would you offer a neurosurgeon the “opportunity” to add your name to his resume as payment for removing that pesky tumor? (Maybe you could offer him “a few bucks” for “materials”. What a deal!)

Would you be able to seriously even CONSIDER offering your web hosting service the chance to have people see their work, by viewing your website, as their payment for hosting you?" (retrieved from: http://positionrelative.wordpress.com/)