AHHHHH!

Ok, that's a little exaggerated. My sister-in-law got this book of vintage labels that included a CD of all the images. You see, all of the labels are public domain so she let me upload the ones i wanted. They are beautiful! So i uploaded a few in hopes of doing something with them. But i don't know what to do! I'm a little overwhelmed with all of the gorgeous labels! I hope to figure something out soon. In the meantime, here's a few lovely labels to enjoy...

art deco - a personal fav...

Art Deco was a popular international art design movement from 1925 until the 1940s, affecting the decorative arts such as architecture, interior design, and industrial design, as well as the visual arts such as fashion, painting, the graphic arts, and film. At the time, this style was seen as elegant, glamorous, functional, and modern.

Its popularity peaked in Europe during the Roaring Twenties and continued strongly in the United States through the 1930s. Although many design movements have political or philosophical roots or intentions, Art Deco was purely decorative.

Art Deco experienced a decline in popularity during the late 30s and early 40s, and soon fell out of public favor. It experienced a resurgence with the popularization of graphic design in the 1980s.

The structure of Art Deco is based on mathematical geometric shapes. It was widely considered to be an eclectic form of elegant and stylish modernism, being influenced by a variety of sources. The ability to travel and excavations during this time influenced artists and designers, integrating several elements from countries not their own. Among them were the so-called "primitive" arts of Africa, as well as historical styles such as Greco-Roman Classicism, and the art of Babylon, Assyria, Ancient Egypt, and Aztec Mexico. Much of this could be attributed to the popular interest in archeology in the 1920s. Art Deco also drew on Machine Age and streamline technologies such as modern aviation, electric lighting, the radio, the ocean liner and the skyscraper for inspiration.

Art Deco was a luxurious style, and its lavishness is attributed to reaction to the forced frugality imposed by World War I. Its rich, festive character fitted it for "modern" contexts, including the Golden Gate Bridge, interiors of cinema theaters and ocean liners. The style is said to have reflected the tensions in the cultural politics of its day, with eclecticism having been one of its defining features. In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the distinctive style of Art Deco was shaped by 'all the nervous energy stored up and expended in the War'.

attention class!

This is part of my pop art report for the YWAM School of Design...

Pop Art is among the most important visual arts movements of the twentieth century. The Pop artists turned to popular culture and advertising for sources to create representational works that defied the modernist view of avant-garde and kitsch. Pop Art brought ART back to the material realities of everyday life in which ordinary people derived most of their visual pleasure from television, magazines, or comics. With the use of these mundane subject, Pop Art seemed to some observers to be frivolous and reactionary. However, it actually represents a turning point in the history of twentieth-century art.

The most famous artist from the Pop Art movement is Andy Warhol, who became famous worldwide for his work as a painter, avant-garde filmmaker, record producer, author, and public figure.

It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor as well as paintings of iconic American products such as Campbell's Soup Cans and Coca-Cola bottles. Warhol had this to say about Coca Cola: "What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."

Throughout the decade it became more clear that there had been a profound change in the culture of the art world, and that Warhol was at the center of that shift. A pivotal event was the 1964 exhibit The American Supermarket. The exhibit was one of the first mass events that directly confronted the general public with both pop art and the perennial question of what art is.

In Pop Art, the epic was replaced with the everyday and the mass-produced was awarded the same significance as the unique; the gap between "high art" and "low art" was eroding away. It was easy to understand, easy to recognize because it was iconic and accessible to the mass public. The media’s role was summarized with Warhol's famous quotation: "In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes". Television, internet, magazines and Hollywood are producing new images everyday. They are only enlarging the popular culture. Everything is just an image, and it’s ready to be consumed.

are you happy (meal) now?

This was my homework for last week, Packaging. everyone in class had to design their own kids meal box for a fake french restaurant that sells kebabs... yeah, a little strange. We each had to come up with a mascot and 3 different ideas for the box design to pitch to our "client" (our teacher for the week)...

one of the reasons that i haven't posted a blog in a while...

every week, for the Design School, we have to complete 4 pages in our design journals. The first page is an illustration of what we learned that week. The next 2 pages are for the 5 main points of the week. And the last page is reversed for a nature or characteristic of God that you learned or experienced during the week. And you just can't slap these pages together, they have to be 'designed'. Here's my first 2 weeks...

Week 1 was about God and Creation. He is the Designer of everything.

5 main points...

last page. those are the lyrics to This Is My Father's World...

Week 2. This design is loosely based on The Book of Kells :-)

Yes, that is CRAP. It stands for Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity...

the tree is (carefully) cut from a small tree leaf. i was inspired by a picture on the internet...

no school like old school...

Here's a blast from the past. Today my mom handed me this calendar that i made when i was 14. It was my Christmas present for everyone on my mom's side of the family (the Grimm's) in 1994. 1994! :-0 As you can see, it's not a "regular" calendar. It just lists everyone's birthdays and anniversaries...

here's a little bit humor. a very little bit...

most of the drawings were from a "how to draw comics" book that we owned. but i remember that i couldn't find a drawing of a turkey, so i improvised...

i remember being very proud at how the old, crappy house turned out. i don't know why...

i don't wanna grow up...

if you read my last blog, you would know that this past week, i worked as a teacher's assistant for an art class for 1st the 5th grade kids. here are just 3 of the kids with their dioramas...

a week of art and kids...

this week, it's winter break and i've been working as a teacher's assistant for the Creative Arts Workshop. (i've taking some classes with them before) 9am to 3pm with 10 kids from the 1st to 5th grade. now, i thought that i was pretty patient with kids but i've come to realize that i'm more patient with little kids, like 3 to 5 year olds - that's the age i work with on Sundays. With the little kids at church, you can do almost everything for and that's what they need. But these older kids want to do most things for themselves, but they don't think or listen and you still have to watch (some of them) almost the whole time. it's extremely tiring. But then today, after they all left, i was still cleaning up the mess that we told them to clean up and i discovered that one of the girls had been writing on the chalk board and left us a little message: "Nellie and Kelly are great. They teach good art." (Nellie is the teacher) Well, i just had to laugh! :-) I love working with kids! :-)

one thing that makes me sad about this week though is: I haven't been able to be crafty. i'm too busy helping the kids, i only get a few random moments to actually create. Today we were working on cut-outs, and here's mine...

human faces are hard...

here's my (what i would consider) first attempt at faces, and charcoal...

they're not bad until you look at the photos that i was basing them off of and you realize that they look nothing like those kids... oh well... i have to start somewhere...