The dino saga continues...

I know all of you fans out there have been waiting with bated breath for the latest installment of "Sahar making a poster of a dinosaur eating some cats." So, we were asked to make a 3D version of our poster.

Step 1. Test your crazy ideas to see if they will even work.
so I wanted to take sort of the spirit of my dinosaur collage without making it too transparent. These were my initial "sketches."







Step 2. come up with different ideas because getting a chihuahua to model for you is really hard sometimes.
So I made this crazy collage thing with pins and foam core, but something was still off.





Step 3. polish polish polish.
Time to photoshop this mofo. Look what I did with the type! I really liked the one where I blurred the crap out if it, but no one else seemed to like it that much. Oh, well.





Final!!!!

Poster Process

So in design school, the instructors who aren't terribly insufferable are always talking about the process you go through to get to something good or at least final. So I thought, why not share the process with the ten people who read this (Hi Becky!)? We have also been working on collages to make into music posters for the past few weeks.

Of all the initial collages I made, I decided to work further on was the dinosaur eating the kitties.



Then I realized that I need to add type. I decided on the band, Let's Wrestle because of their silly lyrics and their garage-y, teenage boy vibe.



I wasn't that into the type I drew and I thought that maybe it would be cool to add stuff! Yeah, adding stuff usually makes design better, right? Nope. It didn't. Though I like the idea of a dinosaur barfing or singing at kittens, unfortunately, the execution wasn't as awesome as the idea.



So...yeah, that was a failure. So, I thought about how I could play with space and the viewers expectation of what they are looking at. I also wanted to make it less sweet (I have a "problem" with being too sweet sometimes, not in life (I am a chronic scowler), but in design). This is what I ended up with. I changed the band because the tone of the poster changed from just being playful to being sort of sinister. Also the name MGMT is nice and four letters long, so much easier to make with cut paper.



I am happy with the results. What do you think?

During the time I was playing with the dinosaur posters. I decided to take one of my other posters that I liked and take the concept and go in three different directions.



What could be better than a mushroom dancing ballet? Could it be ...



A foppish dandy with an eggs benedict for a head? Or maybe....?



A piece of lasagna relaxing in a ultra-modern chair with matching ottoman? Sorry, I made these really fast and you can see that I tore one of the legs off and accidentally glued it elsewhere.




Maybe a beef patty dancing dramatically?

Collages

This week in my Graphic Design 3 class, we are making collages that will eventually become music posters.

This is the one I am going with. If you can think of a band that would work with this image please share.

Here are the other ones.

my second fave

look how sad my USB is

Sahar, I am so depressed. All you ever want me for is to link your laptop to your printer or external hard drive. You don't love me for me!

I agree with the guy who has been doing this for half a century.

I see graphic design as the organization of information that is semantically correct, syntactically consistent and pragmatically understandable.
Massimo Vignelli

Comically depressed everyday objects

Last Thursday, I was invited to my friends' Eric and Ryan's apartment to draw comics. Let me share them with you fine readers. You might notice a common thread throughout many of these: Chickens/Blobs/Horrifying Whales with Elephant Heads who hate themselves.
That poor snail!!!! By Ryan



who wants crazy taxidermy? By Amanda



A jaunty eggplant by Amanda



Eric's initial sketches.



A chicken with body issues. By Sahar



a very disturbed California Raisin by Rebecca



Art by Sahar, copy by Ryan



Raison d'etre by Rebecca



By Sahar. It was Eric's idea that the ghost would try, but fail to vomit into a bucket.



by Eric, I LOVE THIS SO MUCH. There is a SAD TEAR and a portrait of a razor blade. Could anything be more deliciously emo?



Also by Eric, I really want to get that whale thing tattooed but I promised myself I would never get a tattoo because I would get something stupid



A very lifelike portrait of Rebecca by Sahar




this made me really sad



image by Ryan, copy by Sahar



a true story by Amanda



image by Rebecca, copy by Ryan



By Ryan and his friend, Evan (I think)




by Eric. This one has a plot!

1999

I've been thinking lately about how this decade only has about six months left. For some reason, the fact that 1999 was then years ago is sort of, to use a Buffy the Vampire Slayer term, wigging me out. I was 15 then. Wow. It feels sort of good that there's a good ten years between current Sahar and 15 year old Sahar.

The summer of 1999 was when I first read The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. I remember getting into a huge fight with my step-brother for ruining my Donna's CD. I remember swimming in a pool as it was being refilled with water. I went to an art camp where I impressed this counselor who looked a lot like Aladdin by knowing about things like Dadaism. I remember my bedroom getting infested with insects because I left out this summer sausage I was supposed to sell for some fund raiser. It was all and all a pretty shitty time.

I wanted to gather and share some things that came out in 1999 that I liked a lot at the time.


Coffee and TV by Blur. I think it still holds up.



For some reason, I was really obsessed with this Gap commercial.



I was especially into the guy with the ridiculous hair (he sings, "gonna dress you up in my love, in my love"), even though he would later be responsible for this. I made my mom buy me a pair of Gap flared corduroys for Christmas that year. In our house, since we've never done anything in a normal fashion, the "from" tags at Christmas were usually a silly joke. For the cords, she put "eyebrows" and I knew immediately what was inside the package because for months all I ever talked about was how mesmerizing his eyebrows were She accidentally bought the pants ten sizes too big. Oopsie!

1999 was also the year Rushmore came out. I saw it with my dad in the River Oaks Theater in Houston. We felt special because it was filmed in Houston, even though they never mentioned it.


Youtube is being dumb and not letting me embed this. It is my all time favorite music video.

And of course, how could I end a post about being 15 in 1999 without including some Fiona Apple.