Wrapping up our conserving water ideas and such + hero time!

After all of last week's craziness in getting our sip of what it feels like to design posters for a cause, (in this case the drought problem we're having right now in California), I'm finally back to show you guys the work that we've done in GDII.

We were asked to make a poster design on ways that we could save every drop of water and for that we researched ways that we could save water, brainstormed ways to catch people's attention to the matter and even created posters for it!

Mine's down below!

There were so many things to do for this project, but to start it off I chose to create a superhero to defend those who need water the most! It took me forever to actually come up with a design and color palette and to stick with it, but I feel super relieved on how it all came together!

This week on GDII: Conserving and saving water...why?

Why it's cause for concern in communities?

• With all the climate changes happening right now, the water reservoirs will be experiencing a shrinkage all over, including Sierra Nevada.
• More and more people are expected to mover over to California by 2050, which means an even SMALLER amount of water for each and every person.
• There is a big problem happening with the systems used with delivering water, mainly with being too outdated or changed by the environment.

A few things we can do:

• First of all, RAISE AWARENESS to the issue happening to us. It is very important to get everyone together to try and find ways to save water.
• Then we can all do our parts in taking care of our homes safely by changing to a water conscious community.
• And most of all, speak to the ones in charge of the government to encourage everyone to save water!

For family households?

• The average family of 4 wastes 881 gallons of water per week just by flushing the toilet.
• 10% of homes that have leaks waste about 90 gallons of water or more per day.

A few MORE things we can do:

• Water your lawn only when you need it.
• The most common, turn off the faucet when washing your hair or teeth. You could save 5 gallons!
• Try to reuse the water that falls from the sinks, shower, and lawn for other things!

But...teens?

A lot of people think that teenagers wouldn't care for any of these things, that with all the schoolwork and stress we deal with on a daily basis, we don't even consider water being on our top priority.

There are lots of things that we worry about, but thing that we DO see is how badly our community has been affected because of these shortages of water.

We're no strangers to seeing our parents' bills and can see how the water one keeps going up, and up, and up.

Everywhere around us we can see that because of the drought we're having here in California, things are changing; plants are wilting and dying, people and animals hardly want to be oueven water in ponds at parks are being used to supply people's needs for water.

We've been limited in the ways we can use water, and unless it rains as much as it did during the Great Flood, we're going to have to find ways to use our water wisely.

Hopefully we all just realize that.


Sources:

• http://www.saveourh2o.org/content/conservation-why-and-how
• http://www.charlottesville.org/index.aspx?page=1681
• http://www.sscwd.org/tips.html
• http://www.epa.gov/WaterSense/pubs/fixleak.html
• http://savethewater.org/water-facts/

LOOK HERE TOO!
 (just a little extra thing but it's so so so so cool! I want to get Adobe Muse so badly, its not even funny ;3;)

This week on GD: Pictograph - Making a Cupcake!

Hello there, long time no type! 

This year's been all sorts of crazy but its getting better, and hey, we're doing a lot of cool things in the second year of Graphic Design.

Last week we pushed it to the limit in creating 12 little icons for our pictograph project!

Pictographs are just simple little icons used to represent things (ex. olympic sports), and for this project we had to choose a simple theme and 3 simple colors that'd go along with the theme.

The theme I used to create my pictograph centered on baking a pink chocolate cupcake, and all of the steps it'd take to create it.

One of the biggest inspirations I had in making these were from the handle of one of my best friends, Brissia. Since she's gone to college this year, it's been tough to keep in touch with her, but I really do think about her a lot. (We live a bit close to each other, she's just a state away in Arizona after all!)

She really loves sweets and the color pink so I decided to combine both things and make this about her, just for the fun of it. And boy, did I have fun.

There were a lot of nice choices for this project, but these three up here are by far the best in the rest.

The first one was so much fun to do! I experimented with the swirls inside of the piping bag, and chose the colors for the sprinkles, it was a dream.

The second one was a bit more on the complex side, the angles were a bit of a struggle to make but I managed to make all the outline on the inside of the pan without going too crazy.

The third one was really nice too, I found out how to make the lines noticeable, but not so much as to take away from the whisk.

Next comes the concept art.

With all ideas comes a very, very, very long process in coming up with pictures and then building upon it.

In the beginning, I had a hard time choosing what kind of pictures to use in it. 

At first I had an idea of using only food supplies, but then it changed to the utensils used to make the food, and finally I decided to just go ahead and combine the two. I ended up drawing them into my sketchbook and later scanned them onto my Mac and it pretty much went on from there.

From finding the right color scheme to doodling some chickens to keep me going, this took a lot of thinking. And I'm happy to say that it actually came out better than I expected.

The refined version of my pictograph series took a while, but it's finished down here! I played with my three colors and designed a nice little oven to go along with it, the inspiration for it being the ones above in my concept art.

I am really happy with how the final product turned out!

It's simple to understand, stays in the 3 color scheme and has a really cute cupcake for the cherry on top.

Let's see what we make this week!

Until then, stay sweet!

First post of GDII: Toon characters! (A.K.A Introducing Burry!)

Hey everybody! 

To start off this blog, I'd like to say that the second year of Graphic Design's been even more fast paced and crazy than last year, and this project is by far the coolest!

We made some really cool character designs, and mine was the ever sweet, Burry. After that, we presented them to the class and worked on bringing them to life. We even made stickers, (like the ones below), which was really, really rad. * w *

At first, I didn't really know where I was going with the idea, I wanted to find a way to create someone based on something sweet, and since it's been unbelievably hot over here, ice cream seemed like the perfect choice. 

I looked at all sorts of ice cream shapes and flavors but I ended up choosing a simple Popsicle with my three favourite flavors: chocolate, vanilla and strawberry!!! 

I went a little overboard on the first few sketches, I was super excited to draw Burry, and with the recent reboot of Sailor Moon Crystal (best childhood memory hands down!!!) I couldn't wait to make her some frilly skirts, with melting abilities!

Down here you'll see some of the concept art beforehand.

But yes, this project was tiring at times, but it really played off in helping me feeling proud about my work and it gave me a whole other level of appreciation to those concept artist who work so hard to bring us amazing characters in right to the big screen and our living room!That's all for now! Adieu~

♡+:｡.｡❣ That's all for now! Adieu~  ❣ .｡｡:+♡