Sticker week

Hey there all you gallery lovers it’s Jeff & Dolores and we will be breaking down last week up date. Last week was one of the more laid back weeks. Taking all the newly learned skills we focused on finishing our city sticker entries. While students work solo on their own design, each student had to reflect their design on Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago and his contributions to the city in their sticker designs for their chance at $1,000 savings bonds. Also last week DePaul University stop by for an interest and skills inventory workshop.       

Live Painting Experience

The past few days have been mainly focused on learning to color in Illustrator. Skills learned this week utilize basic skills from previous lessons including grouping, live tracing, gradients, and much more. With these basic skills, as a class, we all learned that coloring is a skill with many complexities when it comes to Illustrator. 

  

Furthermore, a project was presented to the class allowing us to take matters into our own hands concerning our personal creativity. The Chicago City Sticker contest happens every year where highschool students from all over the city can complete their own design of the new city sticker based off a theme. This year the theme is Daniel Burnham's Chicago. So far it has been alot of research accompanied by a delightful field trip to the Chicago Architectural Foundation where we were able to analyze a miniature model of the city! (pictured below) The winners of the contest can get up to a $1000 savings bond and not to mention their winning design on over 2 million vehicles in chicago starting in 2010! 

Hope everyone had a great week!

Compton & Erica

Negative Shapes

Konnichiwa (good afternoon). My name's Mattea AKA Matt and I'm your updater for today.

Since last week our graphic design class has been working on the negative spaces using shapes. Basically, using Adobe Illustrator we opened a new file and we used rulers to measure a 6x6 square. Then we dragged 2 guides from the left and above to the square. The guides were put in place every 2 inches. So we had 9 small squares within the bigger square.

After setting up the square we began using shapes. Some of the students changed the look of the shape and some just used the pen tool to disfigure the shapes.

Our goal was to have 50% black and 50% white of space within the square.

It was a fun project and I enjoyed it. I did add a little something in the project---just tweaked it a little bit, but i enjoyed my self and, um....OH YEAH!! we had to do up to 10 compositions with different patterns. Yeah and I believe that's all. Kami! I suck at this!! Here are some pics used in the project.

Focusing on the Negative Space

Hi you guys. Ricardo and Patricia here to give you your weekly update of what goes on in our graphic design class. To start off the week, we constructed view finders to help us identify the negative spaces around positive shapes. We had to draw figures around us, cut them out to focus on the negatives areas to finally figure out, they are as important that the positive areas of a picture. Negative spaces help form silhouettes of a figure. For the next day, we stared at chairs through our view finders to again identify negative space until heads began to hurt. So today after picking random objects to draw only their negative spaces on illustrator, we concluded are week with another project with the objective to now balance the negative and positive space within a picture.

A Message From Sireze & Jared

A Message from Sireze!!

Why Hello There!!!

I must say my first 2 weeks of Gallery 37 were interesting. It took me a while for me to get used to leaving my home school (Simeon) and coming to Gallery 37 because I guess you can say after being with all your friends Mon-Fri from 7:35 AM to 2:30PM for the past 3 years can really be hard (well in my opinion of course LOL =)).

The first week was pretty much an introduction to one another and what not. Then we got down to business.... Our VERY first project was to create an animal with any mechanical tool you would like to choose and I chose a woodpecker with a drill (thanks to Ricardo for giving me the idea!!!). We had to first draw the animal from scratch and then scan it to Photoshop and edit it on Illustrator and BAM! your creation is complete!!! You can take a look at it above (mine is called the PeckerDrill).

But I must say now that I’m really enjoying it here. All of this will most definitely pay off in the future. I'm looking forward to making new friends and improving my graphic design skills!!!!

Until next time my fellow readers, DUECES!!!!

Sireze

A Message From Jared

Hi everyone, Jared Bailey at your service~ I have to say starting my graphic design class this year was a great experience for me. Getting here was not a problem, all I had to do was ride the brown line from Armitage to Randolph. Meeting my new teachers and my colorful group of classmates told me that this was going to be a fun and productive year!

During the first 2 weeks here we introduced ourselves to each other, then we started our first assignment where we had to come up with an animal with man-made properties. For example, I did a turtle with instead of a shell I used a house; which is symbolic because that is technically where the turtles' home is (on his back.)

Oh yeah i almost forgot... We are using this program called Adobe Illustrator. Heh... it is not like Photoshop at all.... like seriously, it's a totally different program! xD Lol, but it's not that much different. In a nutshell Illustrator is vector based, meaning that if you were to paint a line, it will be fine and bold, unlike in Photoshop where you can see the pixels. But i know my fellow students and myself will get better with this program with our instructors guiding us. Heh i feel like i got better with the pen tool already and it's only been about 3-4 days that i was taught how to use it.

Thank you for taking the time to reading up on what I have done this week. I am happy to share my art with the world and get comments and constructive critiques. If you would like to see my art outside of Gallery 37's Graphic Design class.

Till next time, we shall meet again….

Check out what i have done above (the turtle one)~