Student Resource Guide

Some sneak peeks at the student resource guide I designed for my Graphic Design class (Work in Progress):

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She who yearns...

... for love

... for control

... and, for acceptance

I decided to do something with more fantasy elements, but my first attempt was not short on frustration. The ideas weren't quite thought out, the location I chose was just too tiny to do any sort of landscape pictures, without having a piece of wall or a electric plug somewhere in sight. I took the same kind of composition one after another, and my friend was frustrated for not being able to produce the kind of pictures she wanted to, but having to listen to my requests on and on. In short, both my model and I were disappointed and frustrated as neither one was able to do the sort of pictures we had in mind initially. The shoot ended early in silence *sighs*... but it was a great lesson for me, as a photographer, it'd be nice if my ideas are more concrete, and it's very important to establish a comfortable environment before shooting any serious photos, otherwise, both the photographer and the model will be reading one another's thinking and become so self-conscious... At least, we tried. This is the first, and there will be many more to come. This is one area I hope to explore more. Lots of thanks to be' Huong for putting up with me for almost two hours, in a tiny white room with no windows, and a grouchy and demanding photographer. And thanks to her for pointing out that I've been making the same kind of composition over and over, to be honest, it kinda hurts, but it's the truth... I've got so much more to learn.

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Tear

bored 'n sleepy....

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menu design

Hungry yet? Haha ^^...

Yes, it's a Wedding Menu for a friend's wedding this coming Saturday :D.

It's random, very random... I have been busy, but I still wanted to post something. I was doing so fine of posting regularly, one post every 2 to 3 days, and I don't want to lose that momentum now that I had somewhat built the habit.

And my camera lens arrived!!!! I did a few testing shots, and they came out soo sooo beautifully, ways better than my kit lens (duh, haha)... the colors are rich and much more saturated, the quality of the bokeh is to die for, it's fast and takes very gorgeous shots in door with not much lightings. Woah, I'm super excited to be out and about testing this new lens in the future. Just ordered a lens hood, and when I rake in some more money, will be purchasing some filters as well :).

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Not giving up!

Ambition

Hope

Liberation

These are all photos of the birdies wind chime in my study room... decided to focus on something non-people related for once :).

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Her world...

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Back again with a new layout!

Are you guys liking the new layout? I'm loving it! The colors are harmonious, the content area spacious, the overall theme is clean, minimalistic and professional. The theme appears to have little problems so far concerning the codings. Apparently there's a newer version of this theme called "Charcoal 2" and it consists of 3 columns. I like it, but that one has so many bugs it drove me off the wall.

I realized it's been more than a month since my last post introducing the 2012 Calendar I made for my finals, but here it is again, some better views of my favorite months :), including the full cover this time. Also, the poster I showed in the previous entry got changed entirely. The basic concept/structure was there, but the execution was totally new.

Here hoping my inspiration will come back and motivates me more.

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2012 Calendar

Ah, my head is about to burst right now. I finally completed the 12th illustration for this calendar after like what... 2.5 days of wearing my butt off continuously, slaving dutifully away in front of the computer screen. Several times I just wanted to cry, seeing time slipped away and ideas not actualized. I was being ambitious by telling my professor that I wanted to do 12 individual designs for each month, something that I didn't have to, but I am very happy now because I actually finished what I said with no excuses. I did have to holed myself up in my room for several days however. When you have to do 1 illustration after another, it truly messes up your mind. When I started on the 8th illustration, it took me 6 hours or more. I got frustrated tremendously. A lesson learned... give yourself enough time when you're ambitious. If you rush, you will either hurt yourself or your ideas/designs/whatever you're working toward. I actually did have enough time for this, thank God. The actual calendar will be posted when I put all the printed files together. Oh by the way, the theme of this calendar is Illumination. Just a head up if you have a hard time figuring out what all the illustrations are about.

Click for bigger view

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Poster Design 1

I'm in the process of designing posters and video introducing the invention of the incandescent light bulb for my Graphic Design class. So far I came up with this design though I have a few more in mind that shall be simpler. I'm leaning more toward the colors in design A1, though A2 isn't too bad itself. The video is coming along nicely, but it is indeed taking a lot of time because we are required to use either or both Adobe After Effects and Premiere but I knew nothing about either program before taking this class. So yes, it was difficult learning a total new program and have to produce a video at the end. Still, it's going fine and I am having fun learning :). Will try my hardest, aja fighting!!!!

Design A1:

Design A2:

The very beginning stage:

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Food for the soul

Another old photo, recently edited :D. Not the best compositionally, though it's something new I rarely try, so...

(Click for bigger view)

Just tried out manipulating a little photo of mine. Supposedly a self-portrait as you can see. With this one I really had a hard time putting in text or typography. Perhaps, it's just meant to be purely self-portrait with no additional fancy meaningless text. I like it this way, exaggerated in a good way. Currently, my soul is feeling very unsettling and stormy, but I've learned to take things easy. With that said, the best thing I could have ever learned recently is this rediscovery of God and his love for me, as well as my role here. It's a little abstract to explain right now. Hopefully as time goes, I can follow this new calling...

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Too many scattered thoughts...

I'd like to introduce some sneak-peeks into the scheduler I was making.

Today I am posting all the illustrations I made (with photo preferences).

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Ooh la la ^^, busy busy again :)

Woah long time no post but again, I've been so busy that I almost forgot about this blog. I just finished my finals last week and already am working seasonal at a bookstore company full-time. The job is pretty demanding and I found myself so overwhelming and frustrating but I'm trying my best to finish off my work at the end of the day but I still have to rely on others to get me through... Oh well but I will elaborate later on what I'm up to at another time.

I also am keeping myself busy making hand-made gifts for friends... Too bad I can't find much time to do these like I did last year. However, I am coming up with some images for a simple calendar/scheduler :D. I'm really really proud of them ^^. Here's a few thumbnails of what I've been working on, I have more but these are just samples until I print them off and bind them together.

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My prayer

Once upon a time, I prayed to grow up fast.
Now that I'm all grown up, I wished that time would turn back.
But...
-Time- waits for no one.
So I learned to stop wishing, and start living.

My design skills are not improving at all for the past 3 years; on the other hand, they seem to be deteriorating fast!!! It's so alarming >___<; I spent a freaking 1 hour and a half to do an in-class assignment again for my Illustration class today, and the result was horrific -_-; Hic T^T, it's time to hit up on the TutsNetwork Photoshop site. Btw, the graphic above was not done for that class... the one I just did was worse than that.

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Fade away...

I sketched up and painted this quickly during my Seminars Illustration class so it's quite sloppy. It looks so different on my monitor comparing to the one in my computer lab, oh well. This is not really a good piece, but for some reason, I could totally see it as a cover for my diary, lol XD... with some Korean words to spice things up, hahah.

*yawn*... gosh I'm so sleepy but I still need to work on my sculpture -___-; been in school for more than 12 hours today, and got through three tedious studio classes. Good thing I did not sign up for Art History, otherwise, I would have gone insane with all the amount of work for Tuesdays and Thursdays. Anyways, short post. I'm going to sleep now because I have to wake up in 4 more hours -___-; Ja!

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________ Flight C ________

Series: Flight C
Date: July 8, 2009
Location: Lake 70th

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First few wedding album design spreads...

I'm currently designing a wedding album for a friend, and this is my first time so there's a lot of difficulty. These are pretty much just thumbnails for me to see the work without having to open up Photoshop and waiting for the files to load for like 2,3 minutes or more -___- (yea, the pdf file sizes are pretty big, ~600MB for each). There's still a lot to go, but I'm dreading the traditional nha` trai going to nha` ga'i ones. Gotta work hard!!! Ganbatte me, hihih ^^;

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The wind in my hair....

Lately, I haven't been doing much artworks, but I'm beginning to sketch more now. PopArt has gotten to me a lot. Anyways, I did some character designs in Photoshop a while back and came up with these two robots. They are supposedly to be based on my ex-bf and me, I called the girl version Cookie (my nickname) and the boy Windie (a play on word of my ex's name). They took me forever to finish as I did everything from scratch, and not to say I'm pretty much REALLY bad when it comes to shading or knowing my light sources, so don't be surprised to see the weird shadings -___-, I gotta learn more about it.

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