HEY

It's my birthday. :)

DEPRESSING BIRTHDAY PICTURE TIME

This is day 30 out of 100.

Noticeable Changes

I wouldn't normally post a drawing involved in my 100 Days project individually (the bottom drawing is a part of one), but check this out. The shoes on the top were drawn about two years ago. The ones on the bottom, tonight. Different shoes, but same type and taken from the same angle.

This is what formal drawing classes do:

100 in 100

As I sit with my Mac on a ramshackle hotel bed of a Red Roof Inn in Toledo, I feel it necessary to announce the start of a project of pretty decent lengthiness.

100 ARTS IN 100 DAYS

READ ALOUD AND PRESS PLAY

Yes, it's exactly what you think. From May 10th to August 18th, my goal is to produce 100 half-decent to decent original works of art. That's 100 possibilities for something small and unnecessary to include in a portfolio, 100 possibilities for a Facebook comment that will resemble "OMGZ I LUV UR ART", and 100 possibilities for something to go up on my grandma's fridge.

Also, I figure if I do 100, at least one will be good.

If you were curious, no, this is not an original idea. I credit this little project to one guy (whose blog I happened to have found on StumbleUpon), who did what I'm planning, but on a much larger, more ambitious scale. He did one creative work of art everyday for 365 days; really original, and pretty cool.

Unfortunately, it's not all that original. After a simple Google search, it turns out a shit ton of people have done the same exact thing, and are currently in the process of doing so for this year. Fortunately, that doesn't make it not cool.

So it's not the most original idea I've ever come up with (and I don't come up with many), but thorough research has confirmed that it is, in fact, cool. I won't be posting a blog for every day of the 100, but rather a final blog at the end of August with a cool scrollbox or something showing all of them. If you want day-by-day updates, check my photo album on Facebook that I'll be dedicating to the project (friend me - Blake Gifford).

I'll still be posting the other side projects (like the 24"x 36" posterboard I plan to go to town on) I do on here, so keep watching for posts!

P.S. 1038 views = awesome. Thanks everybody!

One month and ten days

...since my last post. Quite the time span, but justifiably so; this project for architecture has literally presented zero opportunities for anything design-related, let alone artistic. The design process for the structure was cool I suppose (I contributed my fingerprints), but even that was riddled with troubles and complications that any group would encounter when trying to work together (BITCHES).

However, the structure is nearly done, and construction went pretty well, aside from a few last-minute design changes that became necessary when the concrete foundation was poured off-level.

(This is where photos would go, if I took any. Regardless, it looks cool.)

The recycled metal roofing we're still using has to be added, in which case it should look like this:

SUMMER IN ONE WEEK.

I've got some cool-ish projects planned; let you in on those later.

A foreign fanbase?

Tonight, I logged into my Vimeo account for the first time since this summer. Surprisingly enough, I had one single message in my inbox. Thinking it was spam, I indifferently clicked the link to read it. Here it is:

"Hi Blake,
I am the founder of filmsdelover.com a French website dedicated to review all the rom-com and love stories in the films but we also have a section for short film about love and we included your short film, "A love story" on our website because we absolutely loved it. So thanks for that, i just wanted to tell you. We embedded the video from vimeo so I hope it is not an infringement of any copyright.

Now, i do have one question for you : What are your 3 favorite films about love stories or rom-com, films you watch with your love on a rainy afternoon ? Don't see any creepy intention here, it is just to add on the website if you don't mind on the page dedicated to your short film, for visitors to know you a little bit better.

Your page is here :
filmsdelover.com/courts-métrages-de-lover/a-love-story/

Thanks so much for your film and best of luck for your career !
Greetings from France,
Fred Renouf"

Sweet. Here's the link:

http://www.filmsdelover.com/courts-métrages-de-lover/a-love-story/

IT IS DONE

Let there be light!

Yes, it's finally done. It bends, it extends (not as well as I had hoped, but it still holds true to it's name), and damn it, it lights up.

"Well done, Blake."

- Morgan Freeman

(totally happened)

This is the exhibit:

New Rotation, New Drawings, New Teeth

This new studio rotation involves a little more hands on work: more hammer and nails, less epoxy. The idea is to integrate first-year students in construction, the "design-build" scenario, if you will.

The project is, in simple terms, a small construction project to initiate the renovation of Penn State's Sustainability Center (research on environmentally sound living and all that). The project is largely centered around the community garden, a huge garden on which members of PSU's faculty and student body can purchase 10' x 10' plots to take care of.

Our studio as a whole will be designing and constructing two sheds, a well of some sort for routing water to the gardeners, and a community center. My section got the community center. The community center's site includes an old broken-down "gazebo" structure, a makeshift path cut through woods, and two picnic tables. We separated into four groups and were to submit designs. We're about to collaborate as a group on one central design and present it to our clients (the garden owner, the Sustainability Center leader, and people from OPP), so I'm just hoping it goes well.* Why write a blog about all this?

BECAUSE I GOTS DRAWINGS:

(Just some renderings for my group's design proposal, alongside the pictures that they were based off of).

P.S. I was, this past Thursday, de-brace-ified. Retainer constantly for the next eight weeks, then probably every night while I sleep for the rest of my life. REGARDLESS: I'm beyond happy to get those little metal bastards out of my mouth.

P.P.S. I haven't finished rebuilding the lamp yet. Hooray!

*BECAUSE MY GROUP WORKS HORRIBLY TOGETHER. FUCK.

Wtf, I still have a blog?

Kidding.

To all of my (imaginary) readers out there, I apologize for the lack of posting I've been doing on here lately. Now, I could write one of those long complaint blogs about "how busy I've been" or "how hard college is", but I won't. Instead, since (for what it's worth) this is a blog centered on the visual arts, I'll just give you a visual representation of what my second semester has been:

(cliché, but this is what 18 credits of architecture major would

look like if it weren't for the nuclear fallout, mutations, and the

large amount of death and destruction*)

ANYWAYS.

I know most of you are probably busy on facebook, twitter, chatroulette, stumbeupon, or myspace (god forbid), so I'll just give you a drive-by of my work from the past month or two:

(quick side note: the main idea behind our first projects this semester was centered around Tyrone, a small economically depressed town outside of State College. We took a field trip there, and were each told to go to the local antique store and pick up an item whose form attracted us.)

I PICKED DIS ONE:

Decorative, blue acrylic grapes.

This is the "wall of inspiration". Four days, 32 drawings a piece. 16 of our object, 16 of someone else's:

(fifth column from the left is mine, the other column's out of frame)

We all also did tech drawings of our object (see if I can post those later). We then constructed a skin-and-bones model of the other person's object we drew earlier:

Additionally, in our Viscomm class (essentially a class for Adobe CS4) we worked on two photoshop projects based on the object. The first explains my idea for the project itself (the grapes as multiple real world objects), the second illustrating its history (the image of a designer at his desk, designing the grapes as a dining room centerpiece):

(Also, the third photoshop project we did was unrelated to the grapes, but more focused on Tyrone and its history, sort of "bridging the gap" between eras)

The design process then began to, based off of our object, the form model someone else made of our object, and some of our own ideas, design an industrial work lamp. We did preliminary working drawings, assembled our lamp, and then did "idealized" drawings, perfecting the lamp we had constructed. I have no drawings to post because i haven't felt like scanning them and all that, but lemme tells ya, they were good.

A week and a half of straight work in the wood shop, three trips to Lowes, an all-nighter last Sunday, and one terrible tore-me-apart crit later, I had this:

Now, my overall presentation was pretty good, an I even built a special rig for this baby to hang from. The wiring worked, the stain was exactly right, and the color of the shade was great; it would have been perfect, had every single one of my epoxy bonds not failed. Let me add: ignorant of adhesives, I bonded the whole thing with epoxy. Stuff is shit for this kind of thing.

For what appeared to be shoddy craftsmanship, my professor ripped into me like a fat kid into a cake.

It's cool though, the issues brought up by the crit have been resolved for the most part, and I explained to my prof how much work I did exactly put into this, and that all that failed in this project was the FUCKING GLUE.

Now, I'm seeing if I can rebuild this bad boy, and make a lamp I can be proud of. We'll see. I'll definitely be posting the results.

*There is still death and destruction.

Viscomm Semester Project

300 views! Thanks, to everyone who looks at this every now and then.

I finally finished my semester project (an analysis of Frank Lloyd Wright's Ward Willits House):

Five days and three finals away from New York City, Christmas, and the most epic reunion ever conceived.

Willits House

For our end-of-semester project in Viscomm, we were told to do an analysis of any building (complex enough) through four drawings of plans, elevations, sections, perspectives, etc. I'm doing the Ward Willits House by Frank Lloyd Wright (pending approval), and I did a preliminary perspective for the hell of it. And I wanted to draw tonight. A little messy, but that was kind of intentional.