Travel

Neighborhood Project

These were really rough, I spent a lot more time doing numerous digital drafts which I uploaded in the past.

A city is only as good as it's citizens, and a neighborhood is only as good as it's neighbors. As much as we try to make to make our facades look pretty, what really matters is the people living inside the walls. 

Being a Wisconsinite, I really wanted to exemplify how every morning I can expect to look outside and see something different. The collage inside the frame is made purely of photos I took out my window in the past month. They were taken in different weather conditions and are of various subjects.

RiverWest is a fantastic neighborhood. It's never quite bustling, nor is it ever quite dead. It's hard to go more than a couple blocks without seeing anyone, even in the dead of the night. It's also an extremely diverse location, consisting of people from many different walks of life. The houses are all Polish flats on my block, so I wanted to hint at the uniformity while still expressing the diversity. 

Waiting

Collagers

These are five illustrators that use collage.  They all have unique styles, and I am attracted to each one's work for different reasons. 

1. Brian Stauffer

Stauffer's work is very politically charged.  He is very good at clearly relating what his message is with very simple forms.  He tends to use many more hand drawn elements than photos or digital representations, but sometimes he will make an exception:

2. Peter Quinnell 

Quinnell focuses a lot on pop culture icons.  He likes to use stars from the 1920's to modern day as subject matter in a lot of his work.  He uses photography and digital editing a lot.  His works are rarely editorial, but usually very busy and fun to disect:

3. Brian Hubble

Hubble deals with really heavy issues like violence, inadequate schools, poverty, etc.  He uses a lot of text and photos to relay his idea.  Many of his works turn out to be quite abstracted due to the chaos of his collages:  

4. Alecia Buelow

Buelow uses a lot of digital means for her illustrations.  She combinines traditional media with found objects, text, and photographic images to create vibrant, emotionally charged works. 

 

5. Marci Roth

Roth makes very traditional-looking collages.  It's not obvious how she fabricates them, or even what era they are from.  They have a certain nostalgia to them, but it's unclear whether the artist yearns for childhood, or for the 1950's.  Regardless, Roth certainly has a signature style:

Rigid

More ideas

Thinking more about the neighborhood project while I walked to class this morning, I realized how every house on my block is a Polish flat.  This gives a real sense of commonality to the street.  Each house is different, however, in color, upkeep, front yards, etc.  So I decided to try and convey these similarities and differences all in one composition.  I think I  eventually want to add people to these sketches, to fully convey the ambiance of the area.

Just an idea.  Might not make the final cut. 

Needs some tweaking on the palate, but I wanted the colors to be vivid and diverse.

Neighborhood photos

These are some of my favorites from the neighborhood photos I took.  The rest can be viewed on my flickr. 

My Neighborhood

I live just west of the Milwaukee River off of Locust street.  My neighborhood is pretty diverse, and walking down the street you see people from all walks of life.  From families to college students to divorced middle-aged men who get drunk and play hair-band-style guitar all day (my neighbor).   The houses also reflect this diversity.  Some of them are in shambles, some are really nicely kept.   The one I live in is slowly falling apart, probably due to the fact that 4 rowdy boys live in it and our landlord is neglectful.  We all work and go to school full-time, so it's super messy, but none of us really mind.

The cool thing about my neighborhood is that I definitely feel more of a sense of community than I did living closer to campus.  Just crossing the river puts you in a totally different world.  No longer do I find myself getting harassed and having to dodge beer cans when I walk around late at night.  And while crime has tended to be an issue in River West in the past, the community has been doing a really great job of trying to prevent it in the future.  It's a thriving mix of artists and local businesses living reciprocally. There is a real sense of diversity and humanity in River West, and I feel that I can be an individual there without being frowned upon.

The Illustrated Voice

I found the reading from "The Illustrated Voice" to be quite relevant in my life.  I love poster-making, and if I had it my way, I'd do it for a career.  There is an almost unattainable goal in poster-making, and Craig Frazier describes it really well in the reading.  It's to present a reasonable amount of information by using the simplest means possible.  If a poster is too complex, people will get confused and won't be able to extract the information as well.  If it's too simple, it might not stand out to people in an image-saturated society.  This is a limbo that the designer and illustrator constantly have to deal with, but as Frazier points out, nothing is more satisfying than hanging up a poster and walking across the street to find that your design is just as powerful from far away as it is up close.  

"EXPLODE"

I wanted to capture the moment just before someone loses his or her beans.  My friend Kelly posed and I hand drew his portrait.  Later I scanned the picture and added color in Photoshop.

Neighborhood Project