Month: January 2023

I have 2 personal projects of mine that I would love to do at some point. One of them is to build a tiny house with environmentally friendly materials (not sure where) and or renovate a cottage in Ireland (where I’m born) and turn it into a part-time Airbnb or some sort of vacation home.

They are relatively similar projects so maybe I’ll talk about both of them. For the tiny house project, I actually made a plan from A to Z pretty much in my sophomore year of high school. working on either of these personal projects would allow me to gain so much knowledge on a variety of things. Examples would be plumbing, electricity, woodworking, roofing, tiling, insulation, and the list goes on. Luckily I have some sort of knowledge or at least am familiar with how I would go about some of these things I listed like insolation and tiling.

Figuring out the timeline of both of these projects is pretty much impossible at the moment because there are so many factors that could affect the timeline. If I had to make an ideal guess it would be take about a year or so to build/renovate either.

There are hundreds of things that I would need to know before starting either project. A couple of examples of that would be the materials, know which companies to ask to do some of the work for me, and the cost of everything.

Speaking of the cost. For my tiny house project, I did calculate the cost of every material that I would use if I were to actually go forward with this project. I found the document where I calculated the cost in my Google drive and found that tit would only cost me about $5,500 in materials to build it. I don’t think that included things like setting up the electricity and plumbing but that’s pretty cheap if I do say for myself. By the way, the house is 500 square feet.

Either way, I would love the have the means and the opportunity to do one of them one day. Not everyone gets to say they built a tiny house before 😉

I actually couldn’t think of any project where I was planning one direction and then something happened where I had to change things until recently. It’s not even anything crazy but for Jason’s first project, we had to only use letters to create an animal of our choosing. For example, I choose a narwhal so I had to use those letters to create a narwhal in any style of my choosing. Before we started the project he showed us a few examples from past students for some inspiration/ guidance. I loved the more realistic ones and they were definitely impressive so that’s what I had in mind before going into illustrator. However, when I started creating all the pattern brushes and “painting” with them it was not as easy as it seemed. So I tried using my iPad so I could use the pen to make things easier but the Illustrator app didn’t have a feature where I could create a pattern brush. In the end, I just used my computer and worked with what I got. I tried to create layers and shades of grey to try and achieve that realism but it didn’t look right to me. I was getting frustrated with myself because when I can’t get something right the first time or fast enough I just want to give up but I couldn’t do that obviously. So I continued until I ended up with a more cartoony style. There are different types of cartoon art so I leaned into the children’s book style. That can differ too but since I have illustrated a children’s book before I kind of kept that similar style. So in the beginning I wanted to be impressive and do more of a realistic approach but then realized that where my narwhal was going was in a completely different direction but it turned out well. Happy accident I guess 🙂

This week we had a food photographer come and show/ explain what he does. I was definitely hungry after that 🙂 Anyway this weeks assignment we have to take/create our own food photography or animation, etc. I like to think I am okay at photography but I’ve never taken pictures of food before.

First, I went to my kitchen to find something I could take pictures of or something people aren’t familiar with that I could make look tasty. I chose something called “nonnettes” its a French dessert that is commonly eaten in France. (I’m French btw) It is made up of something called “pain d’epice” which translates to spice bread. It tastes similar to ginger bread but better. Inside is a jelly like consistency and flavor. There are many flavor that you can get including raspberry, blueberry, pear, caramel etc.

Anyway here are the pictures I tried to take of the food. (I think I might have to focus issue with my camera)

Also having issues uploading images on here so I created a google slide with my image.

Link: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1p0hbC1ySYwtHdQBbh2tc0BQjrVCqeT-_YOMn4A9rIU8/edit#slide=id.g1d497a022b8_0_0