Preston Hale

Dye Happy

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For this week’s blog assignment, I’d like to talk about the personal project that led me here. When reading about the way personal projects transformed Chase Jarvis’ life, I drew many connections with my own experience. During the pandemic, I was working a dead end job and had no real direction with my life. I wasn’t passionate about anything and I felt like my life was at a dead end. In order to shake myself out of that and get into something that actually interested me, I started a personal clothing brand. For the brand I make the designs, take photos of the clothing, create marketing pieces for the products, and manage the website that I sell items on. I had always had an interest in art, fashion, and photography so it was a way for me to exercise all of those muscles at the same time. It gave me something to do when I got off work, and gave me a sense of accomplishment, like I was actually creating something. This was very important for me as it brought me out of a difficult time in my life and gave me a direction. I finally felt like I had a north star to move towards. Making clothes by hand; carving stamps and printing on hand died garments, led me to learn Illustrator in order to improve my designs. After almost a year of Youtube tutorials, I made the decision that I wanted a formal education in order to take myself to the next level. The Creative Academy was one of the best schools I found and was the best match for my situation. If it wasn’t for my personal project, I wouldn’t be here writing this blog assignment. I’d probably still be working the same dead end job that I was before I started.

Photography

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Another personal project I’ve been thinking about starting is nature photography. Being in the wilderness is a big part of my life and I love taking my camera out there. Nature photography is an area I want to explore more and it’s something I would love to make more than a hobby one day. If I continue to do it regularly over the next few years, maybe I could start selling my photos to stock websites or outdoors brands. And the best part of that project is that it wouldn’t cost me anything. I’ve already invested in a decent camera so it would just require me to get out in nature more which would be a win-win for me.

It was very cool hearing from Abdul last week. I really enjoyed hearing from someone that was closer to my age than other speakers, as well as someone that seemed early in their creative career and was still figuring things out and learning a lot on the fly. I was looking at his Instagram after he spoke and noticed that we have many mutual friends so that it was cool having someone I could relate to a little more. I also saw that he had worked on music videos with a few of my favorite local artists which is really cool.

Abdul spoke a lot about how his work constantly requires him to roll with the punches and adapt to unforeseen challenges. In life, you can put a lot of effort into planning, but sometimes you need to throw those plans away in order to make things work. That can be really hard because you put so much time and energy into making that plan and you don’t want that effort to go to waste, but sometimes it is a necessary evil. This makes me think of a project I had last quarter in Illustrator class. It was a project where we had to make a graphic translation of an object of our choosing. To create the image we could only use black and white so we had to use only the shaded and highlighted values of the image. After getting the assignment brief, my plan was to build shapes using the shape tool then modifying those shapes using the shape-builder tool as well as the pathfinder tool. That was the plan. But once I began building the shapes I got too frustrated and wanted to throw my computer out the window. After taking a few breathers to get my head straight I took a completely different approach and took a crack at building shapes using the pen tool. That was much easier to build the compound shapes to fit the shadows and highlights of the truck I was translating. Once I got rolling I couldn’t stop because I was getting so into it and ended up working ’til 1:30 am without realizing it. So the lesson I took from that experience is to remain calm when you get frustrated and always try to think of alternative solutions to problems you are having. Also, don’t get hung up on doing something a certain way because once you start the task you are planning for it might not go as you thought it would. Despite the frustration and long hours, I was happy with how the project turned out.

Taking inspiration from Steve’s presentation, I decided to create this ice cream mock up using a logo I redesigned for Full Tilt last quarter. To make the mockup, I downloaded an ice cream template PSD file from Free Premium Mockups. Once inside the PSD fill I was able to paste my logo from my AI file directly into the corresponding layer in the PSD mockup file. I made sure to adjust the logo to position it correctly on the front of the carton. I then added a picture of a cloudy sunset to the background using a blending mode to add color and interest to the photo. Had fun making this mockup and packaging design is something I am interested in getting into after graduation. It was cool to hear all the techniques and programs Steve uses in his work. Seems like he has a very unique approach.

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