Primavera

Spring is here and it's college fair week at the college, with packs of high school students cruising for the best department. Every department competing for the student’s attention with mugs, tee shirts, pens, pencils, note pads, bags and promises of exciting career oportunities…

Graphic Design got a late start but finished strong; the "give always" showed up from the printers 15 minutes before the first group of students hit our booth. All the tee shirts are medium to extra large (all of the girls are tiny to medium small), one of the boxes of mugs was minus graphic, and the brochure arrived as the second group stormed the booth. Faculty was folding on the fly. The students loved all of it, milled around excitedly looking at the student work, snapping up all the gifts, they don’t know what a zoo the whole thing was. All in all, a typical convention style episode.

I spent most of the day hiding at the administrative assistants desk folding brochures. She had been the person in charge of dealing with the printer, who turned the whole job (4-color brochure, embroidered polo’s, printed tees, note pads, highlighters, mugs and 6 foot banners) in 4 days. She was also the person pulling her hair out at 9 am when there was nothing in our booth but smiling faculty. I was allowed to keep my distance because my part of this job was to flip the logo design, brochure content and layout, and the graphic files for all of the “stuff” with 2 weeks lead-time. Ouch. Just like the real world.

My Illustration for Illustration Friday is a digitized version of Sandro Filipepi’s (Botticelli) Primavera, 1500 something. I gave an assignment to my Foundations of Color class to grid out a painting from the color contrast plates in “The Art of Color” by Johannes Itten, isolate the dominate color in each grid square and repaint the painting square by square, losing most of the detail and retaining the color composition. And they asked for an example.

So in the midst of the college fair excitement, I decided to cheat and happily destroyed a masterwork in Illustrator and Photoshop for several hours last night and finished up this afternoon for class tomorrow. The image I’m posting here is massively deconstructed and is not the one I’ll be showing in class. Theirs is posted below.


Cheers, kate.