I find it interesting how we were taught to associated colors with emotions right away as little kids. Eeyore is always sad, that’s why he’s blue. Big Bird and Winnie the Pooh are mellow yellow. Elmo and Tigger are red, orange, and always excited!

Apart from coloring my emotions, I like matching colors with each other–another designing essential! One of my guilty pleasures is color palettes. I could lose track of time sorting through color palettes and committing my favorite ones to memory.

ColorBurn by Firewheel Designs

The ColorBurn widget features a new color palette every day, along with its hexadecimal vales for all you web geeks out there. If you’re looking for some daily inspiration, some colors to steal, or simply another cool-looking widget to fill up your dashboard and impress your friends, here you go.

Each daily palette features four colors, with the option to change your background from black to white and back again. Previous palettes are saved for one week.

Available for Windows and Mac! Click here to check out the site.

I like how deviantART asks you to state in your profile what kind of artist you are– and there are so many different kinds! I could’ve fit in so many categories, but for the current purposes of the account, I chose Artist: Photo Manipulator.

I opened my account over a month ago now, and so far, I have submitted one piece. This will be remedied immediately upon completion of my time here at BCIT.

Fan Art

I am a firm believer in fan art. Aside from fan-fiction, I believe that fan art is just another way for true fans to express their fandom. In a way, it unites the fan community– not to mention many fan-artists are also commissioned to do pieces for fan-fiction authors to complement their stories.

I only got into fan-art recently, being inspired by my cousin Adriel. His fanatic love for Emma Watson made me want to create a few pieces for him as a present. This got me hooked onto fan art in general.

Twilight

Around the same time (late last year), I started reading the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. This sparked a fresh wave of fandom across the internet, and it was only a matter of time before it hit me. I started two pieces featuring the two main characters, Bella and Edward. These two pieces made my final BCIT portfolio, but they are far from finished.

I was going to make a few others featuring other characters in the book, but I wanted to wait until they were actually cast for the movie so that I could use the real actors photos in my pieces. Again, these will have to wait until after finals here at BCIT.

Party People – Nelly featuring Fergie

My latest piece is one I am quite proud of actually. This is one that I neglected my homework for. I needed to make time for this one because I just couldn’t get the idea out of my head until I completed it. I really liked how it turned out–it’s very close to how I envisioned it. This was inspired by the song of the same name. It was released less than a week ago and I can’t stop listening to it!

Click here to view it at deviantART. 

School Hunting

I was sure that I still wanted to be exposed to audio production or post-production, so I made sure that any program I took had some sort of rich media component to it. There were many to choose from, but the only one that I could agree on with my parents was the New Media Design program at BCIT.

It encompassed a little bit of everything, which is what made my parents most content with my decision. Because for one year, I could be exposed to things other than just recording arts (and hopefully change my mind about my career decision).

I am not a coder!

The majority of the program that I am nearing to complete was web development. HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, Flash, etc. It was a really hard time for me during these classes. These were the times when I wondered what I was doing at BCIT. It was the color theory and graphic communications classes that I loved. And also as much as I enjoyed my rich media courses, I realized that I enjoyed color, layout, and type even more.

Design lives in me.

I really opened my mind to design this year. Much of the things I learned in our design and color classes are things that I’ve been living and applying to all my work subconsciously. I’ve taken to it so well, and a lot of it is just gut feeling… intuition. I just know that blue complements orange. It feels right.

I spend most of my spare time in Photoshop. I am so overwhelmed sometimes with all the visions and new ideas I have for projects, and saddened at the same time because I don’t have the time right now to realize every single one of them. Once this program is over, I am going to make some time for that. I feel like it would be a shame if i didn’t get a chance to share the colors and images I dream of with the world.

Wrapping It Up 

I am in the process of retaking my Illustrator course, as I failed it the first time. I am kinda of glad that I am taking it again. If I had gotten a pity pass, I still wouldn’t know how to operate Illustrator to this day. In way, taking it again is going to force me to learn it for real.

I am going to take this summer off, and in the fall, I’m off to pursue a degree in Graphic Design for Marketing and Advertising for the next four years at Kwantlen University.

Design is always a part of my everyday–from the clothes I wear, to the layout of my room. Making it a part of my career is a way of cementing it in my life, and also a way I get to share what I envision with everybody around me.

I would seem fitting to close this post by saying the designing is my life, but I’d be lying if i said that. Music is still my first love!

How I got here, what I’ve done, and where I’m going is a story I love to tell. Let’s start with the question we’ve all had to answer at least once…

What do you wanna be when you grow up?

Okay, I know it will sound cliche if I say I’ve always known that I wanna be an artist. It’s a bit like hearing supermodels say that modeling was their dream since they were three. (Do three-year-olds even know what models are?) But I knew there had to be some use somewhere in the world for my love for matching colors, and making things fit together.

Until Grade 6, I told everyone I wanted to be a doctor, just to have an answer. No one likes it when you say, “I don’t know yet.” That couldn’t have been farther from the truth– I’ve spent way too much of my life in hospitals.

It was in high school when I realized the possibilities.Through to Grade 7, archaeologist was my default answer. The next year, I joined the newspaper committee and realized how much I actually really liked writing. Aside from articles, I wrote a few short novels for English class and decided I wanted to be a freelance journalist.

Summer’s Music

It was around this time that American Idol aired it’s first season. Because I liked singing so much, I was very interested in this show, and I watched it through all the way to the end. I followed up with all the finalists’ career efforts after the show and fell in love with music on the way.

Somewhere during these few months, it occurred to me that my dream of singing professionally could only be a dream, but it was still entirely possible that I could be a part of the music creation process behind the scenes — recording engineering and audio post-production.

A World of Sound

For the next three years–through to graduation, I was bent on becoming a recording engineer. I learned all I could about the music business and popular recording studios around the world. My church’s praise band started recording a few things and I got involved with that.

My entire senior year consisted of searching for post-secondary schools that offered programs that included recording arts or sound design. The one that appealed to me the most was the Art Institute of Vancouver, and after an info session and touring the school, it was suggested to me that I try SWEAT.

SWEAT 2006

Student Work Experience and Training (SWEAT) is a program that the Art Institute of Vancouver holds every year during spring break. It is a 5-day, 30 hour program that allows students who are interested in attending the Art Institute to “test-drive” their program of choice for a whole week.

Its a good mix of hands-on working experience, instructional time, and training, so it also fulfills the Grade 12 graduation requirement of 30 hours volunteer experience–another incentive to get involved with SWEAT.

Needless to say, that week was one of the best things I have ever experienced. All our classes took place inside Studio M, which was a classroom that was set up like a theatre with an adjoining recording studio. We completed audio post-production for a 3 minute animation, and composed, arranged, and recorded 2 songs during my group’s 5 days there.

As soon as the program ended, I applied at for the October intake right away.