Where have I been?

Wow- its been over a week since I’ve last posted… and I’m sort of surprised to suddenly realize that. The days have been moving past in a blur- between work right now (with a HUGE conference coming up) and my class revving up to a speed that seems to increase exponentially each week… I’ve just been busy as heck! To be completely honest, there have been some really amazing quality times spent with my family in there too… I refuse to give that up- no matter how much else I have going on!

But since I haven’t had much time for combing the internet for interesting projects- or for working on any craft projects of my own… I thought I might share one of the design projects I’ve been working diligently on for school.

Step one of this project was to use black ink to hand-trace & embellish six different leaves (we were given four options for the tracings, and could choose any combination for our six). Three of the leaves had to be “realistic” and three had to be “whimsical & creative”. We couldn’t go outside the area of the given leaf, but inside, we could do anything we wished.

These are the six that I came up with.


The next step of the project is where we are now (due Monday!). We had to scan these six leaves into Adobe Illustrator and use them to illustrate nine design principles and concepts. They are; balance, unity & variety, emphasis & subordination, contrast, rhythm, minimal design, cluttered/random design, orderly design & playful design.

The difficulty comes in when we were told that for the first five principles I listed, we can’t use color… only black and various transparency levels (meaning grays). In the last four concepts we can use color- but each leaf can only be one color. We cannot change the size of the leaves. We cannot take the leaves apart into separate pieces. We cannot use any elements outside of the leaves.

This is more difficult then you might imagine! :)

I’ve “finished” five so far. I use the quotes because while I technically have something I could hand in for each- chances are I’m going to second-guess myself at least a few more times, change a couple small things, possibly change a couple of big things, and then panic that I maybe shouldn’t have changed anything at all… all the way up until about at hour before its due, at which point I will say “eh, what’s done is done” and finally let it go! :)