Sunday, January 17, 2010

Kirstenzirngibl.com is LIVE! Check it out!




In this past 5 days or so I worked pretty hard at designing this site and getting the content together.  I had never really done an actual, functional website before, short of the rinky-dink projects in early High School.  I wanted to "do it right the first time" so that I wouldn't be tempted to go back during this semester (or a year or two from now) to develop/overhaul it again.  I originally had this super-complicated idea, and almost went with flash (which I haven't even tried yet), but I'm glad I used a more conservative layout and HTML.  I think it's faster and just easier to get to the work.  (Google likes it better anyway, and I hear art directors actually want to be able to download images so they can keep your work in a folder for future reference.)

I still need to fix some stuff in my bio and add some better titles/descriptions to the pieces, but for the most part I'm going to call it done for now, though I hope to update it with new work regularly.

Anyway, my site also represents the visual "brand" I plan to use in marketing myself.  I wanted something kind of quirky, with structural forms in an organic layout.  I wanted something that could somehow communicate versatility and detail-oriented, complexity-driven style.  I wanted to enhance that message by making it look both new/futuristic and historical (kind of steampunkish?) at the same time, hence the color, texture and choosing serif font).  I hope I at least somewhat succeeded at this.  (By the way, I just realized not so long ago that this kind of reminds me of conceptart.org.  If you thought that too, just know it wasn't intentional, and when you compare them side-by-side they look pretty different.)

(And major thanks to my dad for helping with the code.  While I did some HTML/javascript/CSS back in High School and have a basic understanding of it, it probably would've taken me a week to look up and relearn how to do what my dad hammered out in half a day!  He also had some valuable web design advice that I'm glad I listened to.)


Anyhow, I'd love to hear your comments/critiques about it.  If there's anything easily fixable that you think would be better fixed, I'm open to going back in before I start getting busy.



Finally, make sure to check out the "links" section.  I've got some well-known artists, but also some less well-known ones as well listed there, as well as some cool resources.  And also, if you know me at CCAD and have a personal site of your own, I've probably linked to you.  (And they're not in a particular order, just as they popped into my head.)

Monday, January 4, 2010

Spectrum 17's Call for Entries Poster



I first found this through Irene Gallo's Blog.


I haven't seen this many puns in one place for a long while now.  If you're a digital or traditional illustrator, I challenge you not to chuckle on at least one of these!


It also reminds me to enter a couple of things this year-- who knows what'll happen?

Saturday, January 2, 2010

EOW #130: The Water of Life at the World's End

This was done for the latest Environment of the Week.  VOTE HERE:  http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=177432


(I'm still tweaking it, too.)

I realized I hadn't really done much surreal/fantasy work.  Never really felt like I could identify with it so much, but I did really enjoy making this piece.  It was a challenge, though.  I ended up solving a couple of my problems using 3D.  For example, I initially sculpted the actual water in modo 302, then applying a water material (refraction index 1.33, just like in real water) in order to figure out the distortion of the figures underneath.  But I really backed myself into a corner compositionally.

In fact, it's got some problems what probably can't be solved unless I overall the whole thing, so it's probably a good idea to move on.  But big thanks to the awesome folks at the critique center at conceptart.org for helping me out with a myriad of issues.  Juggling a complex image is so hard to do objectively!







The 3D really makes terrible reference compared to a good photo.  Thanks to my brother for letting me take this ref of him.  I'm lucky to have him at hand while I'm home for break!