Here are a couple of the storyboards I’ve been working on in the Storyboarding class I’ve been taking this summer. It’s really exciting for me to see how they are coming along. On this project, I’m experimenting with a style completely different than anything I’ve ever done, and it feels great!

As promised, an update on the “eating raw for one week challenge”. I am the type of person who does things in a whim, without much research or thought. As an artist, this can be good. When it comes to other things (such as telling the whole world through your blog that you’re challenging yourself to eat raw for one week) it may not be so good. Eating raw lasted close to two days. We realized that it takes a considerable amount of planning (which because I do things on a whim, no planning was involved), money (the walnut tacos, even though they were scrumptious, cost us about $30 to make), and it can be uncomfortable in social situations.

The first day of our raw diet, the design team at Aptera went out to lunch. Being the only girl on the design team, the guys usually decide where we do lunch. We went to a place called Wings & Curls…a restaurant completely devoted to hot wings and fries, and I felt silly ordering a chicken caeser salad, sans the chicken.

After Dan’s comment on my “eating raw” post, and Carrie’s post “waffling:what should we eat?” and the comments that went along with it, I’m realizing there is a lot more to eating raw than just the fun of using a blender to make dinner, drinking green smoothies, and feeling like you’re feeding your body healthy foods.

Eating raw may be something we try in the future out of curiousity, but I have now realized that it’s extremely tough, that and it may not be all it’s hyped up to be.

Just this morning I became friends with WeeHouse on Facebook!  WeeHouse is a company based in the Twin Cities who build pre-fab as well as custom modular homes. They are concerned with sustainable design principles such as building small and efficiently.

In their own words, “Architecture in a box! House. Cabin. Addition. Rooftops. Developments. Multi-unit dwellings. weeHouses are study enough to withstand the extremes of desert or tundra, and they may be placed anywhere that is accessible by truck.  The weeHouse system is based on modern aesthetics, efficient use of space, and intelligent adaptation of prefab building technology.”

Very cool.

Inspired by clbeyer and Happy Foody, my husband and I are challenging ourselves to a raw diet this week! It’s something I’ve been wanting to try for a few weeks and I count myself super lucky to have a husband who is so supportive and gung-ho about my crazy ideas. Tomorrow is our first day on a raw diet and we’re trying Walnut Tacos.

I found this online and thought it gave a nice summary of what most people are saying about their raw diet.

“Going in for raw food serves as the perfect health improving remedy. A person tends to feel more energized after having consumed raw food and organic food also aids in helping you lose weight faster. Raw food gets easily absorbed in the body, thus helps in ensuring smooth bowel movements. Raw food ensures that the nutritional value of the food remains enzymatically and nutritionally intact.

Cooking food often deteriorates the nutritional value of food, by leading to a loss of vital nutrients and enzymes. Heat tends to change the very composition of fat, protein, and carbohydrates. Also the cooking tends to interfere with the bioelectrical energy, necessary for sustaining life. Eating raw food goes a long way in cleansing your bloodstream and eliminating the waste products that are responsible for the formation of toxins in the body.”

Wish us luck!  I’ll try to update throughout the week.

I’m terribly excited. Today, my website was featured on a new Design Meltdown chapter Got Wood 5.

As Patrick says, “Sometimes there is a trend, and sometimes there is a trend. Is the use of wood the new glossy style? It just might be the case. I have noticed for some time now the shift from a technical aesthetic (things like shiny sites, badges, saturated colors etc) to a more organic style (think brown and muted colors, and wood of course).

As I researched my database of sites for this article I couldn’t believe how many sites I found that used wood. There were so many I just got tired of looking to be honest. But this wasn’t until I had 40 samples to provide here. Which by my standards certainly establishes this as a solid trend.

Sure the style has been around for a long time, in fact it was one of the first articles on Design Meltdown. However, there is a massive surge of design using this style and it easily warrants a fresh collection here on Design Meltdown.”

…and I’m number 3!

Yeah!

The other day, Collis over at PSDTUTS posted a list of some of the latest, greatest, and totally awesome tutorial destinations for Photoshop addicts. He says:

“As you know, we here at PSDTUTS are absolutely and totally committed to being the best place for Photoshop junkies to click to. With that goal in mind, I try to keep an eye on all the other photoshop tutorial destinations around. Lately I’ve been coming across some really awesome sites – both old and new. This is great because it keeps us here at PSDTUTS on our toes!”

One of my immediate favorites was PS Hero. There are some great tutorials on the site for photo editing, cool ideas for the web and oh so much more.

Kudos to Collis for having the guts to promote the competition. It just makes me love PSDTUTS even more!

Today while scrubbing Fave Up, one of my favorite sites for inspiration, I stumbled upon this site. Excited because another one of my favorite sites for inspiration, Design Shack, had apparently decided to redesign, I went to check it out. A little later in the day, I went back to Design Shack, only to find the “old” version of the site appear in my browser. Thinking my browser had just cached the files, I cleared the cache. Nothing.

I headed back over to Fave Up to find the new Design Shack once again and realized after a few minutes on the “new” site that I had been fooled. Mistake? Coincidence? I think not.

Copycat? You decide.

I’ve been slurped! This morning I found that I’ve been featured on The Daily Slurp for the second time. This go around is for my great new redesign. Hooray!

This summer I chose to take a Storyboarding class to replace the required Illustration 3 (digital illustration). The first day of class, I left with a sinking feeling. It seemed as though I was the only one in the class who wasn’t a die hard science fiction addict. (To prove my point, our first assignment was to storyboard either a car chase, a zombie attack or an argument…more points were rewarded if you were able to incorporate all three into one storyboard.)

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good Star Wars movie every now and then, but that is about as deep as it goes. As luck would have it, my professor loves when students break out of the box and make assignments work for them.

This particular class is completely focused around the final project due at the end of the summer. I have chosen to storyboard a poem, and instead of using drawing or digital illustration to create my boards, I have decided to do mixed media collage.

This board is a section of the first stanza of the poem and only half of a sentence. Unfortunately, this board makes it glaringly obvious that I am hopelessly addicted to wood texture at the moment. Not to worry though, because each board features a different background.

Stay posted for more throughout the summer…

I am continually amazed (and admittedly jealous) of the work I see posted on The DieLine. The latest packaging that has caught my eye is Sivaris, a brand of rice from Spain and designed by Pepe Gimeno.

In their words, here is a description of the design objective:

“The brief for the packaging for SIVARIS was twofold: to raise products awareness and profile, and to do so with a considerable economy of means. To achieve these goals, we based the graphic design exclusively on typography and color to distinguish the different varieties of rice. The packs are made with tubes and lids already existing in the marketplace, while the graphics are laser printed on kraft paper labels which are then adhered to the tube.”

The point is that beautiful design can be achieved on a budget. This is a great design because the tube, color and typography alone say natural, simple….and wow.

Lately I’ve been interested in compiled, mixed media art. I love the idea of creating art from what has already been created; taking it apart and combining it with other designs to make something personal. I found this poem and quite a few others while doing a Google image search. The artist of this set is Austin Kleon. Beautiful.