Performance animation

I know I may have shared this already with most of you, but for the sake of formality of posting stuff onto this blog, I present to you my animation final:

The Door - performance animation from Yvonne Weng on Vimeo.

The teacher asked us to try a performance installation animation, much in the spirit of artists Kathy Rose or Tabaimo, for a change from the usual animated shorts we've been making. So I decided to use a door on the wall, and play around with what kind of craziness can come out of it.

And of course, please excuse my awkward, flustery acting. Never done a performance piece before (actually, never acted in front of a crowd before), so naturally it was slightly nerve wrecking. Haha.

Lucky Number 7

This is a graphic design project from earlier this semester. We had to design a calendar - the guidelines were pretty open, we could do pretty much anything we wanted. I decided to base mine on the concept of 7 - you know, 7 days of the week, it totally fits. Researched a bunch about what in the world comes in sevens, and found out most of them were either based on spiritual themes or worldly geographical themes.

I got some good comments on the color schemes - I tried to make the colors of each month/week relevant to the theme of the month. Though, a little secret: got a lot of help in figuring out the colors from Adobe Kuler. It's a fantastic color resource.

There's even an explanation bit underneath all the weekly pages. Just in case you don't know the 7 deadly sins, or the 7 wonders of the world, etc.

If I had the resources, I would pick a fancier coil instead of a standard white plastic one, perhaps a shiny wire one. But it's okay, I'm still glad I got it bound all nice and neatly.

Colors and patterns

Just FYI, be prepared for a project dump over the next few days. I promise I'll try to keep it one project per daily post.

This here is my Graphic Design 4 final project. The aim was to explore color schemes and patterns from natural sources and compiling it all into a color guide of sorts.

Mine is a sky theme, in the format of a log documenting the atmosphere and mood of the moment in a sort of metaphoric way. Click the link below (or the swatch above) and enjoy:

http://www.yvonneweng.com/gd4color.swf

Experimental Type epic final

My final project for Experimental Type class! The project is to design an alphabet, and you can do a whole range of implementations - and as you can see, I decided to go more illustrative, inspired by fashion illustrations of fancy hairstyles. This was also my first time working with inking with a tiny brush. I'm quite pleased with this project, it was definitely fun to do. The actual printed poster size is 20x30 inches, giving it a nice grand scale on the wall.

a little life drawing

A random except from my life drawing sketchbook - drawing the figure with scribbles:

Scribbling a figure is really fun, and it just plain looks amazing. I like that loose feel.

(The male model we had that day was a body builder type of guy. It was neat.)

New Found Glory - poster

Oh man, just occurred to me that this is soon.

Made this poster a few weeks ago for Experimental Type class (taught by the Bruce and Nolan of PostTypography). We had an actual client (monozine.com), who is the promoter for all sorts of shows at Sonar and Ottobar, and everyone got assigned a band/show to make a poster for. In turn, we get a free ticket to see the show we designed for, and we've been encouraged to meet the bands and give prints of the poster as gifts.

I suppose I shall go. At least it's on a Friday night. However, I REALLY want to go see Of Montreal (which Chen got to design the poster for), at Sonar this Tuesday night. But it's a freakin Tuesday night, right in the middle of the most hectic part of my week. And I haven't bought a ticket for it yet (because I can't decide if I'm really gonna go). Oh dear...

Which reminds me, if they actually used the student designed posters, where would it be? I haven't see any of the posters my class designed, but then again, I don't hang out at bars and music venues on a regular basis.

"Documentary" animation - Barter: macbook

The assignment for this project was to make a documentary animation. And by documentary, really just anything based on something true in real life. I decided to go experimental with this: chose to animate a craigslist posting I found (it's quite hilarious, see it here), and use a medium you would usually never consider using for animation: vine charcoal. And of course, due to time constraints, I editted and cut it down shorter than the original list.

So yeah, very challenging project, and very happy I pulled it off. I was also learning how to use Final Cut while doing this, so if the editting looks a bit amateur-ish, it is.

I'm starting to realize that I like the rough loose drawing quality in my work. Maybe I'll keep at it, who knows.

process/animation sneak peak

So this is what an animation stand looks like:

The school actually has a couple of these, which is nice, except I didn't feel like using them during the past month I needed to shoot my animation project. Below is my version of an animation stand.

I'm quite proud of fashioning one up in my bedroom for the sake of convenience. Tripod, cardboard box, pegbar, and plenty of tape. And that's the mess that resulted in the process of the past month. (it was actually a bit tidier than usual at the moment of taking the picture.)

But it's okay, because I'm all done, and my room is all cleaned up! So happy now.

Stay tuned for the actual animation, coming soon! It's more experimental this time: vine charcoal was the main medium, and the project requirement was a "documentary".

Unofficial "business" cards

I whipped these up the evening before the career/internship fair, so I can have a card to give out.

I don't like calling them business cards...I like thinking of them more as online-portfolio-hand-out-cards.

Portfolio site update

In frantic preparation for the month of April, which means time to buckle down and seriously start securing summer internships as well as prepare for the MICA career fair this Friday, I did a complete overhaul of my portfolio site. Check it out - has a good collection of my graphic design works, old and new:

http://www.yvonneweng.com/portfolio.html

(Note: let me know if it doesn't work for you, I am going under the assumption that by this day and age all computers and browsers can handle flash. It may also take a moment to load for some people.)

In other news, this 18 credit semester (with 4 studios including an animation and life drawing on top of 2 GD studios) is kicking my butt. It has hit that time of year where it's crunch time in all my classes, time to think about final projects/presentations/papers. Starting to go crazy now...*sigh* Next year I'm taking it super easy and doing 12 credits...ha.

GD4 Project - Robot Fest

Latest project for Graphic Design 4: design a poster for Robot Fest, which is coming up sometime next month and it seems to be a small convention of robot-building geeks and nerds (which sounds pretty cool actually). The teacher is collaborating with the guy from Robot Fest and there's a possibility that the client will pick one of the students' designs to really use to advertise.

So here is mine - we had to make a full package of poster/postcards/flyers/shirts (poster/shirt shown below):

Honestly, I think I like my shirt the best - I'd totally wear it. Overall feedback from the class is perhaps a different color palette (black is perhaps a bit too serious/outdated). Which is cool, I'd totally redo it with some different color variations but I don't have the time or energy to, so I won't - unless the client picks my design (which I doubt would happen). Haha.

First animation project of the semester

And it's finally done!

For my Advanced 2d Animation class. Voiced by my friends (and roommates, haha) Niki and Tiffany. I'm no good at sound editing, so I know the audio isn't as good as it could've been. But I'm still very happy with what I got, so yay.

Graphic Design 3

Oh right, I am still working on slowly revealing the stuff I've done this past semester as a GD major. So of course I should show stuff from my GD3 class, which was more of a "let's confuse all the students by making this all about FLASH" class.
So here is the final project, which is a flash based site that includes all our previous projects.

Tapioca House: Nearly Forgotten Paintings in Houston

Years ago, while in high school, I've heard that Tapioca House (one of the many tapioca cafes in Houston Chinatown) would hang anyone's artwork on their walls, and I took advantage of it. So I put up a few random stuff, as you can see below. For the past few years (especially since I started college), I sorta forgot about them, and finally this winter break I decided to go check on them, perhaps take one of my paintings back.

These are a series of silly colorful fruitiness that I did for leisure years and years ago.

In a funny turn of events, I get a call last night from someone who is interested in buying the pineapple one. It was really good timing, since I'm actually in town and I was in the middle of thinking of what to do with these. So I sold it. The remaining 3 fruits are still hanging there.

And, feeling a bit nostalgic, I decided to take back my painting of japanese marble soda bottles. It was my very first try with oils, and it won an Honorable Mention in 2004 in a Houston area art competition.

As you can probably tell, it's slipping out of its frame, after hanging here neglected for the past 3-4 years.

I also noticed it's the first thing that comes up when you Google Image search "yvonne weng". Weird, haha.

From PhotoImaging

Here's a random selection of some of my better photos, most of which I did for PhotoImaging class this past semester:

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A belated happy new year to you all...I always forget that I still have this blog. It's perhaps one of the saddest sketchblogs out there I realize, after spending some time browsing through all my other MICA buddies' blogs. (It also prompted me to update my list of links to "sketchblogs that are much better than mine".)

I guess one of my 09 resolutions can be to try to post more worthy stuff. Also to draw more. I rarely draw anymore. Except that will change this spring, because I signed up for a Life Drawing class. I look forward to it. Hopefully I can finish my sketchbook soon.