For the Love of Contests

One of my goals for this year is to participate in a contest each month. Contests are a wonderful way to give yourself a deadline, and push your limits to learn something new. Now that I am out of school, and  somewhere in between free-lance designer and employee for my parents' business, I find that I need to push myself more than I did when I was in school.

For the month of January, I failed miserably. I had intended to design a fabric for one of Spoonflower.com's weekly contests. If you have never had the opportunity to check out Spoonflower, I highly recommend doing so. They are a fantastic website that gives you the opportunity to design your own fabric and actually get it printed! There is also a wide range of beautiful designs available to chose from that other artists have already uploaded. My favorite part is the contests though, and at some point this year, I will enter one!

Because of my failure at making it into any contests for the month of January, I decided that I would just have to enter two contests in February. To my surprise, there is a wide range of contests on DeviantArt.com. I found two different fashion illustration contest groups to join, and designed something for each one. 

This dress was for the "Greek Mythology" theme for the "Fashion Illustrators" group.
My dress design is based on Heracles fighting the Hydra. If you want more of a description, go check it out on my Deviant Art account.

This dress design was for the "Ugly by Design" contest in the group "Catwalk Challenge" on DeviantArt.
There were several ugly patterns given for this contest, and the challenge was to use at least two in one design.  This was what came of my design, which I had to do all of the rendering on Photoshop to keep the patterns.

Back in January, I did some surfing on the web to see if I could find some design contests that required sewing and fashion shows and the like. I found a really cool one involving the "International Talent Support", which is located in Italy and has design labels that come to watch the show! I had to create a collection of 5 to 8 looks with a specific inspiration.

I have been quite obsessed with Ancient Egyptian Mythology lately, and after purchasing a book about it on my birthday, I found plenty of interesting topics to inspire a collection. I chose "the Book of Gates," which is a work that describes the passage of Ra (the sun god) through the Tuat (the Underworld). There are 12 divisions of the underworld, each with a gate and large serpent guarding it. Each of these serpents have a name, and in order for the deceased person to get to Amenti (sort of a heaven), they must have the names of the snakes to get through the gates. For Ra, he has to pass through all of the divisions to get through the other end. The 12 divisions represent the 12 hours of night, so when Ra emerges at the end, it is morning.

I designed a menswear collection inspired by the different divisions of the Tuat.

My collection for the ITS Fashion Show.

I mailed my package at the end of last week, and will hear in mid-April if I am a selected finalist. If I get in, that means I get to actually make all of these garments by July (when the actual show is), and the really awesome part is, ITS will fly me and my collection to Italy for the show! So send me all of your good energy so that I make it as a finalist!!

For next months contest, I am thinking I might try for a t-shirt design contest.

Anyone of my readers a crazy contest person like me?

Festive Fingernails

I removed the last of my Halloween nail polish today and have been trying to figure out what I want to do next. These were probably one of my favorite designs though!

I think you can see clearly what my theme was! I would also like to point out, that I have never received more compliments/comments on my nails than when they looked like candy corn! The great part, is that it is a really easy design to do! (Provided you have all of the colors you need).

Step 1- Paint your fingernails white
Step 2- Paint a horizontal orange stripe across the middle of your fingernail
Step 3- Paint the tip of the fingernail yellow
Step 4- Clear coat over the top

BAM! You have candy corn fingernails!

Note: Make sure you allow plenty of time to dry between coats, so the nail polish doesn't get all thick and goey. I have a real hard time with this, because I can't seem to be patient enough to wait to do the next coat! But do it, because it pays off!

Good luck!

The Design world at Oregon State

A couple weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending an informational session by Oregon State's Design and Human Environment (the department I belong to) and the Engineering department presented to Alumni from Nike and Columbia Sportswear.

I got to hear about just how awesome Engineering is at Oregon State. I've always heard that they have an excellent program, but it was pretty cool to find out just how amazing it is.

The coolest part to me, was to find out how awesome the DHE department is. Currently, the faculty of DHE are trying to combine with graphic design and create the College of Design within the university. Not only that, but there is a tremendous amount of research that goes on in DHE that I had no idea about. It makes me feel proud to be attending Oregon State.

The other great part about this event, was that I got to show off my amazing shoe dress and talk a little about that and about other projects I've done at OSU, all in front of people from Nike and Columbia. I was happy to add some more business cards to my contact stack :)

Since I haven't posted a picture of my shoe dress on this blog before, here's a pic:


It's always fun to have other people get excited about something you've made. It's really exciting that I made this dress for a show last February and I still get to show it off, thanks to the great people at Oregon State taking care of their students.

A friend of mine sent me a link to an article about what OSU's design department is doing, you should check it out!

Adventures in Japantown

Back in September, I had the opportunity to go and visit my baby sister in San Francisco and attend the "J-Pop Festival" held in Japantown. It was a great experience and a lot of fun! The funny part about our trip, is that we had intended on going to San Francisco to take part in the "Moon Festival" held in Chinatown. Needless to say we spent pretty much the entire weekend in Japantown.

One of the exciting attractions for the J-pop festival, was that they had Mori Chack there signing t-shirts! What? You don't know who Mori Chack is? Mori Chack is the man who created Gloomy Bears. Let me give you a little background about Gloomy Bears.

I had not even heard of Gloomy Bears until early September, when I was staying at a friend's house for a disc golf tournament. One of the other ladies that was there, Miranda, filled me in on the exciting tale of Gloomy Bears. I noticed a cute little bear on her cell phone, and asked her about it. Miranda is a person full of amazing life experiences, like many people. If I were to start writing biographies on people, I would love to write one on Miranda, it seems that every time I spend time with her, I learn something new.

One of the experiences that Miranda had was living in Japan for a time as an Illustrator. When Miranda was telling me about Gloomy Bears she began by explaining that there is a district in Japan, where artists gather to sell their art. They might be really good, really bad, but they are all there. Apparently, Mori Chack started there as an artist, until someone discovered his unique artwork and the story behind it.

Gloomy was an abandoned Grizzly bear, who was adopted by the kid, Pitty. This child loved and cared for Gloomy, and Gloomy loved Pitty. Gloomy grew older and started growing claws, and teeth, and because bears will be bears, he attacks Pitty.

So all of this artwork that Mori Chack created was this adorable pink bear gruesomely attacking children, specifically, a little boy named Pitty. Miranda told me about a new Japanese store that opened up in the Bend area, and that when she made her first visit she told the cashier that she was looking for one thing. If they did not have this one thing she would not consider them a legitimate Japanese store. She asked if they had any Gloomy Bears, and sure enough, they had a whole wall full of Gloomy Bear merchandise. This is where Miranda found her cute little keychains that were on her phone and her keys.

I didn't end up being able to get an autographed t-shirt by Mori Chack, because the time we got there all of the shirts were sold out and they weren't allowing any other merchandise to get signed. But I did get a some sweet pictures:

Mori Chack signing a bear's head, there is even a little drawing on it! :)


Mori Chack and a fan!


And this was the back of her hat, so awesome!



In our shopping around Japantown, I found some of my own must-have Gloomy Bear merchandise:




I know that it's kind of horrible, the idea of this bear beating up this kid, but it really appeals to me. I think that part of it is that I have never understood the infatuation with Teddy Bears, because bears are only kind of cute and they aren't sweet either (same with Hippos, but that's another story). These Gloomy bears are ridiculously adorable, but still have the realistic side that they are bears and they are not nice.

More Disc Art

Last night I stayed up waaay too late, but I had the opportunity to delve into yet another type of artwork: the art of dyeing discs. Being in the disc golf world I know quite a few people who dye their own discs. Some people are really talented and do some amazing work that they sell, and some people like to just make their discs look different than everyone else's.

Widye.com is a company that custom dyes discs, and has donated some great dyed discs to my disc golf event (Hope Open) for the past two years. This is one of my favorites:



There was also someone who dyed me an amazing disc with the M*A*S*H* cast on it, and a neat red cross in the back. I'll need to take a picture with something other than my phone before I post it.

Here is my first dye-job from last night (You can see how messy my desk really is...):



It was a pretty easy process, especially since my friends had everything and did all the necessary research. First thing we did was take off the hot-press stamp of the logo with acetone, which is really easy if you let your disc set in the acetone for a couple minutes (just not too long, acetone will eat the disc!). The next thing was to decided what color of dye to use, then put it in a pan and heat it up on the stove. It only needs to get as warm so you can still touch it, so definitely not boiling. As the dye was heating up, I came up with my design and cut it out on some contact paper (one side is sticky- you stick it to your disc, my friends got it pretty cheap at Home Depot). After sticking the contact paper on my disc where I did not want the dye to hit, I put the disc face down into the pan so it was floating on top. Then all you do is wait for 10 - 15 minutes, and see how it looks! I think I waited a little longer and added in more dye so it was dark enough. Then I rinsed it off with warm water in the sink, took of the contact paper, and wah la! I have a pretty disc!

I'm excited to try this again in the future, when I can put some more time into thinking of cool designs and play with more than one color. Definitely different than submitting designs to a company to get hot stamped on a disc!