Progress.

Project 1
FINISHED!

The Smoker Farms website is finally finished. After a couple days of trouble shooting, everything on the website is up and working. Here is the link to the website.

smokerbrothers.com


Project 2
I just need to frame these 4 pieces and it will be finished.


Project 3
Working on the layout of my sports program and collecting ads. Wednesday I will be taking team and individual pictures for this program.


Project 4
I have no idea. A couple ideas in mind, but not quite sure.

Finishing up 1st 2 projects

Posters.
I took into consideration everyone's comments from the last critique. I was open to about anything, so I researched my options. There were comments about making the wood look more real by changing paper or actually transferring the image onto a wood panel. I researched homemade paper and realized that I didn't like the way that looked. It didn't look, for lack of a better word, "biblical" enough. I went on to research what kinds of paper was used back during biblical times. This came down to papyrus or parchment. Papyrus had a cool look to it, but was more on the expensive side to make or buy. I then researched parchment, which could easily be just as expensive to buy at parchment. I then thought, how could I get this parchment look at a cheap price? I did a quick Google search on how to age paper, and it seemed like the way to go. I took the following instructions (Tea Staining) and put my own little spin on it. The process on how I aged my paper.

1. Through trial and error, I came up with 2 different teas for aging my paper. The cup on the left is a mixture of peppermint tea and dandelion tea. These gave the paper an old, yellow tint that I was looking for. The cup on the right is plain, ole Lipton tea. I used this after the first tea to add some brown highlights to the paper.

2. I set the oven to 250 degrees, crinkled the paper, then smoothed it out onto a cookie sheet. I didn't want it to lay flat all the way because there would have been no texture created from the tea staining. 

3. I then poured the dandelion/peppermint tea mixture onto the paper, making sure everything was coated and had sunk through to the other side. I baked this for 5 min.

4. After 5 minutes, I poured the excess liquid back into the cup and put the cookie sheet back into the oven until the edges of the paper started to curl up. This stage dried out the paper.

5. Once the paper was dried, I dabbed the regular tea bag onto the paper. I wanted the tea to soak through the paper, but didn't want as much as the first tea. Back into the oven it goes until the edges of the paper curls up again.

**I repeated this step twice to make it even darker

Here's the finished project for staining the paper. 

Next step is to frame these 4 pieces of paper then this project will be finished.

Smoker Website.

Over break I was also able to finish the Smoker Farm website. The Smoker family already had a domain/host purchased through GoDaddy. I've never worked with GoDaddy before so right now I'm trying to figure out how to get that all set up. Here are a couple screen shots of the website.

History Page

About Page

Home Page

Enlarged photo in the Photo Gallery -- Used Lightbox widget

Virtual Tour -- Used Flash to make it

I think I might change the look of the photo gallery to match the rough edges of the photos like on the history and about us page. Or at least make the red borders thinner.

Contact Page -- Mail form to the email address

*Once this goes live, it will be at smokerbrothers.com

As for my next projects, I'm working on the layout for my game day program and getting my images collected for my penny project. 

Resume -- Updated

Posters...about finished.

Posters.

I still haven't nailed down which ones I want to present in my show. I think I'm going to plan on doing 4 posters, but I still don't know which 4 I want to do.

Here are the options.

 

 

 

My though is to do the Life of Jesus Christ..So out of these six, it would be 1) His Birth 2) The Temptation 3) Crucifixion 4) The Ascension 

--Stories I could add:

 1. Water to Wine - John 2

 2. Feed the 5000 - Matt. 14:13-23; Mark 6:31-46; Luke 9:7-17; John 6:1-15

 3. The Blind Man -- John 9

 4. Palm Sunday - Matt. 21:1-11; Mark 11:1-11; Luke 19:29-40; John 12:12-19

There are just so many to choose from, it's pretty difficult to choose what I want to do.

Burned effect.

-- Not quite sure if I want to display these in my BFA show with a burned edge or keep the edges clean

-- I'm leaning more towards keeping the edges clean

Artist Statement for this Project.

Christianity is a large part of who I am. I have grown up in a Christian home, learning the different stories of the Bible. There are so many people now who don’t know these stories. These are stories that can shape a person’s life for the better. Displaying these stories in poster form is a medium that would be able to explain these stories in a way where the viewer doesn’t have to read a whole chapter within the Bible. I’m playing off of the minimalist poster idea. Minimalism gets the point across with as little text and imagery as possible; which is what I’m doing here with this series of posters.  Having the image of the subject of the specific story will entice the viewer to go out on his or her own to read more into the Bible story. The wood background shows age, which coincides with the age of the Bible and the stories it contains. The burned edges effect also conveys this idea of aging as well as an idea of roughness. The Bible indicates rough times throughout the book, which I wanted to incorporate within the posters.

What's Coming Next.
Here is my plan on my upcoming projects. I'm hoping to get a lot done during spring break. So here's the lofty "to do" list for break.
  -- Finish Smoker Farms website and get it live
  -- Get layout started for programs
  -- Get 12 portraits taken for coins