Something I've been playing with as of late...

How do you represent the hardest thing a person can possibly represent, themselves? The problem is, I want to make myself a website that is sort of a collection of my own work...weather it be because I want to use as a resume site, personal site, or something else entirely (I think I just want a piece of real estate in this world with my name on it, virtual or not.) I have tried many designs over the past what I would say nine years if you included the ones thought up with Taylor..All of them were scrapped save one which ended up as the idea for Dave's site ( www.davidgroseclose.com ) And again I am plagued with the question of how I should represent myself. I have to say that I am sort of digging my logo, which was on here before and can be seen in the SCAD work folder. So this summer I have been playing around with yet another idea. I am not going to show you the entire thing, just a little sample of it. A few details on the site is that it would be completely done in Flash, inspired by Rauschenberg (probably way off on spelling of that), and consist of the idea, "me, in some form." The following image is just a clip (scrap, piece, fragment) from the final still of the opening keyframe. Again this, like the others, would probably hit the cutting room floor...But I figure hell, might as well share what has been floating around my brain.

hate to admit it...

but, here goes...

i just watched "camp rock". and i kind of liked it.

it wasn't hsm, but it couldve been a hellofalot worse! haha

anywho, speaking of disney (it's a stretch, but you see where i'm comin from) im going this weekend! i'm called it a "girls weekend"- me and my gay husband steven are meeting there! AH! i havent seen him in three years and ive missed him so much. we don't keep in touch as often as i'd like, but i have a feeling we'll pick up right where we left off.

funny story for those who don't know- the first time i met him we were on the dynamic bus heading back to the college program apartments after our first day of "traditions class" at disney university. he offered me a disney fruit snack pack, and i totally thought he was hitting on me (i have terrible gaydar, ask anyone). i ended up pretty much living at his apartment.

words cannot express how excited i am to see my long lost husband! it's been far too long.

oh, and i got my car fixed. the check engine light had been on for about 8 months, and my dad pretty much grounded me until i got it fixed. seriously, he grounded me. someone needs to explain to ME how i let myself get grounded by a dude who's 3000 miles away from me. obviously he won, since $300 later, my car is fine, and i'm "allowed" to go now. i would've gone anyways, i might have just commit grand theft auto (is that even the term, or just a game?) and taken rylan's car. but no felonies were commited and im going to disneyworld!

adios.

growing up, some of my favorite movies were "blue hawaii", "south pacific", and "beach blanket bingo" so naturally i felt like i would be the ultimate beach bum when i was older. but let us not forget that i was born and raised in a desert, and spent 23 years of my life in said desert. i feel like a fraud admitting this, but i, chelsea parks, am not a good beach person.

well thats not true, but yesterday was just not my favorite day at the beach. it was hot, there were bugs, and god help me there was a crying baby about 20 feet from us who would not shut up. we only spent about an hour there, then we went to get some really good pizza.

then we went to sam's club and got a membership. we're card carrying members of adult society now! so i went a little nuts and bought an iTouch. if i could figure it out, i guess technically i could be updating this from that, but well, im not. haha

more news from our kitchen. we bought an ice cream maker! we've made peach ice cream (which was more like soup... but still yummy) and vanilla. that turned out much better than our first attempt. we bought a ben and jerry's ice cream recipe book, so hopefully deliciousness will ensue!

tonight we have steak. it's been a very long time since we've had it, due to lack of funding on the grocery front, but my god it was so good. even the dog benefitted from this- her bowl was overflowing with the scraps.

and now there's orangecicles in the freezer!

Things are abound to happen

Now every once and a while we get people that either visit us or do something for us that is well out of our ordinary routine. For these such occasions we try and come up with a little thank you. So I suppose this is the result of what happens when someone visits us (hint hint Taylor and Andrea)! A couple days ago we had the pleasure of having Chelsea's dad's cousin come into town. It was great to have them here as we hadn't seen anyone in a while and well they were a blast to visit with. They took us out to dinner at Tubby's on River street. We left the house around seven and figured we would get home around ten or so. Well we ended up visiting with them until about midnight. We were just hanging out on a nice cool night in the restaurant. It was a day in between my finals so I didn't have much to worry about. It was such a delight to have them here. So we made a little thank you card. This isn't the first one I've made. I made a charcoal sketch of Mickey Mouse for Nicki and Jim (Avid Disney fans - and btw the sketch was awesome!). They are basically like second parents to us out here, and they never had to be. I also made a thank you card for just hanging out with Blaine and Ginger - at a time when we definitely needed a friend to hang out with. The thing that is different about this one is Chelsea and I both made it. A little burned out from work I devised a plan to get Chelsea to do her favorite thing...become a tourist in her own town. I handed her the camera and told her to take pictures of everything she wanted...and from there I would make something with it. This got us out of the house on a Friday afternoon and we just walked around downtown (a wonderful sight to see I must say). You can just meander and not have a care in the world. This is a picture down Drayton street I believe, and when I saw it I just immediately imagined text filling in that bright white sky. Really, with the architecture in Savannah, you don't have to do much with it. I dig it.

On a side note, in the post earlier this evening about cafepress, I found a better website. So the shirts are there now too and you can select what type of shirt you want it on. You can also select different colors, its pretty awesome. so check it out! Rylan's Zazzle Page Oh and make sure to promote the hell out of me :) thanks

Design Solution: Lloyd

So thought I would throw down another quote shirt for the hell of it. This time it's from 'Say Anything...' Unfortunately, I didn't know this but on a basic account for Cafepress you can only have one of each type of product, so I couldn't put this on a V-neck. I am kind of disappointed by this realization, but such is life. The upgraded account is like six dollars a month...something I don't really feel like paying for especially if I know that the products aren't going to be sold that much. I wish they worked a little like deviantart in which you paid a one time fee for your prints account. They are still getting money from their cut of the print. Maybe if people digg em I can put like a different one up each month, I dunno. I suppose I digress a little. The shirt font is meant to look like the new logo design for the movie...I wasn't to keen on using the old one as it was a cheesy script font. The pen is actually two different pens put together through scanning and Photoshop. The ink was made from me printing out the text and then actually going in and scribbling on the paper. Scanned and changed the color to blue (it was black) and then put it all together for the finished piece...easy as pie. Check it out, tank top, at Cafepress!

Design Solution: A Beginning of Something

I have long been expressing interest in the idea of my own t-shirt design company. Now the following has nothing really to do with anything about realizing that dream. This is more about making something else entirely. I have had this idea for a website, in which I will probably not get into the entire details of the idea as I don't want to give it away and hell you never know, I might actually make it someday. But let's just say the idea centered around that of chick flicks. It is kind of an interesting place for me, as a guy, to find myself thinking about. But alas, I have, thus a couple things have resulted from it. I had this idea of T-shirts that comprised basically of simple images and quotes from movies. Every good movie has the perfect quote that gets repeated around water holes across the globe - "You breed raptors here?" - "This is Sparta!" - "Let's Call it Steve!" - "I gave him a break." - "Here we are, Sunset and Camden!" - "Goonies never say die." - "My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next!" - etc. Some people may not know what all of those are from, but you get the picture. My idea is not exactly unique as their are tons of shirts out there like this, I am but one of many. Since they are kind of spare time kind of things, I am using Cafepress as the people to print them. It makes them a little more expensive, but I don't have to worry about inventory or anything like that. These are kind of extra things for fun, and you'll probably see a few more on here. This one is from the Notebook, and a great line from the movie, "If you're a bird, I'm a bird." It is a line that Chelsea absolutely loves and well goes with the whole chick flick thing mentioned above. As for creation of the piece...the birds were hand drawn using pencil, just a quick sketch. Then they were inked and scanned in. I fixed up the lines just a bit, moved some stuff around to make them work together. I only drew one bird and dup'd it for the other. The color was added in photoshop - sort of going for a watercolor look. the overall feel was to be quaint and simple. So the birds are sort of sketchy and the type was to be a bit elegant - definitely a serif font. I messed with all the font fixings to make it flow together until I got a bit of something I liked (that sentence was awesome). Well go check it out over at Cafepress! If you love it and just have to have it, you can buy it too (hawking my designs for a couple extra bucks, lol)! Really though its just something to do for Chelsea and for fun. Thanks