Hu - Surivival of the Fittest - the Struggle

As humans, we are animals on a basic and instinctual level, yet we try to be something more.

Special thanks to Chris, Jeff, Alex, Kaelynn, and Dom for being such great hand models!

Mr. Shen - Survival of the Fittest

Mr. Shen here.

This is a picture of Blattodea (aka the cockroach).

"They were here before man; they will be here after man and why? Because they eat crap." - Al Bundy

Mr. Shen - Holiday

Mr. Shen here.

I hope everyone has a happy National Build Your Own Furniture Day!

You should have seen the original idea I was going to run with. It was basically going to be the Ikea logo and that phrase: National Build Your Own Furniture Day. The End. Fin. How boring that would have been!

I've always had a fondness for the D.I.Y. kind of work ethic when it comes to creating furniture and whatnot. It's like doing those models you did as a kid, but on a larger, functional scale... and there's all these pieces left over!

This was done in CorelDraw12 and prepared in Photoshop 7.0. I've included a really concise tutorial on how I did this little ditty. The key point here is that you absolutely need the right lighting in order for "color range" to work correctly, otherwise you will have a terrible image to work with.

Hu - Holiday - Turn Out the Lights Day

Turn Out the Lights Day: a holiday from artificial lighting. This is when the government shuts down the generators to all but the most vital public services, and everyone is forced to live without electricity for a night. You have never seen starry skies so beautiful.

As a child, I used to absolutely love it when we had blackouts, and a part of me still does.

Mr. Cheung - Fruit / Veggie Stamp - Cherry

allo allo allo

fruit stamp getchoo fruit stamp

i like the futura font a lot

cherries, not such a big fan, but i picked it because it's visually pretty simple to draw. just a circle and a twig on top. pretty minimal in that way. not like that fancy pants pineapple.

french stamps because i gotta represent!



here's a detail of it (circles are vectors that i drew in cad, i then imported it into photoshopped and rendered it...)

Hu - Fruit/Veggie Postage - lo-fi sketches

I've been thinking about this assignment ALOT, and yet I haven't been particularly happy with any of the solutions that I've generated. It's getting me little neurotic. Here are some sketches of my ideas rendered in Adobe Illustrator (and yes, I am tempted to redo one of my previous kickfaces for this purpose - boo-urns, I know). Whichever one I end up settling on, I would probably want to end up painting and texturizing my final choice in Photoshop. Alas, my time is running down and I need to just pick one and keep refining it. Which one do you like best?

Mr. Cheung - Street Corner - South Park

south park. this is where i work in san francisco. a little park south of market, in between a freeway and warehouse lofts. it's a piece of green in an industrial zone. i often wondered how it got here. i heard that in the 80s, south park was where the garment factories were. a hundred years ago, it was supposed to have been a rich real estate until the wealthy moved north to the hills near pacific heights. when they left, the park was abandoned. during the dot-com boom, internet starts ups worked here. when it busted, they moved out. now it's full of architects.

at center, to the left of the playground, all the way down there is a yellow coffee shop - butler and the chef - that makes a vanilla latte that i'm addicted to. i work across the park, in one of those buildings to the right in the distance. ground floor, all the way in the back. there's a guy who walks a dozen big dogs every afternoon while carrying a baby. i smile when i see him. there's also a garage full of old treasures - a sports car (the kind that james dead drove), fake palm trees, old movie cameras, regal furniture - that is strictly not for sale. i grab my bagels by the green building to the right. at night, it's all dark and foggy, and the street lamps look like hazy lazy angels, a bit too tired to get off the ground.

Mr. Shen - Vegetable Stamp

Mr. Shen here.

So here is a vector piece I did of a vegetable on a stamp. Would you pay 34 cents for a stamp like this one? Yea, neither would I.

Those yellow moon like objects can either be moons or potato chips/crisps. You know, the chopped up bodies of his fallen brothers and sisters. He sure is awfully happy about that.

Hu - Street Corner - Hong Lih Food Products Inc.

Near my work, there's a great little red brick warehousse that has a lot of character to it. It's small and dingy and houses Asian food products of some kind, perhaps to transport to Oakland Chinatown. This photoshop coloring was done on top of a scanned ink sketch. Color that simulates luminiscence is tough. Right now, the sunset light on the hills looks like fire. And I haven't done enough shading in general.

Mr. Shen - Street Corner

I work on the corner of Technology and Skyport. I figure by the time 2027 rolls around, only a short 19 or so years from now, people will be living with robots and they will try to get dates then as awkwardly as they do now.

We follow the adventures of Alexander, the ugly water cooler guy, and Sally, the hot computer from the office across the way.