Talent

Those first 2 pictures started out as a third flyer design but somehow ended up there...and then I couldn't choose which I liked better.  Suggestions?  I can actually see that being a poster for some organization or something with just a few more touch-ups here and there.  That makes me happy because I'm not very easily satisfied by my own work...
But anywho, what I do find very interesting whenever looking at the 2 actual flyers is the style of them.  They almost remind me of the random flyers we see around the art dept and Mayfair.  Our quirky artsy sense of humor sometimes gets the best of us and we end up with these types of things.  If I were to analytically approach each of the 2 flyers then I could talk about composition, style, color, negative space, etc. and I could rip both them to shreds because they don't hold hard to any of those rules necessarily, but, for some reason, I think, they just work.  There is a personality coming out of those flyers...my personality.  It's exciting to see myself weaving so seamlessly through my work, even if they are just flyers.

So what are we learning then in this ever so common formula of an art curriculum?  What is it that is really breaking through if in the end I find myself breaking the rules anyway?  I'm not going to go much into it but I definitely think those are really important questions that we should be able to answer before we leave school.  For me, the very fact that I know that I am breaking rules is important, because yes anyone can break them but not everyone can identify them and abide by them If Necessary.  It is up to me to decide what is the best route to take in order to get my information across, be that through humor, entertainment, style, or any other artistic principle that we have become so aware of.  It makes me happy and feel a sense of accomplishment to feel like I am well on my way in that area, like maybe all this time and work actually IS leading up to something...even though it is still really frustrating that I don't know what that something is.

On a different note, I've still been messing around with playing instruments and recording audio stuff.  I was trying to learn how to record my own acoustic loops and how to implement them in the program I've been learning on, Ableton Live.  A few of them are just a little off-beat of each other, you'll notice one of the instruments occasionally finding itself getting off-time, but it always makes its way back around.
Real quick, before I post the video (track I made), I'm just going to explain basically what you're listening to and its significance.  There are several different tracks that were recorded to put all of this together.  I started out listening (in my headphones) to a metronome tick, and then improved a little 4/4 piano progression.  I played the progression ONE time, but because it is played on a loop, it sounds like I played it over and over.  I did not play it over and over, the track that was recorded from the one time I played is just repeating itself.  So then I listened to the repeating track of the piano (a loop) and added on top of it the drum, then the shaker.  I'm pretty sure I played the guitar last of all and then went back in and changed up the piano some for a variation.  The important thing here is that everything played was physically, acoustically played for only a few seconds at a time but can be looped and made to sound like they were being played forever and ever.  So then you can just add and take away instruments at your discretion in post as an audio engineer...er whatever they call them.
I'll make some more of these soon, but this was my first demo: