art by powerpoint : 2014-01

I made some blank cards (thank you notes or what have you) for some of my classmates. I thought I'd try using PowerPoint. The "freeform" (under "Insert > Shapes") allows you to edit the individual points once the shape is made. Before now (I think in Office 2007), it was really easy to snap those points to drawing grids and/or other points. I.e., it was really easy to bring multiple points together. That, sadly, is no longer the case, but I still pressed with PowerPoint.

This is the first card I made - for my specific group, R3. I added an F-1 because I was lucky enough to get a ride in one! And of course, I added an F-16 because they're cool. The "roundels" on the bottom are the countries of those in my group.

This was my second version - for C Flight - which was my first academic group. It was a fantastic group of people. As blank cards and/or thank you notes, I added "merci" since it's pretty much know worldwide as "thank you". And it gave me a great play on words. They are "Mer-C-Flight" cards. I hope they like them.

I use Snap Fish to print my cards and they were running a great sale. So, I made a couple more designs for cards which I plan on using and/or selling. Above is my first. It's pretty much timeless since the Eiffel Tower is a default symbol of France and jets will probably be around for awhile. This design actually took me a lot of time. The trees...I like them, but I tried dozens of different looks/shapes. In reality, the trees in Champ de Mars are even more cube-like - pretty cool actually - but I wanted to keep things a little more abstract. For example, I could have added hundreds of more lines on the tower.

This is the second card I made - much simpler but still an image/scene I always love; jets streaming across an awesome blue sky. Even if the blue is a little abstract, it's still a great sky. Originally, I had the banner in red, white and blue, but I thought gray tones kept the eyes focused on the jets. And I modified the contrails. Originally they were just lines, but I thought the triangles made a better effect. And I switched the end that faded out. I had them fading out further from the jet, but actual contrails behave like shown. The jet lays out the exhaust (basically invisible from a distance) and then the condensation occurs shortly thereafter...as shown.

fin