I loved the way this looked somewhat tropical with the combination of patterns, but simultaneously limited the color palette to 2 tones each for blue, yellow, and green alike, with a few hints of red.

I kept multiplying the layers of a spiral I had drawn, and I wanted it to stand out, so the complementary blue and orange mixture allowed the green- and yellow-tinted 'OP squiggle' to stand out and not blend in too much. I applied many gradients to both the fills and strokes of layers, trying to manage how many colors I used. When I was almost finished, I threw in another spiral with a lightning bolt design (here it appears as a black arrow with a beige outline) to fill the empty void behind the personal details.

 The ultraviolet 'OP squiggle' looked rather bland against a plain white background, so I threw in some curves with a brush stroke look and rearranged the order of layers until I had something that was both readable and artistically expressive without demanding too vast of a color palette.

 A.K.A. Hazel Prim, this is a girlier take on the design, incorporating my experimental alias as the cardholder. For this daredevil skier and ballerina, I wanted to create something that evoked both power and flourish. The font for the company name speaks strong but the style of opacity permits perk. Using Google™ Maps, I spent a short period of time locating a building under construction at an ideal place in Washington, the hometown of this thrill-seeking character. I thought the 'OP squiggle' should be more vibrant, so I looked for images that showed ultraviolet light, and what I figured out was that it is captured like neon or lightsabers (white beams with radiant magenta emanation). Illustrator® was not cooperating with the colors I was choosing, and I learned this was because the color settings were CMYK rather than RGB. When I fixed this, I applied the change to the other documents and restored some of their intended glory, but I couldn't help wondering how many colors I had lost that I had custom-picked. I didn't want the background to be ordinary, so I tweaked two of the corners and split it in two, picking a different but similar pattern for the other shape, and tweaking the pen curves of the shape to align with the french curves of the pattern. The most difficult part was making the company name and personal details stand out from the background, so I decreased the background's opacity and tightened the outer glows around each object, multi-layering the company name and nudging the patterns applied.

 This squiggle took the longest time of all the variants. I wish I could have shifted the background pattern, but I wasn't sure what that would do to my artboards, and I was running low on time. I thought that 'powerful pink' or 'powerful purple' would make a good color palette, ultimately resolving to pink and gold. When I tested black as my secondary color, it made me think of the fifties poodle dresses and hair salons and dance studios and the like, which does not represent the company I designed. I wanted to say powerful without perky, which is why I also put a sharp bend on the 'P' in the squiggle. This way, it has a right-side-up and an up-side-down, so one way of looking at the card is more pleasing than the other.

When the pattern of the background stood out too much and made the words harder to read, I decreased its opacity, as well as that of the 'OP squiggle.' This design included the widest variety in fonts (4 total). I kept two fonts from a previous design because I felt that since I had put so much care into aligning the role terms, it wouldn't hurt to place it twice. The email is a combination of the two things that describe the character of my pseudonym: for some reason, whenever I write the word 'idea,' I have a habit of capitalizing the 'i,' and I do this often because I have them often; a creator of ideas... an ide-ator? The website is not owned (yet) and it stands for the company name.

I noticed right away that the animation was themed on the topic of naval sailors coming to shore and falling in love with native women and putting children in them, so I hoped it would be a less demeaning of the navy. Alas, as opera tends to end in tragedy, so does Aria and Madame Butterfly. It was disappointing how the phases of the story seemed to drag out every fabric of their being, slowly and boringly (not effectively or painfully, as it should have been). I understand that the story in Aria is modeled after Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly, but I feel like there could have been a less animate and more inanimate way to depict it that would have come across more effectively and emotionally taxing, like if the characters were actually butterflies with a human life cycle, and the butterfly was a flower or something. Regardless, I found it incredibly political, as some liken the Navy to Samurai or even Vikings (who were known for rape). In reality, many sailors that followed the path of the first half of the animation (literally to the halfway point in its duration) didn't know that they had children, and when they found out, they went back and took the women with them as a wife (not many individual men went out and had children with women across the globe, as is depicted in Aria) without delay. The message of Aria depicts the sailor as a prideful, lustful, despicable playboy by the end. I would not recommend anybody watch it, honestly.

Creativity According to Raul Cuero

"Creativity has to do with how you perceive nature in relation with your existence."

— Raul Cuero

Raul Cuero's fearless approach to creativity recognizes failure and loss as opportunities to improve and learn. Although this lines up with my approach (as well as the Meet the Robinsons approach) insofar as commitment to an idea notwithstanding the possibility of failure, I do still have my fears of whether an idea will work out well or poorly. I agree that creativity is not a planned occurrence, as it cannot be programmed, but only for most circumstances. As an instrumentalist I have witnessed firsthand the spontaneity of creativity in synchronized play (watch any video of musicians at an Irish pub and you'll notice), and as a dancer I know to have a plan ready at the spurt of the moment when mistakes emerge during a performance. While screenwriting, I find that ideas come to me prematurely, and while I may not be able to expand them at the time, I write what I can about a fragment of an idea that will help me connect story segments at a later point. Additionally in story writing, a practice of many writers is to insert ideas from a figurative pile of story puzzle pieces that one has accumulated over time as a tactic for bypassing writer's block. All in all, I find that creativity is most useful in troubleshooting, be it technological issues or life's roadblocks; creative solutions to problems are essential for survival and everyday activity. If the worst thing that could happen is to experience failure, I see no downsides to trying ideas. Besides, in many cases of failure, loss might not even occur; in these cases, it's a matter of try and try again.

You may still be at the same level, but don't discount the experience points you gained from trying!

Operating Out of Bounds:

a comment on Huyghe's "un-bound-ing—un-box" methodology

Can you see the reindeer?

"When the doors are moving, there is no more threshold; there is no more inside and outside." —Pierre Huyghe

What I interpreted this to mean is my perspective; I am not dictating Huyghe's definition. I think he would agree that artistic philosophy is like an art in itself. The way I understand it, thinking outside of the box is phase 1; once this is done, one may work outside the box. For the open-minded artist, however, this is not enough; next, one must work against the very concept of the box's threshold.
In my opinion, that is the point when motives become questionable, because Huyghe's epistemology sets work as the means for entering a world (a means to an end), and sets the act of creating said world as the aforementioned work (an end in and of itself). Thus, his work becomes his walk into the world he creates. In simpler, non-artisan terms, the very act of making a project completes the experience, and an experience such as this cannot be done unless making the project.
Essentially, he is the only one who will experience his project since making the experience is the project, so nobody else can experience it the way he made it. The experience he gets from his projects is obtained only in doing his work, which is the act of constructing the project itself, though that would mean his experience is the project. Summed up, the world he creates is the world in which he works, and his work is the act of creating worlds in which he can work.
It takes real artisanship to justify this belief, but that is my opinion.

"I asked a composer to take the shape of this island and transform the shape into a musical score for a symphonic orchestra." —Pierre Huyghe

In this epistemology, one can believe that their work will achieve the effect which they aimed to, and nobody will question it or argue because there is no sense in questioning nonsense wherein no reason can be found. The artists achieve their goal, not by observing the effects of their work on the world, but by experiencing the very world they create. Unfortunately this way, few find such art very enjoyable, but most can at least find it interesting, though perhaps not in the way the artist intended.
Art is a very interpretive end, and media is the means to that end. How one interprets it is not for the artist to decide, but they may observe, and how one makes it is not for the interpreter to decide, but they may likewise observe. In Huyghe's case, both roles belong to the artist; he makes a world himself with an interpretation, leaving the otherwise interpreters no privilege of interpretive choice but their one duty which is solely to observe that world and do so only with acceptance for the artist's interpretation. It seems to me that what he delivers is a first-hand statement of the experience, so audience experiences it only second-hand.
Predestined meanings are seldom derived from observation alone. An interpretation is a decision by an individual, not the decision of the individual. If it does not yield so, it had not been so, but if it does, so it was.