Deck is ALL FINISHED. Well, almost. I still have to decide what text to put underneath the joker, but I’ve sketched out some handwritten font for “54 cards designed by jennwang” and I think it’ll look nice I’m probably won’t be making any major changes, but if there’s something about the royalties in this image that really, really bothers you, I’ll still take it into consideration. I’ve done some research and will probably be printing my cards in China. It’s much cheaper than I had originally planned, so I’l be printing something like 150 decks, I think. Not completely sure yet. But this is exciting! (Also, I updated the photography section on Derek Powazek. It’s clean and simple, and definitely looks nice, but now that three people on my RSS feed use the same theme, I guess I’ve just lost appreciation for it. I’m glad that his design gained so much popularity, and I’m a big fan of minimalist design (Muji, Ikea, Apple…) but I don’t think it’s meant for the everyman. I guess I feel like the creative nature of minimalism is diminished once it becomes too readily available to the masses. If you’ve seen my room, I have organized (sometimes) clutter everywhere, and try to use layers and patterns often. Minimalism as a style is evolving to become the norm, and I don’t like that. Like, frosting is delicious as an accent, but definitely not as a main dish.

Classes this quarter have been so-so. My 107 (Modeling Dynamic Systems) professor is unclear during lecture as well as in his homework assignments, so it’s hard to follow his thought process and hence subject material. I like the labs though, because I’m really excited to learn how to use Matlab. 156A (Strengths of Structures) is only interesting to me because if it’s relations to materials science. 136 (Energy & Environment) is my favorite class so far because of the very apparent application. We spend half the class-time discussing various topics (so far, just global warming as a crisis or not) and the other half learning the “engineering” behind things like solar power and engines. It’s my second (and last) elective, and I’m glad I decided to take it. Lastly, EE100L just sucks. I barely understand simple circuits, and applying those concepts is… really difficult. I hope I can just get through it though… it’s the last EE class I’ll ever have to take!

My head hurts, maybe from typing in Dvorak on a Qwerty keyboard and having to re-orientate myself every time I accidentally look down. Speaking of Qwerty, my Dad gave me his old iPod Touch! What apps should I download?

First blog completely typed with a Dvorak keyboard! The first time I dabbled in this nerdy hobby was probably back in my freshman or sophomore year of high school, but after a few weeks of trying to pick up the new (old) way of typing, it got too tiring so I gave up. Hopefully this summer, my efforts will be more fruitful. I think I also attempted it a second time last year, but that was also a failed attempt.

So I finally got somewhere with the redesign of my hearts, Above is a scan of the sketches I made before deciding which style to follow through with. I thought it’d be kind of fun to show a bit of my process. (The equation of hyperbolic cosine was a note I made to myself during math, haha.)

So I made these vectors really quickly this morning based on the sketches in the scan. They’re messy, but I’d still like a bit of feedback before I clean it up any further.

Here’s the new ace, too. It’s pretty much finalized I think I still like the old ace better, but I agree that the style of this one fits better with the rest of the deck.

After finishing this suit, I’ve just got the joker and back to design before I’m totally done! I’m really excited for the day I hold my deck in my hands… whenever that might be.

Ohhhhh my god typing in Dvorak for so long is making me so tired! By the time I finish typing out one sentence of my thoughts, I’ve already forgotten what else I wanted to say. BUT I WILL PERSEVERE! At least it makes me really think about what I’m saying. Kind of.

PS. I just took another look at the Jack, Queen, and King, and I feel like the Jack doesn’t match that well with the other two. I’ll probably fix the set by making the Jack’s thinner and the Q and K’s thicker. Yeah, I lazily typed Q and K because it’s taking too long to type.

I have ridiculously horrible short term memory.

Saturday morning, I went to the first session of summer CHAMPs. We’re only going to have three sites this summer, and unfortunately I’m going to miss the second one due to yearbook’s editor retreat. Since there wasn’t any transportation available this weekend, and Stanley had shown interest in coming to CHAMPs with me previously, I asked him to drive me and hang out with the kids with me. We picked up Lucy, an alum, and headed to downtown at around 9. We got a little lost on the way but still got there around 9:30. Neel arrived shortly after, and the four of us ended up being the only mentors there. Good thing there were very few kids there as well, because otherwise it would’ve been way too difficult to organize.

The day before, I had asked Stanley to get about 15 feet of white butcher paper for me from his RA friend, so when we got to CHAMPs, I spread it across three or four tables and wrote a big “WE LOVE CHAMPs” on it. I opened the crafts cabinet and got out all sorts of random things - feathers, paint, sponges and stamps, sprinkles, yarn, etc., and just let the kids have at it. It ended up being a relatively successful impromptu event. There weren’t that many of my K-2 kids, so I still miss them, but it was great being around some of the other kids again. I think our biggest problem at CHAMPs is not being able to discipline the kids, but I’m not sure how to take care of that, either. What’s a legit means of threatening them in a way that they’ll really listen? I’m not still naive enough to think that honesty and truth, by example, will work itself out. What steps can we take to grind these lessons into the kids’ minds?

After CHAMPs, we headed back to our apartment to pack for a weekend Arcadia adventure. After getting to Stanley’s house, Layla and I just bummed around and read - I finally started reading The Giver, which I finished before the end of the day. After getting settled, Stanley and I left Layla at home reading and went to the mall to get my ears pierced. The hot weather (according to Layla) made us both easily irritable, and a short irrational quip led to a wasted afternoon of me not getting my ears pierced. We headed back (in silence) and I finished The Giver (More on that later) and eventually made up. We accompanied the rest of the family to Stanley’s aunt’s house for a BBQ. As a true Cantonese household, the mah jong table was set up and being played on when we arrived. After the adults dispersed to deal with food, Layla, Stanley, Justin, and I took over the table for a couple rounds. I won both rounds by zi mo (自模) which was TOTAL LUCK. It reminded me of old times at Guilin with Alex and Danny and Fifield…that was a fun trip. At the BBQ, they had one of the street-vendor-style egg-cake (雞蛋糕) waffle things, and they were awesome. To complete my vision of Taiwan, I had a Hey Song (黑松) sarsaparilla soda, too.

While waiting for the adults to finish socializing, Stanley, Justin, Layla, and I sat around and watched Harry Potter on cable, haha. We got back to Stanley’s house at around midnight and pretty much just crashed after the long day.

Sunday morning, I got up at 9:30 to take a shower. After Stanley got up and we had breakfast, we dropped Layla off at Matt’s house (WHERE I SAW THREE PEACOCKS!!!! SITTING ON HIS FRONT YARD!!!!). Then Stanley surprised me by bringing me to Huntington Library! I had never been there, and I’ll admit that I thought it was a book-library when I first heard of. Actually, it’s a huge estate with various art galleries and open gardens. We went through a gallery of British art and design, then followed up with American paintings and work from the Arts and Crafts movement. I was a bit tired by the time we saw the Greene & Greene collection, but it was super cool to see work that I learned to be the response to industrial improvements in mass production. I was reminded of how much I used to like researching art and art history… DESMA10 and ARCH&UD10B were awesome and I wish I had time to take more classes in those subject areas. I wrote down a few artists’ names and pieces for future research (Edward William Godwin - Anglo-Japanese style, Samuel Gragg - side chair, Allan Adler, Edward Ruscha, Sam Francis) but I don’t know when I’ll get around to that.

The Huntington was awesome, it also had a cool botanical garden (The Rose Hills Foundation Conservatory for Botanical Science) with little labs for kids to explore with. Clearly, I took advantage of them and played with microscopes and felt like a freshman in high school again. It reminded me of the indoor rainforest at the Academy of Sciences in SF.

After getting scorched in the sun while walking through the Japanese (bonsai!) and Australian gardens, we headed over to the mall for a second attempt at getting my ears pierced. After having a late lunch of McD’s (because we are high class), we went to Icing and…success! I now have two holes in each ear, and I really like it. It took forever for the lady to mark my ears perfectly symmetrically, but it paid off to wait, and now I am super satisfied. It looks really good, if I may say so myself, and I can’t wait until it’s all healed up so I don’t have to be afraid of hurting myself, haha.

But now, awesome weekend is over and it’s time to get back to schoolwork and concentrating and all those lesser-fun things. Alas, the life of a college student in the summer. I’m glad UCLA is nearer to the ocean and hence not 100+ degrees every day…

Now that summer has started, I’ve been checking my Google Reader much more often and compulsively. I’ve been surfing design blogs and came across Public School, a group based in Austin, Texas. From what I gather, they’re really into print-based media (posters!) and have a really cute logo that I was tempted to buy, just because I have public school pride. (Yeah, so what if I went to a private high school for two years?) I added them to my RSS feed a few days ago, via which I chanced upon this really beautiful illustration by Álvaro Domínguez Gámez. Unfortunately, I can’t read his blog (it’s in Spanish), so I can’t tell you more. Just that his style is full of puns and simplicity - I especially love the facial profiles and universal imagery :]

From what I can gather (read: my very limited vocabulary skillset), it’s called Flood (Inundacion). The spot coloring and textures make me want to frame it and put it somewhere where I can look at it all the time. Alas, the best I can do is make it my desktop background…

My sister sent me her own version of my heart today, thinking that the style might fit better with the rest of my deck. I took her concept and tweaked my design (very quickly) to see what it’d look like.

Here are the original and the altered designs side-by-side. Any thoughts? Which one do you like better? Which one do you think fits better? Do you think it’s important for all the suits to have more similar styles?

Here’s this again, too, just to see the all the aces’ styles together.

Finally, a blog with pictures! But something is really tripping me out, and I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve been editing my raw photos on Photoshop, or if it’s my laptop. Things seem much grey-er and washed out after I upload them, but when I open them with PS or Preview, they look totally fine. On my desktop monitor, they also look fine. Does this mean I need to calibrate the browsers I use? I’m so confused! Maybe it has to do with the web settings of the pictures when I edit them… (Also, things look totally fine on my desktop where I use Chrome…?)

Stanley took a picture of me while I was working on my impromptu art project in my dorm room. This is my little corner - I never realized how colorful it was, covered in pictures and doodads and memorabilia. My space is so comfortable looking

Danny gave me these cloth paints after we graduated from college, and I only used them once, on one of my throw pillows. I’m glad I finally dug them out, though. Due to lack of table space, I resorted to working on the ground. Which resulted in me spilling paint (see first photo) but whatever. (Photo also taken by Stanley.)

End result, modeled by Layla! My own design on an New Silver Fine Jersey Tank from American Apparel.

Original designs. I think the aces are the only ones I’m totally sure about. I have some tweaks to make with the rest of my deck, not to mention the creation of the backs. I’ve gotten a bit of inspiration, but nothing concrete yet… The order I chose (yes, I considered it) was the order of the suits in the card game of Bridge. I recognize that many people use the order of diamonds, clubs, hearts, spades for alternating colors, but colors don’t really apply to my design, anyway. Plus, Bridge is awesome. So clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades wins. It’s also alphabetically ordered. Ftw.

My stamp on the back - I used fabric markers for this instead of paint. Haha I forgot to do it until the last minute, hence it’s messiness.

What else have I been up to? Eating lots of chocolate. My friend Sean sent me this chocolate ages ago, but I never got around to eating it. So I finally did. 70% is like, almost the perfect percentage of dark deliciousness. I decided to melt it down and make chocolate covered strawberries so I wouldn’t feel so guilty about downing pure chocolate. Note to self: Must use wax paper next time.

Deliciousness! Im really good at it. I guess my slight bit of perfectionism kicks in when I do things like this - so simple and pretty! I bought strawberries from Ralph’s, and happily picked the box with the smallest, cutest strawberries. I think that small fruit is often tastier than it’s ginormous counterpart.

I’ve been using my wide angle almost exclusively since the quarter started, and it makes me feel a bit guilty. I love the distortion at 10mm and intense depth of field it brings even at 24mm. But alas, I know I’ve got to step back into reality with my 24-120mm eventually.

I didn’t have wax paper, so I placed them directly on my (awesome square) plate. Cons: Chocolate got stuck on the plate. Messier. End result was uglier :(. Pros: I got to eat the chocolate that fell off the strawberries :).

This is from mid-March. I just wanted to show off my skills at writing backwards.

I’ve got a few blog ideas stored in my “drafts” folder, ready to be dug up and shared. But first, I’m going to study for my EE midterm, and my MAE 103 midterm (I studied this morning, and somehow, things just started to fit together…), eat a mango, and deal with school. I’m sad that I havne’t had time blog lately, but at least this is a competent update.

North campus classes are so life-y. In my Japanese class, I wrote/gave a speech about the time I moved to China. It allowed me to reminisce a bit, and tell part of the story of my life. I also wrote an essay about how although I’m an engineering major, I’m much more interested in art. I expanded on the fact that although I have less time to dabble in practicing art, I still retain my interest through simple projects, research, and photography. I guess I’m mentioning this because this blog in particular touches upon that part of my life, right? Art is so important to me, and although I’m nearly drowning in physics, I still let myself take time to stop and eat strawberries. Nomnomnom.

I meant to blog about this ages ago, but by the time I remembered the half-finished post in my blog drafts, the exhibition was already over. Even so, I guess I’ll finish it up, because this is a pretty cool concept.

From February 12-24 this year, there was an exhibition of four BMW Art Cars at the LACMA. My boyfriend Stanley likes cars (that’s an understatement) so he sent me a few pictures from the exhibit he found on the Internet to test my contemporary art recognition, haha. I researched a bit more online and discovered that there’s a reputable collective of BMW Art Cars; a panel of judges chooses an artist to whom they bestow the honor of designing/creating one of the BMWs. Since 1975, 16 BMWs have been utilized as canvases for various famous artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. I looked up the most recent one, and it’s so intense. Olafur Eliasson created his car by creating a metal frame and slowly layering water to freeze over it. It’s exhibited in a giant freezer.

His concept embodies a pro-alternative energy type of mobility, as the BMW he chose for his piece was the BMW H2R oxygen-powered prototype race car. He decorated it with an ice and metal chassis, representing the relationship between the production of automobiles and their effect on the environment. It’s a really specific concept, totally extreme and different than most approaches. Which makes me really like this BMW art car collection - such a broad field with specific approaches.

I should be studying for my two midterms next week, but instead I just uploaded 20-odd pictures to my portfolio site, Mint. I also decided that the photography subsection of Mint was getting too large, so I moved all the photos to a separate page. I hope that isn’t too confusing, but I hope I have time to design a different page solely for my portfolio of digital photography.

I was inspired to design my own calendar. The entire process took about two weeks (from sketch -> finished calendar) which resulted in a month-late beginning, but I finished January first so it could be utilized before I finished the rest of 2009. It’s designed to be versatile (it’ll be in production forever! Just write the dates in by hand before each month begins) as 12 un-dated months.

One of the silly decisions I had to make for my calendar was whether to start the week at Sunday or Monday; I ended up choosing the more conventional Sunday. A few of my friends would have preferred Monday, but, meh. If this ever gets popular enough, maybe I’ll create another version (digitally) that goes from Monday to Sunday? Also, I had originally wanted to add color and color the apple differently for each month (For example, Fuji for February, Granny Smith for September, etc.) but didn’t do the apple-research. So that didn’t happen, either. It’s okay, this way its like a color-book-calendar, too.

Anyway, the idea (if not obvious) is to eat an apple a day and to put the apple-sticker on each date you eat the apple. I saw this calendar on Etsy (it’s so genius!) and showed it to my neighbor (who really does eat at least one apple a day. It’s customized for him, check out the “sticker”!). I decided that twentyfive dollars was a bit steep for a calendar like this, so why not draw my own? I doodled a bit and sketched a few layouts before deciding on this one, and worked on it during my most boring classes.

I might research a bit on paper samples to decide if I’m really going to get it printed seriously, but first I’d have to decide/design a way to display/utilize it. We’ve been taping it to my neighbor’s closet very ghetto-ly, but I might try to make a frame for it…? Also, I plan on cleaning up a digital version of this as soon as I get my hands on a scanner. When that happens, I’ll be sure to share.

PS. I really like my hand-drawn apple-typography and days of the week.

I spent the last few days decorating a “3″ for my friend Ben. We were at Santana Row the other day with a few other Bruinlife 2008-ers (Christine, Erica, and Steven) and were wandering the stationary stores (because really, that’s all we can afford at Santana Row). Ben ended up purchasing 4 numbers to spell 1337, and offered me a 3 to decorate for him. I definitely made it my own, as it’s very stylistically me. It was a lot of fun to design it and then execute my ideas. It’s really messily done, but I really like the way it turned out anyway. It’s me, in a 3.

I still have all the color scraps of cloth from my Making Amends and Connections pieces from high school, so I used grey and blue coth to cover the letter after painting it blue (it was the only paint I had in my room, from summer school). I cut leaves and shapes from red and green cloth to make a miniature rose-bush of sorts to put in the bucket of the 3. So here’s a blurb about my concept and idea -

Definitely I wanted to incorporate the idea of the importance of nature and environment into my 3, because I mean, seriously? Nature is always amazing, though people forget it often. The shapes and curves of the 3 made it really ideal to keep something inside, so easily enough I decided to “plant” the flowers inside. It kept it all together well composed, and so for awhile, I had the plant-part done but not the rest of it, which I hadn’t decided on. I really wanted to continue working with my fabric, because of how messy and hands-on it looks (I like it like that) so I cut out the 3 shape twice in dark blue, for the front and back. A few days ago, I found these miniature brad-buttons at Target, so just playing with them I put them into the cloth, gradienting light blue on the top to nothing on the bottom. After setting that up, I realized it looked like stars against a night sky, so of course I had to keep it that way! I did the same on the back with the light grey button-brads. And voila, pretty much it. Oh, lastly, I found these really old earrings that my sister was about to toss - they had little lock/key charms on the end, so I cut them off and hung them from the serifs of the 3. They hang on the side, so from the front & back you can’t see it. I knew I wanted the lock somewhere easily visible, but I wanted to hide the key somewhere within the “garden.” Thinking about it, though, it didn’t seem to fit well, so I kept it on the side, underneath the lock across the jump of the 3. Separate but together, as a lock and key should always be.

I had problems with the super glue - I didn’t experiment and forgot that the glue would darken and stiffen the fabric. I should have put the plants through the cloth more neatly, and stuck with double sided tape instead of super glue. Oh well, though, the grey cloth = dirt will just be like that. Yeah, honestly, I should have experimented and sketched more ideas, but I was so into decorating and getting started that I couldn’t help just jumping in. Next time, I’ll hold myself back so I can think things through more clearly.

I uploaded a few other old and new sketches onto my portfolio site, mint. I plan on updating that more often, and hope to change the layout sometime soon (ish) as well.