The responsibility of real beauty

As a digital media major the big push for real unedited beauty has been a big deal for me. I have never been a high maintenance girl, light or no makeup, undyed hair, and my favorite outfit is sweatpants and my husbands tee's. I'm sure that most everyone has seen one of these evolution video's (my favorite is the pizza to girl video...just...ridiculous) and they really do show the extreme nature of our modern ideal of beauty. No one idea of beauty is right. In Mauritania women binge until they are ill to attain a beautiful full figure. In Japan many young women dress outlandishly and dye their hair and skin wild colors. In China tiny feet are considered beautiful and women bind their feet to the point breaking to stunt their foot growth. In Thailand women bleach their skin to achieve a pure white beauty. In Burma women use metal rings around their necks to slowly stretch them to a long elegant shape over time and eventually they stretch to the point that women cannot support their own heads without the rings. I believe that it is not only the responsibility of each person to believe in real beauty but also very much a responsibility of those in media. Please understand that each person you meet is a unique and beautiful individual.

Catching Kayla Montgomery

Get your tissues ready! I cried nearly the whole video. This is a beautiful example of the strength of the human spirit.

Tetrachromatic Artist

 

 

Concetta Antico is an impressionist painter unlike any other, she see's more than one hundred times more color than most humans. Concetta is a tetrachromat. She describes the world as a mosaic of color. Tetrachromats have more cone receptors in her eyes that absorb color. The average person have three cones which enables us to process about one million colors. Concetta has four cones which makes her capable of picking up an estimated 100 million colors. People who have regular color vision have three cones, tuned to the wavelengths of red, green, and blue. These are connected to the X chromosome—most men have only one, but most women have two. Mutations in the X chromosome cause a person to perceive more or less color, which is why men more commonly have congenital colorblindness than women (if their one X chromosome has a mutation). But the theory stood that if a person received two mutated X chromosomes, she could have four cones instead of the usual three. It is thought that about one percent of the world's population has extra cone receptors. Five years ago, when Antico’s daughter was 7 years old, the family learned that she was colorblind. “I didn’t think it had anything to do with me, but she’s colorblind because of me. I have a mutation,” Antico said. The more she helps scientists understand tetrachromacy, she figures, the better they will be able to help people like her daughter. “If we understand genetic potential for tetrachromacy and how their perception differs, we can understand quite a lot about visual processing of color that we currently don’t understand.”  In addition to spending her time helping researchers better understand tetrachromacy, Antico hopes to open an art school for the colorblind and create an online platform for people around the world to discover if they are tetrachromatic. “I want to be sure before I die that I’m able to define tetrochromatism,” she said. “There have to be more tetrachromats out there. Maybe I can lead the way for that.”

http://www.popsci.com/article/science/woman-sees-100-times-more-colors-average-person

Family Portrait Project - The Ladies: a Tribute

 Britney, on her adventure to India to teach Tibetan monks English.

 Gabrielle, being the elegant lady that she is. Currently she is adventuring in Italy.

 Garyn and Britney, my younger and older sisters. Garyn is getting her degree right now and makes the craftiest food this side of the Mississippi and Britney is pregnant with her first child, a boy. They got married like a second apart.

 Grace and Chloe, adorable sisters. Grace is being a kid and doing an awesome job of it. Chloe is #22 on her Basketball team and is possibly the most beautiful teenager I've met.

 Maddie Belle. Just like her cousin she is #22 on her Basketball team and scored 5 points in her last match. She is also an accomplished actress and dancer and has been Gretel in Hansel and Gretel, Louisa in the Sound of Music, and was a dancer in Annie.

 This is either Maggie or Abby...really I can't tell those adorable twin cousins of mine apart.

Olivia Longhair, Tribe of the Awesome. Olivia is one of the most talented people I know. She is a beautiful dancer and excels in all things artsy and strange. You know those people on the internet that you tell yourself you want to be...that's her yo.



Whimsical Business Cards

These are a few of my more whimsical business card designs. I notice now that they are all neatly in a row that I have a thing for pale beige grey. Such a good neutral color. I'm glad that if I have to have something that I do all the time its beige-grey. Beige-grey is the "like" of my art vocabulary, or maybe more aptly the "uhh".

Baby Shower Invitations

 The stork is a baby shower icon so naturally I had to make him the star of the show! I had another project with aspen trees in the background and pulled them to use as a woodsy background.

For this one I went with a dream catcher type of theme. I'm very excited for my sister's baby to come and it really seems like a wish come true. I blended the dream and wish themes...Aaron asked if the Mother is a Native American...so, yeah.

Family Portrait Project - Couples

A few installments for my family portrait projects.

 My sister Garyn and her husband Trevor.

 My cousin Shawn and his wife Katie.

 My sister in law Michelle and her husband Phil.

My cousin Isaac and his wife Anna.

Pray for Rain

The final in my design class is to create a CD label and cover. Aaron supplied the fake band name "pray for rain" which sounded pretty cool so I ran with the rain theme. The photo's I used were taken  in Pocatello Idaho on a rainy day while visiting Aaron's Grandmother. I color picked the CD scheme from the foggy mountain photo. I'm really happy with the overall moody feel....happy with moodiness, sounds like I'm a 13 year old girl....I'm not by the way.

Family Portrait Project

 

 

I wish I could say that I never run out of creative juice but sometimes I have to come up with large project goals so that I keep up with my art. I decided to draw a picture of every member of my family and when I finished up with that I thought I might as well go ahead and do my extended family as well. I'm still working on the extended family and I have some REALLY cute little cousins.

This one is my first of the family project. This is my husband Aaron and myself while we were engaged.

Diamond Business Card

I love the geometric pattern trend going right now and decided to have some fun making a business card design with it. I used a sunset photo and turned up the saturation and added some art filters in photoshop. I then overlayed a diamond pattern and added it to my handmade text. The color turned out AWE-some!

Photo restoration project - Wendy

I'm taking a photoshop class right now and for my first project I fixed up this photo of my Mother, Wendy. I think it worked out pretty well for my first try. The photo was left in a window and there were hairline cracks throughout the photo and a large portion of the background was damaged.

Hot Mama & Papa

This one speaks for itself....as in, my parents are babes. Also, my dad has a mustache, that is all. *prismacolor pencil*

Gonna Pop

 

My sister, Garyn, commissioned a "pop" themed baby shower invitation for her sister in law and here is the result. I have to say I'm pretty impressed with myself that I came up with "little kernel". I'm loving everything about baby shower invitations right now. I love looking at them, making them, and thinking about my favorite people, the baby population.

Cosmic Dancer

I had a lot of fun with this particular project. I used some NASA photo's from the Hubble telescope and this little beauty below of my darling sister, Olivia. She is a phenomenal dancer and for her the sky is the limit, thus the photo of her taking the cosmos by storm. To make her look more realistic and give her dress some body I overlayed a low opacity image of the original outfit on top of the sky dress.