Late Hours & my First Love Package

week #10 entry #1 04/19-04/26: personal journal

Holy cow, it's week 10! Focus is coming to a close.  (At least writing journals is coming to a close) I still have a lot of work to do to prepare for my presentation and portfolio, which seems kind of overwhelming right now.  So it is 1:25AM and I am still up making shirts. My body is getting tired, but I honestly do not mind making the shirts.  The boring stuff is ironing, folding, and washing screens.  These are the kind of tasks I need an assistant's help with.  Anyone interested... heh... seriously? :) But, I do like making the shirts.  I have to be very careful not to get ink on the rest of the shirt and I get to fill in spots where there isn't enough paint with a paintbrush.  However, lately it has been exhausting.  I have had Calliope (the literary arts magazine) meetings everyday late after school.  I am so lucky I have not had a lot of other assignments due recently.  I screened 8 shirts tonight!  I need to make a bunch more. I want to finish ironing and folding those in addition to creating a few new ones.

I got my first love package! Two of my blog readers, Austen and her mom, have been following driftwear since the beginning.  Austen said "Congratulations on your launch!" and handed me a package.  I was awfully surprised to receive any driftwear love token.  I didn't know anyone was as excited as me about the launch! I am so happy to have such supportive fans.  But anyways... the gift was in an Anthropologie bag and I knew it had to be good.  Inside was a beautiful notebook with paper made in India bound with beautiful mustard color thread with twig colored pencils.  The gifts were so cool and so driftwear.  I totally loved them and hope to sketch out the Summer line in the notebook!

I am trying to keep driftwear in people's heads and stimulate my fans so I also thought it'd be a cool idea to see how different people style their driftwear t-shirts.  So I have a contest to be posted on the website: driftwear How do you rock your driftwear tee? Upload a photo and have a chance to be showcased on the driftwear website! So post a picture on the driftwear fan page for a chance to be featured on driftwear.com.  Thanks everyone for your support. I really appreciate it. After seeing how many sales I had in one week, I was so psyched. You guys are the best.

Drift on,

Isabella

10PM Nightmare

week #9 entry #1 04/12-04/19: personal journal

(source: here)

My shop was supposed to open tonight at 10:00PM. I cannot put into words my frustration as the clock ticks to 10:54.  This morning, Chris finished the site.  I was so excited after being woken up at 5:20 from him asking for more pictures.  The adrenaline rushed through me as I uploaded pictures for Chris.  I couldn’t fall back asleep.  Around 10:30AM my site was up and running, but not on purpose.  Chris did an amazing job and I was so excited.  I disabled the site for a bit.  Then around the middle of the day, friends told me that my site was up.  This was news to me, as I thought I had disabled it.  So I tried my hand at disabling it again this afternoon.  That is when I royally screwed up the site.  Somehow one host site mixed with another and driftwear.com was nothing but a page of godaddy scams.  It was only about 4 minutes to 10 when I realized that my site wouldn’t work.  I tried not to panic and calmly tried to forward the host to driftwear, but this was not working and was processing.  I franticly texted Chris and he couldn’t figure out the source of the problem.  After a phone call with GoDaddy, he informed me that it could take up to 48 hours for the real site to be fordwarded to the driftwear.com URL.

I am so disappointed.  I updated my facebook status and the driftwear status with: “due to technical difficulties the driftwear site will be temporarily hosted at http://mysite.verizon.net/bizs6vp3/drift/index.html“ That is what the site looks like and everyone who saw it loved it, but it still stinks.  I had about 15 people text/IM/e-mail me that the page wasn’t working.  I felt like I had not only let down myself, but my friends and supporters as well.  I know it will all work out fine and the website will work, but I have been leading up to this day for so long and I have gained excitement from supporters, and I don’t want to mess it up now.

Tomorrow I think I'll sleep in.  I only got 5 hours of sleep last night because of FOCUS.  I also need to print a few shirts, because I got some orders tonight. I'd be nice to deliver some on Wednesday.  Plus, I have to order some more Small mens and womens tees.  Hopefully things will pick up before next time. I know they will.

Whoops! & logs

week #8 entry #2 04/05-04/12: personal journal

(source: here)

The amount of progress driftwear has made in the last two weeks is remarkable.  This past weekend, my focus has been the driftwear photo shoot.  I spent the prior week creating silk-screens and printing shirts.  I thought I had my whole week planned so well until something went terribly wrong…

Over break I had created the driftwear t-shirt designs to print.  I initially wanted to create five shirts, however I decided because of time restraints I would only create three.  I wanted three different shirts that I really loved so that it would be easy for me to sell them.  As I learned during my first semester project, it is hard to sell something you don’t love and believe in.  Thus, I picked my three favorite shirts that were most well liked from the public and printed the designs on transparencies.  Monday, I set a time with my dean and teacher Mr. Emery so that he could help me through the silk-screen process.  He had some emulsion that we coated the screens with and we waited for the emulsion to dry until Wednesday afternoon.  By Wednesday the screens had dried in the dark and we were ready to place the transparencies over the coated screens and to make the screens.  But something went wrong.  After the screens had sat under the light for seven minutes, the emulsion wouldn’t wash out of the designs. 

Mr. Emery scrubbed vigorously at the designs with no luck, he finally created a big blob of uncoated screen where my design was.  I was so frustrated.  I didn’t know what had gone wrong with my screen.  We did everything right.  Mr. Emery and I came up with a few theories on why the screens did not work. A) Someone opened the dark cabinet where the transparencies were placed; subjecting the light-sensitive emulsion to light B) the emulsion was old and did not work properly anymore. And C) My printed did not print out the transparencies in dark enough black ink.

Aggravated, I washed the emulsion out of the screens and went home.  Mr. Emery promised me that he would help recoat the screens and that I could re-try making the screens Thursday.  When I came in Thursday, I arrived in the art room with a blessing.  My three designs had been transformed into screens thanks to Mr. Emery.  I started printing screens that day and worked over Friday with help from Royce, Allison, and Mr. Emery to print twenty shirts.  With their help I got all the shirts printed that I needed for the Friday/Saturday driftwear photo shoot.  Everything worked out!  I am so lucky to have the help and support of so many FOCUS students and my art teachers.

Friday and Saturday were so much fun.  Harrison Co, a talented photographer peer of mine, agreed to be the photographer for my photo shoot.  (Check out his Flickr!)  I asked 15 DE students to be models and many of them eagerly agreed. Friday, I drove two models that couldn’t make the Saturday shoot to the Englewood boat basin with Harrison.  I briefly styled the girls and we found a few beautiful locations to shoot as the sun lit up the George Washington Bridge.  I was surprised to see that it took two hours to shoot only two girls, but the photographs turned out brilliantly.  Saturday, Harrison and I came back with 12 more models.  Royce G., a focus peer of mine, stylized each model.  Royce and I had talked the week before about inspiration for the shoot and what vibe I wanted to convey.  David V., another focus student working on public service announcements, came to the shoot as well.  David had dreamed up and awesome idea for a brand video for driftwear and I put him in charge of directing the brand video.  He worked with models who weren’t shooting to get some footage.  After a little over six hours, the shoot came to a close.  It was so much fun to work with fellow students and to get more DE students involved in driftwear.  Photos of that to come!

driftwear opens April 19th!

Over break logs:
3/30: 3 hours; drawing logos and getting feedback
4/1: 2 hours; making brand video
4/2: 5 hours; drawing designs, scanning them, making brand video
4/3: 4 hours; work on brand video, draw new logo, e-mailed cults, band
4/4: 4.5 hours; editing video, uploading icons, video, and bios on vimeo & youtube,  worked on mission statement, edited blogger logo, updated flickr, made vimeo account,

Week Eight

Senior Focus Field Work Log Dates: April 5th-April 12th

Name: Isabella Whitney

Monday: 5.5 hours; invited friends to drift group, mission statement, coated screens with emulsion for silkscreens, edited website, hung up boats, photographed boats,
Tuesday: 2 hours, uploaded photos from The Paper Boat Project, printed designs on transparencies,
Wednesday: 2 hours, coated silk-screens, e-mailed faculty about boat project,
Thursday: 4 hours; practiced silk-screening on newsprint, decided on hairstyles for models and printed inspiration for photo-shoot, printed first shirt, wrote journal entry, updated flickr with pictures from today's silk-screening, edited photos,
Friday: 5 hours; silk-screening shirts, shot two models, sending Chris a package,
Saturday: 7 hours; photoshoot, ironing shirts, getting props together, styling models, packing up, driving to boat basin,
Sunday: 1.5 hours; journal entry & planning for next week, updated quickbooks,

guerilla, not gorilla

week #7 entry #2 03/14 - 03/21: personal journal

pretty hair. (source: here)

I have been so inspired lately I could faint from excitement.  I ordered some sample shirts to silkscreen for my brand video/site yesterday and they came in the mail already! They're American Apparel, organic cotton.  They're super soft.  I just want to lay in a pile of them.  So, yeah, that's really exciting for me.  I thought that I would be bringing samples of all my designs around during lunch, but I have pretty much decided on the favorites.  I will be printing a bear design, the day of the week, the drift logo, a suitcases one, and an owl.  I also just got Photoshop and Illustrator in the mail, which is superb. I should have some final designs posted soon.

Today I went to the International Center of Photography (image: here) gift shop (I know, I have to get to the actual museam part, I just didn't want to drop $12).  It was the coolest store ever; tons of postcards with awesome photography prints, sick cameras, cool shirts, and great books.  Okay, it's about 100x cooler than I made it sound, but yeah it was great.  I also had to pick up The Guerilla Art Kit (image: here) by Keri Smith.  (Ms. Smith also has a really cool blog.)  The book is this excellent spiral bound book full of wonderful ideas to lighten up people's days with art, in addition to wonderful illustrations.  If you don't know what guerilla art is, here is a Wikipedia definition for you:

Street art is any art developed in public spaces — that is, "in the streets" — though the term usually refers to unsanctioned art, as opposed to government sponsored initiatives. The term can include traditional graffiti artwork, stencil graffiti, sticker art, wheatpasting and street poster art, video projection, art intervention, guerrilla art, flash mobbing and street installations. Typically, the term street art or the more specific post-graffiti is used to distinguish contemporary public-space artwork from territorial graffiti, vandalism, and corporate art.

So basically guerilla art is awesome.  The book includes some ideas to draw eyes on parking meters (image: here) or leave an idea dispenser in public and gives tutorials.  This book is full of enchanting ideas and I recommend it. I think that guerilla art/advertising is an essential part to the beginning of my brand.  Drift is whimsical and non-traditional, like i think a lot of guerilla art is.  I don't want obnoxious, in-your-face advertising, I want subtle, make-people-happy, lighten-your-mood/day advertising, if possible.  Maybe I can even just have drift kids do fun guerilla art projects for fun, to brighten up the community and I can blog about it? Hm... :)

I have much to do.  Over this two week spring break (Yay! It's spring break!) I will be going to New Orleanes to work for Habitat for Humanity, but when I'm not doing that I'll be editing designs on the computer and such.  There is much to be done over break like ordering stickers, making paper boats (more to come on that soon!!!), and preparing designs for shirts to screen the day I get back from break.  But in the meantime, I'll leave you a quote from one of the first pages in The Guerilla Art Kit. (image: here)