May 18th - 22nd/May 25th-27th

I finally figured out a way to find access to blogger, youtube, and all the other websites China banned from us. Its called Hotspot shield and it’s a search engine that works just as fast as google, so its pretty awesome.
The week of May 18th – 22nd
This week I worked on an illustration for our solar House project. It is a small wooden play house that is solar powered. I started by arranging a CAD file in the perspective that I wanted it in and then traced some of the house so that I had the right proportions. Once I got the basic size of everything all layed out then I was able to draw the rest free hand. For example, the awning, accessories, and texture of the wood. After I finished the line work I pulled it into photoshop and began adding color. I pretty much finished it by the end of the week and just left the final touches for Monday morning.
The week of May 25th-27th
This week was only a three day week thanks to the Chinese Dragon holiday. We had the 28th through the 30th off, but we have to come in on Sunday morning(booo!). It was a really nice break and we got to spend some time with Jason Yi and his group of Miad kids on their summer trip around China. It was really refreshing to see people from home and introduce them to a few areas that we enjoy going to.
On Monday at work I finished the illustration before lunch and as soon as I finished it my boss came over with some bad news. The product had been changed at the last minute which meant that my illustration also needed to be changed. The door and the window were going to be switched around, the placement of the recycling bins, and also the placement of the solar flowers. This wouldn’t have been so bad except the kids I drew were interacting with all of the items that needed to be re located. I spend the rest of the afternoon playing around with my options and trying to see what I could save from my illustration. I ended up reusing the children that I made originally, but just reflected them and moved them around a little bit. The new arrangement of play house made parts of the area very crowded and hard to fit kids into the composition. I spent the next day re drawing parts of the house and re rendering most of the house.

This week I got my prints back and put them up on the walls in the showroom. We were told to put them up with double sided tape and apparently we didn’t use enough because the next morning they were scattered on the floor. Luckily the people we were expecting weren’t going to be in until after lunch so we had time to put them up again. I think the prints for the showroom turned out pretty well, I was surprised to see how large they actually were, they ended up being 8ft long! I didn’t really get a sense of scale when I was working on them because I was working in the metric system, but I realized it once they arrived.
I also got to work on a new project which was to create an illustration for a scooter that we have. I spent one day creating the drawing and finishing up the line work and one day rendering the image and putting it on a quick mock up of some packaging.

I dont really have alot of images to post this week, since I spent most of my time prepairing the showroom. They needed our help to assemble a bunch of our products"swing sets, monkey bars, a trampoline, doll houses and things like that. In between helping out with this I was putting a few presentations together and arranging some disney images on some boards to be printed on foam core and placed in the showroom. Not too exciting, but i should be getting my prints for the walls of the showroom on Tuesday, ill post some photos of how it turned out on next weeks post.