Pasadena Project

After an extremely busy fall and winter with work and focus on my thesis project, I'm finally making my first 2010 post. In November of last year the Hartford MFA team traveled to Pasadena for another memorable trip. Our assignment was to create an illustration that “screamed” of Southern California.

After nixing a number of ideas, and getting inspired by looking at Doug Johnson's incredible airbrush album cover art, I did some poking around the web for images of an art deco theater. I found a number of wonderful images of the Regency Lido in Newport Beach. My thanks to Dangerghost and Bugcer on Flickr for these two images, among many others, that I used to recreate a 3D model of the theater in Strata.

I got the idea to change the name of the theater to reflect the illustration program, calling it the Hartford MFA. No rocket science inspiration there, but it worked well. Once I rendered my original idea, I decided to see what it would look like rendering it at different times of day. I ended up creating dawn, midday, dusk and evening versions.

I got so excited about the way the 4 images turned out I decided to go a step further and create an album cover, down to the dust sleeve and record label. The final was very well received during the critiques of our work in Fort Worth.