The art of self branding dates back to the Ancient Chinese
and then Japanese. It may date further back but I am guessing not; since
the Chinese invented block printing. Chinese artists, poets, and writers
would design stamps to sign their work. Interestingly, as the piece left
the creator's possession other people who had the piece in their possession
would also add their stamp to it. This was very common practice and
often the bigger a person’s ego the bigger the stamp. It was a status
symbol to own these admired works and anyone who at any time owned any of these
works wanted everyone else to know that at some point in time it was in their
possession. Therefore, the magnificent pieces of art and writing over
time became emblazoned with many different stamps. By our standard these
additional markings are as much a part of the work of art as the original
signature and add another layer of beauty and history the piece.
The Chinese and Japanese artists inspired me to design my
own stamp, although I never did until now. I might alter it more before I
actually put it to use on my own art. I also have wanted to have my
students created their own logo/stamps to use as a signature. Something I
have been trying to incorporate into my classes since i took a seminar on East
Asia in 2008. Until now I wasn't able to come up with a good way to help
students understand. I plan to teach them the same way that this course
taught me. I think it will help them to understand the concept more
easily.
Logo
Creating a logo to brand myself is a first for me. I
am not completely satisfied with this one but it has all of the components that
I wanted. I had to stop myself from drawing it by hand. I really
wanted to. The image would have been so much nicer. I forced myself
to create it in Illustrator and learned how to distort text. The tree is
made from my first initial. I used a few different fonts and distorted
them by using "envelope distort" and then "make with warp and
mesh" tools. Then I had to copy and reflect the initials both
horizontally and vertically and layered then until I got the tree shape that I
wanted. For a first attempt I am satisfied. I don't know if this
will be the version I hand in. I will try again tomorrow and see what I
can come up with that hopefully will be better.
I thought about everything I had learned about creating
logos with Illustrator and vector images. I wanted a cleaner simpler look
to the design. While I still constructed the tree with the letters of my
name, this time I used all of the letters and designed it in all black and by
only using the warp tool and a single font style. I also decided to look
for free vector images for the bird. I refined that search because
regular clip art and photos don't allow me to remove the background. I
used to be able to do that with Corel Draw which came with a generous supply of
clip art. I knew how to easily alter any clip art with Corel. I
have not figured out how to do that with Illustrator. I will continue to
try to figure it out but for now I figured out that I can get free vector
images on the web and save myself a little time. If I did not find free
vectors I was going to draw the bird in Illustrator with my tablet.
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