Saturday, May 03, 2008

House T-shirt


House T-shirt
Originally uploaded by runawaypenguin
My camera continues to have difficulty shooting the color purple. In real life this is a royal purple, the purple you remember from kindergarten color wheels. I'm very pleased with how these turned out.

I realize that I never properly explained how the illustration relates to the house. According to the Smith website, Park House was originally built in 1880 and acquired by the college in 1923. At some point close to when the college purchased the building, there was an addition put onto the house. Common spaces are primarily located in the footprint of the original building, and private rooms are primarily located in the addition. For some reason, the addition isn't exactly plumb. There are reports of a few dressers whose drawers wouldn't stay shut, and when I first got to college Parkies would play a game called "Will it Roll?". This involved dropping things in the hallway to see how far they could go.

There are a number of art students in the house, and a common assignment for the first drawing course is a perspective drawing of a hallway. I thought it was interesting that in order to to fulfill the assignment a student might be tempted to ignore the reality of slightly off-kilter walls. After coming up with a vision for the illustration I played around with a few slogans before landing on this one.

(I should mention that Park Complex also has an annex, which is a smaller building across the street. We have the same set of keys and you know how sometimes couples say they have one heart in two bodies? Well, that's creepy. But we're one house in two buildings. The cubism is slightly less applicable to the annex.)

I finally had time to bind off the back of Alouette. You should be unsurprised when I tell you that it looks almost identical to the picture I posted a week ago.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Love the shirt - congratulations!
I wouldn't want to wake up with a hangover in Park House. Your description reminds me of one of Janet's first apartments. "Will it Roll?" was not the question - "How far will it roll?" was more to the point, which proved to be endlessly entertaining for the cat.