Creation is the game and technique is key. Here is a collection of various mediums I have worked in, showcasing the breadth of my skills and commitment to exploration, traits I found important to communicate in my university application portfolios. Starting with some sketchbook pages where I painted with coffee, honed graphite shading skills, compared mediums with a doughnut exploration and detailing their execution and challenges.

Entering my University era, with a major in printing, I get to show the flexographically printed wine label I produced in my final year. While it does use three ink plates, the majority of the visuals are delivered with tints of just the navy ink whereas the other inks, gloss and matte, was utilised to add visual texture and contrast on the header texts, stars and mountains. This two piece design included the right spacing and repeat length to increase efficiency and alignment for automated application to the bottles.

Print paper? NO! PRINT EVERYTHING! TRY ALL THE MEDIUMS! 2D? MORE D! 3D!

Ah you probably thought this paragraph was going to be about 3D printing, maybe not if your screen already revealed the raccoon card. This now is about circuit board printing! My brother, Savo Bajic, has a long-time interest in circuit boards, creating projects like a transit timer & christmas ornaments. You can check out his website here. I love the aesthetics of the boards. Did you know that the 90 and 45 degree marks you typically see on boards is due to early design software limitations? An “efficient” line is essentially unnecessary for circuits! Lets get back on topic.

Before the two of us went on a holiday, we wanted to make some gifts for the friends hosting us in Paris. One of them finds raccoons absolutely adorable despite our tales of them being Toronto’s vermin. These trash pandas would make the perfect “from Toronto” gift, our concept was to create a board which when touched on the belly the current would be interrupted, triggering the raccoons eyes to light up. I was tasked with the visual design, learning about circuit composition and how to turn these technical elements into aesthetic ones. The contact area would require to be soldered silver, over a gold mask which was kept exposed in other areas, additional details were added with white.

Savo spent quite some time troubleshooting the power draw as the boards were killing batteries far too fast when in standby. Eventually he configured it so that the battery was estimated to last over a year. Its been over 15 months since the first Raccoon gang was distributed and no one has needed a replacement battery since. On February 15th 2023 the project was featured in the Hackaday newsletter after submitting it to their 2023 Low Power Challenge. My name wasn't cited as a co-creator, but we all know it wouldn't be nearly as cute without my touch.

It was so fun to create a gift that when I had to return early from our trip and missed my brother and company there, I was determined to create a gift from my realm of specialty - pakidging :3

Unfortunately the graphic file I has was too complicated for the rapidly declining plotter table I started with in my "Secret Evil Lab of MASS DESTRUCTION in Plastic Solutions", as I liked to call it. So I had to ship the second copy I let cut to completion in order to ensure its arrival before his departure. I’ll admit the failed outputs still look cool, like 3D printer spaghetti. I made the card to be a very shallow box to fill with near flat knickknacks, and doodled all over to update him.

Ambitious as I am, already with an added concentration of Packaging to my major, I believed I could also attain two additional minors (not including my exchange minor) if I took some summer courses. One of which was a 3-week intensive course and my introduction to 3D printing. This format really allowed me to focus solely on the course which led to a strong understanding of 3D printing technologies and strategies of creation

My final project was a 2-colour print of Duolingo Owl, inspired by the then trending “Evil Duo". My partner and I designed this shakeable owl in TinkerCAD and Meshmixer - two free-to-use softwares. Output as a single piece using a dual extrusion printer with green and white PLA, hand painting the beak, feet and the two sided (red and black) eyes you can change between by shaking or spinning the eyes in their sockets. Retained as an example for future classes, I was informed it would also be missed from the background of Donna’s class cam when I picked it back up.

The dancing star is the first 3D model I have ever created. I used varying depths of the 2D shapes to convey the sketch in 3D while maintaining the character of the illustration. To the right of that in the group shot is a printed scan of myself doing the ‘whoa’. Since it used single colour printing it was important to create details using form, like choosing a denim button dress which would have well-defined curves prime for handheld scanning & printing.

In more recently projects, I have been focused on technical creativity, which led me to create the teal fuzzy teletubby which was altered to hold my collection of priming lines created by the Ender 3 printer I was using at the time. It makes for cute desk decoration where I tracked my growth as I continued printing. The reaper teletubby was not designed by me, but through it I got to learn about SLS printing.

I still have work to do for my hedgehog project. I sculpted the hedgehog using Meshmixer while watching the entire Sex In The City film series (I'm a Samantha). I taught myself Fusion to engineer the inner workings and additional pieces. I’ll update this page soon to showcase how I intend to have the quills (or pencils) pop out of the body.

My Communication and Design minor provided many opportunities to practice the more visual side of creation within my undergrad. There were also courses digging deeper into the theory. My favourite class of this sort was Introduction to Semiotics, where we studied how humans extract meaning from visual means, throughout history and today.

For my second minor – Advertising – one of the projects was to fabricate an app prototype. My group and I pitched Ikea Ata, Ata being a Swedish phrase for “to eat”. The concept was to advertise Ikea products through a video call/live stream cooking experiences in the app where users can follow recipes and cook together during the pandemic, earning points for Ikea coupons. The prototype was designed using Adobe Illustrator and brought to life using Adobe XD. You can experience the app at this link here.

I also made some more posters in my undergrad – my favourite being the giant cat eating the clock tower, cropping around the fur was rough! The oldest one here is the "Watch What You Eat" two color offset lithography print from my first year. The mummers play poster includes artwork I drew from scratch. The ugly stick (a traditional Newfoundland musical instrument fashioned out of household noise making items, under the same cultural umbrella as the play) features a little something from each character . I also developed a website for the production company, more on that here.

We love creating and trying new things - this past year I picked up a few new hobbies. Crochet, mending socks, and gardening but most sickly - carpet tufting! I scoured far & wide to find a reliable and not overpriced tufting gun. Exploring whether to buy a beginners kit but then deciding to make my own tufting frame suiting the width of canvas typically available. This was my first independent woodworking project (unless you include marble mazes composed of garage scraps in grade 3). My first carpet was a black and white vortex illusion and with all the set up and yarn material it cost >$400 until I started making more pieces. I was dedicated to discovering my own methodology, working from my memory of seeing others work and learning from mistakes along the way. Instead of proper backing fabric I used a garbage bag! Currently, I am in the middle of a few tufted portraits of my cat - exploring how to “paint” with different yarns in this new medium.

In high school, Cirino’s art classroom had a similar explosion of creative enablement like Papak’s photography class. In grade 12, our oly constriction was that we needed a theme across six projects, mine was the 1960s and I still cant get over some of what I made, like the fondant spiderman on a Vespa, shooting spaghetti, or a remix of Lichtenstein's 'Wham!' Re-quoted on the mysterious assassination of JFK. The true icon being Jackie, our sheet metal eating queen.

Printing was also a present fascination back then, I did many projects using stencils made of projector copies and carved linoblocks to make prints of skateboards.