[Camille Soulayrol]

I’ve come to find that I love all design. I really truly do. I’ve always liked art, but was never particularly good at painting or drawing, maybe better than most, but no future Rembrant. But then design… I enjoyed taking graphic design at the local votec when I was much younger, and my teacher always raved on my talents, but I can say that I don’t regret my time at drexel at all because of finding my un-ending love for design. I always loved fashion design too, and interior design, but never had put it all together in my brain that they were all forms of design. Fine art can be so hard to distiguish between good and bad sometimes it seems, as if there’s no set formula. Design feels so much more like theres formula, flexible formula. There are certain rules, but if you’re smart enough you know how to break them too.

I recently decided that since I’ll be here for a bit longer than it was time for a change in some way. So I pulled almost all of the furniture out of my room and either trashed it or am in the process of changing it in some way. My room has looked fairly the same since I came home from art camp when I was 16 and my mom had re-done it while I was gone. At the time I didn’t really care that much, but now I need to feel a bit more like it’s mine. I need to know that I thought about it, so now I can think in it.

Once I feel it’s at least mostly done maybe I’ll share some photos with you, but for now I’m just enjoying the process of design.

Photoshoot!

This morning was the photoshoot for my “Event Inspiration” for my internship at JP Event Design. Basically, I had to set up a sort of “mock wedding” to be photographed and put on our company blog and for all the vendors to use for their own advertisement and such. I was blessed enough to get to pull it all together at The Rittenhouse Hotel in Philly. It’s an absolutely gorgeous place and even though I cannot see myself ever having a regular wedding and reception and such, I won’t lie… it made me re-think what I thought up to now (but only for a minute and then realized I’ll have plenty of time to plan regular weddings for other people).

Even though I have a good deal of photography experience and have done weddings before too, I decided to have someone else do the photographs (also because it gives them a chance to build their portfolio and saves me the stress). So I wont have the photos back for probably a week so I think I’ll give you the behind the scenes a little bit.

I spent most of yesterday fetching everything for it. I got the flowers, the fake-cake, linens, china, everything pretty much and had my moms SUV packed with weddingy things, freezing my toes off trying to keep the flowers cool. I used the conference room in the office building our offices are in to do a run-through. Judy (the owner of JP) really showed me the whole process of figuring tables out. I’ve done a lot of different creative projects but this is still foreign territory to me. She assured me that everything would go great and it would come out looking completely different than I thought it would (and it did by the way).

(me, playing around for a minute before actually working!)

I arrived this morning and one of the great bell hop boys helped me get everything through granite-floored lobby and halls of the hotel. It was strange to go up to where I was only a week or two ago to have dinner at Lacroix and keep passing it as I ran up and down the stairs later. It felt like it couldn’t possibly be the same place since it was such a completely different mind setting, if you know what I mean (it’s okay if you don’t, few do).

I was there way before anyone else and started playing around with it and seeing what I could do. I tend to get a little stubborn with things like this (I did the same things with the extravagant design projects at drexel) and can’t shake my vision, even if there is a better solution. Thank goodness for judy though, because she did basically what my design professor did and just took what I was doing and flipped it around completely and made me think about really making things different and great, not just good.

The photographer (Tina Jay) was absolutely great. She started by photographing my lovely sister, laura, who was our “bride” for the day. Just from how she was setting things up I could tell the photos will be gorgeous. I did feel bad though since I would occasionally jump into photos to fix teeny little things, but I made sure to explain to her that I’m neurotic and went to college for photography.

Heres a little sneak peak at everything. Everything was just lovely and I cannot wait to see how Tina’s photos came out!