Magazine

My magazine, The Point, along with an ad for some amazing binoculars!  Made in InDesign with photos manipulated in Photoshop and text made in Illustrator.

Rotoscoping

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2_4puIP5Sk

For my rotoscoping project I used a 25 second clip that a few friends of mine shot of me a little while ago but was never actually used in our film.  I imported it into Photoshop which broke it up into 258 frames.  I then traced myself on each individual frame on a new layer and also applied the chalk and charcoal texture on the background layer.

I am quite satisfied with how it turned out and although it was time consuming it did allow me to catch up on a lot of shows on the monitor I wasn't using.

Multiplicity

This project was a fairly simple one compared to teh other projects I have done so far in this course.  Using nothing more than layer masks combined with adding and subtracting from the masks with the brush tool I turned a collection of photos into one picture.

I started with this picture as a base.

Then I added additional pictures and turned it into this!

Restoration

It took a good amount of work but I was able to eventually able to fix this picture in Photoshop.

The end result looked like this.  It may not be exactly perfect but it definitely is an improvement over the original.  If only the father's jaw wasn't entirely missing in the original picture then maybe he wouldn't have needed such drastic alterations.  I mostly used the clone stamp and spot healing tools to accomplish this.

 A side by side just for reference.

Propaganda

Whoops almost forgot to post this one.  Well anyway here is my propaganda project showing off just how much companies control the lives of an average person in the 21st century.

Three Logos

For my project I wanted to make companies that were either based off of puns or just terrible ideas.  After a few prototype ideas I eventually came up with these three: Brown Knows Toilet Tissue, Wired Repair, and Grandma's Old Fashioned Taxi Service.

I created them by mostly using the pen tool and the individual selection tool.  However for some parts I made use of the brush tool for small details like the face on the toilet paper logo.  By using gradients for some parts and solid colors for others I made an image that can draw the viewer's attention at a glance.

For the Toilet Paper the light and dark brown colors on the face draw the attention over the light blue and white gradient on the rest of the image.  On the Repair logo I used jagged lines and a bright yellow color fill for the word 'Wired' to stand out from the smooth lines on the wire itself.  Lastly on Grandma's logo I wanted to simulate the traditional black and yellow color scheme used on most taxis.  I think however the yellow may pop a bit too much and detract from the actual image of the walker.

Nuclear Calligram

For my calligram project I decided to use the image of the Fat Man atomic bomb to tell the message of  not worrying about the small problems in life.  In a world so heavily influenced by technology that has the sole purpose of making life easier, why is it that people act as if there are still so many things to complain about?

The image that inspired my project, the Fat Man

Getting the best technology, technology not working quite right, or just technology not solving all problems seem to be things that everyone will complain about.  They need the new iPhone as there current phone appears to make their life so bad.  They need to have technology give them instant results and if they are slow their whole day is ruined.

Technology has made things so much easier that weapons are now so devastating   With the push of a button a nuclear weapon can wipe a city off the face of the earth.   In a world where people complain to make things even simpler how much farther will technology go?  Perhaps weapons will become so great, powerful, and easy that the world could end in an instant.

So dont worry about the small stuff and just enjoy life for as long as we possibly can.  There is no need to shun technology but rather just appreciate what technology we have.  You never know when life may change in an instant.

Using the pen tool as well as heavy use of the lasso tool and duplicating text on lines I was able to create this nuclear calligram.  If only I found out about the many different kinds of warps earlier it would ave been much easier.

Illustrator Practice

Last week we touched on Adobe Illustrator a little bit after we had finished working on HTML in Dreamweaver.  Although we only just started I can see the potential of the program.  It appears much more geared towards drawing than Photoshop does so I may be able to use it for much better results.

HTML

In today's class I learned about basic canvas programming in html format using Dreamweaver.  Despite a few technical issues I think it was pretty easy to understand.  I have previously learned a bit of Java programming in an elective course back in high school so many of the lines of code made perfect sense to me while it seemed like others had a harder time grasping it.  I was happy I didn't have to write my own code, as I used to always run into the smallest issues in Java that would ruin the entire line of code for me.

Although contrary to most people I actually look forward to doing more programming work in the future.  It may not be a part of my major but it is something I think I may be interested in and it never hurts to know a wide variety of skills.  While we may not continue working with html in future classes there is Adobe inDesign on the horizon.  Maybe I will bite my tongue when I am swamped with coding work but it still peaks my interest.

Week 1

The first class made me quite interested to see what we will be doing in the future of this course.  I know a little about Photoshop already but I can always use more knowledge, especially with some of the issues I ran into when I did use it.  I am also excited about inDesign and Illustrator as I have very limited knowledge on vector based programs and would like to expand that.

Although we only barely touched upon it, what I did see of HTML interests me very much.  I used to take a Java course back in high school but it never went very in-depth on what it could be used for. While programming was not something I initially thought about learning a little knowledge on the subject could always come in handy.

I enjoy to use digital design programs and have learned 3D animation in Maya through several courses and have self taught myself how to decently use Adobe Flash and Source Filmmaker.  To better use 2D imaging programs on the computer I have purchased a Wacom Bamboo tablet the other year.  It is not the best tablet but it gets the job done.  Maybe through this course I can learn to better use it.

Through this course I hope to get a better knowledge of these Adobe products as well as some programming skills I would not know otherwise.  I hope we spend a good amount of time with HTML and Illustrator and maybe if we have the time I could learn a few new tricks with Flash and possibly After Effects.  I am also incredibly excited about rotoscopng as I have never actually done it before and it is a technique almost every animator seems to use.

After a semester abroad in London I am ready to get back to serious work with digital arts to prepare myself for wherever life winds up taking me.