Student Work/Selected finals from Winter II 2011 FND 112
My project had a family theme and included images of both of my children. I am hoping that everyone in class will be able to identify with my project, I'm sure most of the people in class have or know someone close to them that have children. So then they can understand how I feel and why I choose my children for my project. Right now I have been a little sad about how big my little ones are getting. My daughter, the oldest, has just turned three and she is getting so old. Her personality has changed a lot, her ideas of what is funny, and what she likes to eat or what she wants to do for fun. Everything is changing so quickly. My son, the youngest, is five months and two weeks old a whole twenty-two weeks old. I have been looking at a lot of their pictures lately and I see how little they use to be and how big they are getting. So I wanted to do this project with pictures of them. I hoped to really come up with some creative ideas to possibly use in my portfolio. I also wanted to have something for myself that I wouldn't normally have. A thought of a few different ideas, such as:
1. Regular pictures of my kids (one child).
2. Pictures of both of the kids together mixed on one canvas.
3. An abstract and whimsical design that is more than one picture on the same canvas.
4. A canvas of things that remind me of my kids.
5. A design with more than one stage of their life all-together.
After I decided on which picture to use I then played with how they should be put together to make an interesting image that would make someone want to look at the design. I did decide to go with a picture of my son when he was only a week or so old that I took myself. I eliminated the background of the picture of my son, and kept only my son lying on his tummy. The background in my finished design, are flowers my little girl gave me for Mother’s Day in 2010. I put the image of my son in the middle of the two front flowers as if he was the center of them and they were blooming. I started with black, white and gray designs to help myself focus on the details and not the colors in the pictures. I then did four thumbnails in different color schemes to see how they would either help or take away from my original plans of how I wanted the design to look. My design when I was done had some two and three-dimensional looks. The layering helped add dimension and depth to the design. I had quite a bit of texture in the project; the small bumps in the petals, my son’s fuzzy hair, his smooth skin, and the slick glass for the vase. The shading was really interesting because you can see the shadows that came from my son, and then there are shadows everywhere from the flowers going in all different directions. To make the design interesting I used a lot of the tools in Photoshop to alter my image and make more details that I thought would be pleasing. I used the dodge tool to make some of the flowers and my son’s face lighter and eye catching. The burn tool allowed me to make some of the already made shadows more prominent, and to add a few I thought needed to be there. I also used the burn tool to darken up the background of the flowers picture in the negative space to let the images shine. I also lassoed the middle section of the flowers petals on the main front two and colored them a different color than the edges of the petals; this is how the flowers in real life are colors, but my colors where different and done by hand. I selected the portion I wanted to color and changed the color, feathered the edges, made the opacity 75%, and manipulated some of the selected portions with the sliders in hues and saturations/ masks window. By changing the centers of the daisies and lightening the petals of them with the dodge tool they really popped and gave a more dimensional look to the design. The roses at the top of the design were selected individually and changed to take on and different hue and saturation than the rest of the flowers. They make the main blooming flowers more of the focal point, I believe. I was very happy with my end results and loved being able to vary away from the color schemes somewhat and add a few more colors in and change some already color pieces. I was anticipating the design would be hard to make but it was very fun to see it change and alter throughout the process.
As my final image concept changed from assignment one to now, I decided to create this urban city theme with a grunge, cartoon like effect, I think the outcome was well worth the change. The image I introduced as the final project was created from three different photos that were taken by me on two different occasions. The sky you see in the background was taken at Corpus Christi Texas. I was traveling to the beach and saw these beautiful, huge clouds and had to get a picture of them. A storm was brewing which created these thick, rich clouds. The other images I used were taken in downtown Chicago Illinois. I went there to participate in my son’s promotion ceremony. I like the tall buildings with the clouds covering the tops of some of them. There is so much history in that city and you can see it in the buildings and landmarks as you navigate through the city.
As I looked through all my photos, trying to find something that stands out for my final image I opened the photo of the buildings and thought they were interesting and would make a good image if they were combined. I took the sky out of the building and layered them on the canvas and knew this is the start of something interesting. I knew I needed a sky so I began my search. I opened the image of the clouds I took at Corpus Christi and knew I found what I was looking for. I ran the image through pixel bender and produced a very interesting oil paint image that created great detail and volume. I layered that photo behind the building and blended it using multiply. By doing this it aloud the vibrant reds and yellows from the bottom of the image to show through the buildings, creating a fire effect that I really liked. I arranged the buildings to compliment the sky and flattened the layers. I then decided to run it through some filters to really make it pop so I went to work.
I started by duplicating the image and blending it with multiply. I then created a new fill layer using threshold and used the previous layer as a clipping mask (check the box below the name field), Which made it really dark. I highlighted the multiply layer and used a high pass filter on it. I then duplicated the original layer and added a surface blur. I made another copy of the original and created a Gaussian blur and moved it over the surface blur. I created a new blank layer on top and painted in the image, bringing back some of the original color. The color didn’t seem rich enough so I recolored some of the image using the split complementary color scheme. The resulting image was full of detail, depth and volume, which I think would look great on a comic book cover. I named it city burning because it represents the hard, gritty, toughness of the streets while at the same time showing the beauty and grandeur of the city.
I have always been a very “artistic” person. I am always scouting for somewhere new to take pictures or something new to take pictures of. When I was a child I was always known as a daydreamer. For my final project I created a design that shows all that I have learned in this class. I used different geometric shapes and different techniques I have learned, such as layering, saturation, hue, duplicating, and cropping, to create an underwater scene of different types of coral. Much like my imagination this is a scene I started out not knowing how it would come out and it evolved into a beautiful underwater scene. I am a very creative person and love playing around with things to see what I come up with. This assignment was challenging to me because it caused me to be more organized in my thoughts. My goal was to use the designs I created to not only show off my creative skills but my graphic design skills as well.
My intentions for this project were to create a composition that took an Andy Warhol-style and put a modernized twist to it. I wanted the twist to produce an ironic message that played on his style. His style is known as “pop art” and because pop culture is one of those flash-in-the-pan types that is absorbed and then spit out by society, I wanted to portray his style after it is has been “spit out” and it’s current state today—a few decades later. So basically we see my interpretation of Warhol’s style after it’s been affected by the quick attention span of pop culture and I added various more modern styles to depict it’s attempt to change over time and show it’s attempt at being relevant in today’s world.
I started out thinking that I would do a self-portrait and make adjustments but I thought that a female subject would make it more cohesive and relate better to the Monroe comp that Warhol did. I also was planning on putting the model into a pose reminiscent of Monroe but then changed my mind when I saw the opportunity to produce an emotion from the figure. I thought to myself, how would Monroe feel after age and being ignored, so I added a bottle of wine to go with the somber look. These were the only things that I changed from my initial proposal.
So I started off taking pictures and trying to achieve a certain look through a series of different poses and I decided on this one. I then cropped the image to get a square dimension and a composition that centers the face. I then set the filters to posterize and set it to get the look that I wanted. I then scaled it down and duplicated it four times. Then I went looking for texture to photograph that would give off an old/grunge-type of appearance. I ended up using images of wood, and an old, wet decayed wall. I set the images’ blending mode to multiply and made the wood pop out a little less that the wall. The wood runs vertically while the wall runs horizontally. I then found produced masks by free handing where I wanted to paint. I wanted to achieve an identical application of paint on each section, which is why I made the mask.
When I applied paint I was basically just playing around with the colors. I liked the Monochrome thumbnail I created in the color schemes but I really wanted to explore with different colors, so decided to use colors that were high contrasting. First off, I wanted the message to be clear that I was taking the Warhol’s Monroe style and putting my own spin on it and giving it a purpose.
So on the top left I put the blonde hair, red lipstick, and blue eyeshadow on that thumbnail. The skin is still a light peach but I wanted to set the blend mode to something that gave her more of a grunge type of look. The light green background is used as a complementary color for the lips and skin—which make those colors stand out.
On the top right I wanted to achieve a zombie-type of look that I achieved in the color schemes. I noticed a couple comments that really liked this look, and I thought it played well into the theme of my design (interpretation: pop culture turned her into a zombie, or now she’s half dead). So first I wanted to start with the skin and I went with a pea green. Again, I was thinking complementary to keep in the theme of the high contrast design, and make those colors pop out, so I went with a blood red (also, helped the zombie look). I really wanted to make the eyes pop out so produced glowing eyes with the yellow and brightened up the color. I then wanted that to contrast with the hair. I chose a blue-violet look, which I thought worked really well looking like dead and lifeless hair. The lips were applied last with a cyan shade of blue. And because the look I wanted to achieve focused on eyes, I chose a lighter value of blue—which contributed to the dead look but also stepped back with the rest of the features except the eyes.
On the bottom left I wanted to give a dark and somber look to her. I applied a dark purple to the skin. I was thinking of using a dark blue for a depressing look but I thought this purple captured a more dramatic feel to it. Then I wanted to apply bright colors to the features to establish some ethereal type of feel. After cycling through various colors I settled on pink for the hair and a light hue of cyan for the eyelids and lips. I was really going for an unnatural look for this one and the heavy contrast between the dark violet and the bright colors of the pink and cyan really divide the features. Combined with the slouching posture it really makes the figure look like she’s falling apart. Finally, I wanted to add a light background to contrast it heavily with the dark skin, so keeping in theme with the somber look, I chose a shade of blue (cyan actually).
The final piece I wanted to make a sick and ill look to the figure so I went with the yellow tone of the skin. Keeping in theme with the high contrast, I decided to use the triad color scheme for the features. I thought the orange, purple, green would look best and I just modified the saturation a little bit. The orange doesn’t have as high of a contrast with the yellow as the other colors so I brightened up the orange and dulled the others. They all seem to be at a consistent level with each other. I then added a puple background to make the skin stand out a little more.
As a whole, there is a ton of contrast in this composition. But it all serves a purpose in their respective corners. I tried to make each segment look different individually and the balance is slightly heavier on the left side. It’s a subtle shift, mainly because there is such high contrast between colors that it is hard to see, but after you look at it for a little while you begin to notice it. That’s what I like about this design—there are so many elements, so many things to look at that it is impossible to absorb it all with one glance. There is a purpose and meaning to every figure, and they all tie in the message I am trying to relay.
While I worked on this, the only difficulty I faced was I would occasionally try to focus on one figure and when I finished and looked at it as a whole composition I realized that the contrast was not heavy enough, so I started over on that section. Other than that it was a fun journey to achieve the look that I desired.
smART minds
I chose the image of DJ Rob Swift and a drawn background, very heavy contrast and abstract. I used a lot of overlap and abstract designs as backgrounds for texture and depth, and heavy positive and negative asymmetrical designs for movement of the eye. Along with the use of contrast, repeating patterns, and color I was able to combine different elements to create a creative design that introduces the view into the world of hip-hop underground music.
I stuck with very bright and warm colors to stay abstract, and give a designed feel to the work. I took elements from all the color studies and incorporated it into the final design. Staying with the theme of my proposal and using hand drawn images, photographs, and design elements, I was able to create a piece of work to highlight the music scene in a designed and colorful way. Keeping a darker background shows what a typical club could look like at night, and keeping a monotone to the DJ reflects what stage lighting can cast. I also refined the image and cleaned up the outlines, and gave way to more of the background for foreground detail.
Proposal
The theme of my final project will be around live music, and the live music scene. I have a great collection of photographs from live shows that show great use of depth and high contrast. I have some hand drawn backgrounds I will incorporate to allow the design to have depth, and keep from a two-dimensional look. I want the viewer to see an abstract view of what a night could look like out in the local dive enjoying a great show. With the use of multiple works to show the full aspect of the show itself, the design will reach all audiences interested in the field, or as just a spectator.
This design will incorporate mostly black and white imagery overlapped in repeating textures to allow your eye to move freely, and focus on each aspect in detail. I enjoy keeping the design one tonal range, and using heavy contrast and sharp lines in a black and white format I should be able to keep with these elements.
Most all of the shapes will be recognizable, and will include real life objects digitally manipulated within Photoshop and Illustrator. Changing the size, rotation and depth of the elements will keep an abstract view to real life objects. With the use of repeating textures, perspective, and shading the design will achieve a three-dimensional look.
I feel that I may include too many elements and styles in one design. I will want to keep the design simple and creative without going overboard. Trying a few different styles, or cropping the design heavily will help to overcome those objectives. Also including a little bit of color may add more to the overall design, I may need to expand from a black and white image to get the look I’m looking for.
For my final I went back to the drawing board. I wanted to make it with three pictures but I made it pretty sloppy looking so I decided to use just use one. I used an image of me holding my guitar. I wanted to use shapes and the pen tool to add some foreground. I used an image of curtains behind my picture to add some background. For the coloring I used multiple gradients and edited how they affected the picture. I wanted it to look all different kinds of colors like the color of different tastes of music.