Exquisite Corpse

This project served as our mid term. The way an exquisite corpse works is: a group of people get a sheet of paper, then take turns drawing part of the body. The catch is this: no one can see what the other people have done. Sometimes, like in our project, guides are drawn so the image lines up. We worked in groups of three, rotating around the room. We worked in layers, one layer per person, and hid all previous layers. One person did the head, another the torso, and the last the legs. I did the head in this one, but I can't find the legs or torso that I did, but they were along the same lines: a skeletal structure laid under a flesh structure. This was an interesting project, but I think it would have worked better if the background was the same.

Shakespeare Project

This is the Shakespeare project. We were supposed to pick a quote and design an image around it. I found the image on the internet, placed it in illustrator, then put it into live paint. I'm glad I found the text, it was just the thing to pull it together. For anyone who wants to know, it's called Zapfino. I put the light green square in the background to tie it all together. With a little help, I finally got the text to work with the image.

This is the second project we did, an appropriated image used in a poster. This image is one of Gustave Dore's prints for The Divine Comedy, specifically a scene from The Inferno. I used live trace, then traced over the lines to get the image I wanted. This was by far the most time-consuming project of the semester, and it turned out really well. I created the gradient myself, then used black to offset it. It still didn't look quite right, so I put a dark gray block of color behind most of the image, and it looked complete. There was text that made the image look like a book cover, but I think it looks better without text.

Brandon made this image, the start of the fight.

This image was done by Stacey Trujillo, one of my oartners. She designed the end of the fight story.

Final Project

This is the final project for this class, a collaborative game design project. Our original plan was to go with a story board format, which caused interesting issues. In the end, the project was a lot of fun. For my image, I drew the fight scene, then (after a lot of trouble with the school scanners) scanned it into illustrator, used live trace, and presto. I used live paint, then painted in the shadows and highlights using various brushes and colors from illustrator. I used drop shadows, and the shape function in illustrator. After that, I made my own gradients and changed the angles accordingly. In the end, the project was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed using illustrator to color my own drawing, something I've wanted to try for a long time.

I've never been a fan of having my picture taken, not even when I was little. For this project, I wanted to use photos and pieces of artwork I've created in the past to make the portraits. Many images are from Ireland, and I've got three or four from when I was a really little kid. My main goal for this was to get more familiar with photoshop and the mac, since I've used windows for years, but I also wanted to create beautiful images. I tried to make the newly combined images look like they've always been together, and some of them were meant to remain as photos. There are even a few that are designed to look like paintings.
This project, while it was very time-consuming and admittedly more frustrating than I dreamed, was very educational. By and large, I am satisfied with all of the images, and extremely pleased with a few of them. In the future, I hope to use illustrator in conjunction with photoshop. (don't forget to look at the older posts for the rest of the images).

Project 1: 10 Self-Portraits

The ten images below this are all part of the first project, and they took a very long time. Each of he images is as close in size as I could get them, and the longest side on all of them is 800 pixels. Most of them are 800 by 600, but a few of the ones I cropped are 800 by some wierd number of pixels. Anyway, I hope everyone enjoys.

I thought this turned out fairly well, considering all of the trouble I had with it. I scanned two separate images of myself into ps, then combined them. I thought the similar poses of myself would look cute together. One photo, the one on the right, was professionally done ad of a much better quality than the rest. I cut around myself with the lasso tool, then added film grain. Then, seeing that there was too much, I tried to balance it out by adding the same filter to the low res picture. Then I somehow added film grain again to the one on the right, and ended up needing to fix the background again. In the end, I couldn't get the two separate photos to look exactly like one, so I had to play around a bit more, and put a poster filter on the background photo to hide the join. While the two photos don't mesh as well as I hoped, the outcome is still good.
Just a note, that is a real dear behind me, and yes, it was part of the original photo. I don't remember how we managed to get so close to a doe, but the photo is amazing, despite being seventeen years old.

This was another challenging but fun one. It's a picture of me as a little girl, wearing the same outfit as an earlier portrait, but it was a fairly low resolution photo. I scanned it into ps, got most of the red eye out, then scanned in a drawing of one wing I did earlier. I cut close to the wing, copied and rotated it, then placed the wings and cut them to fit around myself. I then applied brush filters to the original photo, and applied the same brush filter and a film grain to the wings. Last of all, if made the wings translucent. I'm glad I was able to downplay the red eye with the brush filter.

Another one from Ireland. This one, well, the castle is beautiful. I cut around my image, shrunk it down and placed it in the picture. Can you find me? I though it would be fun at least.

This one didn't turn out as good as I hoped. The landscape is another photo from Ireland, as is the pose I'm in. I intended to replace the fountain with a photo of myself, and it worked I guess. I do like the way my red shirt stands out in from the green though, and the landscape is beautiful.

This one was very challenging. The landscape is an acrylic painting I did myself. I had to take a photo of it, and because of the size, I couldn't get the whole thing straight o without casting my shadow on it, so (after it was in photoshop) I spent probably 40 minutes trying to adjust the perspective without distorting the painting too badly. Then I scanned a photo of myself at three into photoshop and placed myself in my landscape. I applied a brush filter and an artistic filter to make it look like a part of the painting, copied the image and flipped the copy. Then I skewed it to get the reflection in the water, and set the transparencies for both to make them look like a part of the original painting. Did it work reasonably well?

I took a photo of my shadow, then of my surroundings, and put them together. I changed the perspective on my shadow, darkened it, and enlarged it. I thought it had an interesting, almost haunting look.

No, this is not a real tattoo. I took the dragons (Ireland) and a photo of my right wrist and combined them. The dragons I lightened and faded (after adjusting the perspective), and it turned out well.

This one was one of the easiest. I had to change the orientation of the background (Also from Ireland), but then I faded out my image, lightened it, and applied overlay (I think).I really like the simplicity of this one, and while I don't generally like yellow, I think the flowers work really well with the ruins behind them.

This is the second piece. The Mandala is one I made myself, and the original is too large for a scanner, so I took a photo of it, rearranged the perspective so that it was straight on instead of slanted, and darkened the black parts. I added a filter to the image in the background (also from Ireland) and faded the mandala. I know I'm not in this one, but I hate having my picture taken, and the whole point of a self-portrait is to show yourself, and I feel that the best way to do that is through my art work. That said, I am in all of the others, but I just didn't want to take attention away from the mandala this time.

After a lot of work, I managed to get tihs image done. It combines three photos, two of which I took myself. The middle ground photo is from Ireland when I went over the summer. I took out that sky and added a sunset picture I took from my backyard, then put a photo of myself on the very top and made it more translucent. I added a filter effect to the middle ground, and was done with it.

After several snares, I registered for a full semester this fall. One of my classes, Intro to Digital Design, requires us to maintain a blog for the duration of the semester and place all of our assignments on it. As I have never blogged before, this will be a new, if trying, experience. I'll decide at the end of the semester whether or not I want to keep going.
This is the first assignment of the semester. The terms were to create a piece of artwork in a program that is not usually used for that purpose. I decided to use Microsoft Word. The words in the image are passages from a story I've been writing for a while, which if ever completed, I would like to publish. I figured that, since I was using a writing program, it would be neat to make the words into art of some sort, so I played around with the fancy text features and the colors. I thought about the mood I was trying to evoke with the words and tried to find a text that matched. My goal was to form a suggestive landscape by the color and placement of the words.