Book Assignment

Week 10: Someone Else

Maybe it's my current mental state, but I found this image to be incredibly funny as well as creative! An orange finds his naked mate in bed with another fruit, screams in fury, goes to friends for consoling, and then resorts to a lonely smoke and booze before bed (or at least that's what I get from it). I really love the lighting and placement of objects in this image--capturing emotion of FRUIT with simple little faces.

After all the blogging and image creation I've done for this class, I think I might start up my own blog of images plus commentary or even a web comic! I would really like to take an Illustrator class or some form of advanced Photoshop to accomplish this. Even if no one but my friends sees it, its been rather cathartic for me to just create, or even sit back and laugh at the humor of others creations. I don't think I could be an illustrator for a career, but continuing this blog sure would be a good way to build a portfolio! =)

Week 10: Me

So being that it's finals week, I've been having a lot of discussions with friends via text about how stressed out we all are. I've been so stressed in fact, that I've had no inspiration for either my Week 10 post or the cover of the book I'm designing. One of my friends, who doesn't know me very well, was laughing when I said that today I looked and felt like a crazy psycho about to snap at any moment. He kept responding, "No.... hahahaha, you are too nice to be that crazy of a person!".

Oh REALLY?!

I stood up and took a picture of myself with my phone, wanting only the glare in my eyes to get the point across. The image above is the result of a couple shots I ended up taking, trying to REALLY capture the crazy I'm feeling. As luck would have it, my paper star-light hanging from my ceiling, ended up in the picture as well to really perfect this image. When my friend saw the picture I sent to him, he responded, "Holy f***......creeeeeepy.......and what the hell is above your head, psycho?!". If an image is supposed to convey emotion, then I think I've made my point! I like this image SO much, in fact, that I'm gonna use an altered version of it on the cover of my darkly funny book of quotes I'm making. Two birds, one stone! =)

Scratch Assignment

For my scratch assignment, I first created the "aurora" image immediately above. I was really happy with the way the Aurora Borealis turned out in this image by selecting an area with the Lasso tool, and then just applying a multicolored gradient over it. I had to play with the opacity and blur a lot to get it to look just right in the sky. I ended up adding a second "wave" of color, just to add to the effect of light in the sky. Total, with all the different components in this image, I ended up with close to thirty layers--many of which I ended up merging together so I could do the lighting/shadowing effects.

The snowman image was probably the most fun. I love the snow and after one of my recent posts which featured a snowman, I decided it would be fun to play with the lighting effects of snow. I did it much less blended than with the aurora, but that was for the intended cut-out paper type look it has. Originally, I just had a snowy landscape, the trees, and the snowman. After discovering that I have ZERO skill to make anything resembling a tree trunk, I decided to kinda cheat and use an additional mound of snow to kinda block the hideous tree trunks I had created. Hopefully it wasn't obvious I was taking the easy route by doing that. =)

GODZILLA!! Papercraft

When I had decided to go off-template for my papercraft assignment, I had no idea just how irritatingly complicated it would be. There were many things I had planned to add to my papercraft, but I settled on just an additional box for a snout, and a large rectangle for a tail. Many of my other attempts were complete failures, and I still have yet to actually print out and attempt this most recent one (although I WILL add a picture of the completed Godzilla by tomorrow, so stay TUNED!).

My biggest problem was trying to get the realizm that you are looking at Godzilla, rather than just a large lizard. But I suppose if I know what it's supposed to be, that's all that really matters. It's hard to make a cartoon-like Godzilla without it looking a little goofy (one of the reasons I gave him a toothy grin). However, I did get great enjoyment messing around with this flat color design, and I'm excited to see how it turns out......and yes, his head is going to be MASSIVE!

Week 8: Someone Else

This post contains an exceptionally tall image from one of my new favorite web comics VGCats (vgcats.com). I'm really new to comics, but there is a flow to most that can't be messed with, and although I could have photoshopped this into a square, I really like the flow it has as is. So just click to view!

Having never read many comic books as a kid, I'm finding more and more that webcomics are definitely up my alley. VGCats in particular tends to theme most of it's entries around video games and the industry producing them. The above image is actually one of the few that were done simply as a Christmas entry, but still in the usual darkly funny style. I have no experience using Adobe Illustrator, but I'm thinking it's what was probably used to create this. I can imagine the headache of doing this in Photoshop, but it is possible of course. The gradient mapping alone of the colors is very richly done, and would probably make my head explode if attempted. Someday I hope to have even greater skill for my own designs; people like me with stunted art skills need a lot of practice and digital help! =)

Week 8: My Work

This week we went out and chopped down our Christmas tree from the Reuben Tree Farm out past Glendale. It took at least an hour of searching around before we found the perfect tree. Now we always tend to get a large tree, usually about a seven footer, but this year we just couldn't find the perfect tree in that size range. The one we ended up settling on was actually closer to 11.5 feet tall; this was a problem since the ceiling is only about 8 feet off the ground. After much effort cutting it down, though a massively thick trunk, I was suprised to see an almost perfect star pattern created by the tree's rings.

I took a picture, with my handy phone, and it looked even more defined on my little screen. I immediately uploaded the picture onto my computer, but upon doing so, I could barely make out the star pattern that had captured my attention. Remembering one of our lessons in lab, I used Photoshop to create a new layer and used the Overlay blend mode. Instantly the star popped back out in the picture. I had to do a few adjustments to remove the strikingly PINK coloring it inherited, but otherwise it developed into an interesting image.

Late Week 7: My Own Work

Out of all my collages, I think this is the one I am most happy with! I was browsing around, and I somehow found the above quote from Dr Seuss. I'm not one for cheesy phrases, but this one really has a nice feel to it I think. It's the same sort of thing that Hitler would say, but given that Seuss was emphatically anti-nazi back in his day, I will stick to the more positive implications. The quote itself, I believe, represents Seuss' work; not just anyone can invent nonsensical words and have several best sellers!

The quote itself made me think a lot about my favorite childhood Seuss character the Lorax--the prophetic tree-hugging activist. It just seemed to fit as a central image for the quote. I found another image of a city, which I'm pretty sure was drawn by Seuss as well, but if not at least fits the spirit of his whimsical drawings. My happiest find for this collage was an actual Dr Seuss font that I downloaded and used within Photoshop--something I'd never attempted before. I included another clipped picture from the Seuss tribute postage stamp, took out a few characters, and it as well seemed to fit perfectly for my purposes. The characters surrounding him, if not all characters he's ever created, all seem to share the same trait of speaking their minds.