This semester killed me.

Unfortunately, I lost my flash animation for resubmission. However, I found it somewhat helpful for retaining information because I was able to make an animation much quicker than before.

On to the website...
Making this website has given me a new appreciation for web managers. I have always known HTML but never really understood how much planning, math and small details go into just one page. I do not think I would ever like to design webpages unless I were more familar with ratios and how to space images. I kind of think that someday there will be a program that does this for you, which is somewhat scary.

I am proud of my website because I made sure that everything looks visually similar. However I would have liked to add more of my content into the webpage so that I had more to show for this semester. Still, I am proud of my work overall.

I am more comfortable with Flash, InDesign, and DreamWeaver because of my loss of projects this semester. Perhaps this is a blessing in disguise!

HTML Coding

In middle school I had learned the basics of HTML coding, and for some reason they have always stuck with me. I was always fascinated at how much you could control the web pages with hexadecimals, and still am today. I hope to make my web page something easily navigational, but with a interesting theme. I say theme purposefully because I want all of the images, colors, and layouts to be unified throughout my website. This being said, I want a simple colorful background, with an interesting banner that I will probably hand-draw, scan and import. I know I want a sidebar for navigation, to draw the viewers eye central instead of downward. As for colors, I want a teal, yellow, crimson and cream palate, as this is present in most of my artwork. I will, of course, use this opportunity to compile all of my different mediums to showcase all of them!

My flying bird.

I thought that for my own animation, I wanted to make sure I fully understood the concept enough to create something from scratch. I decided I wanted to have my hands open and then a bird fly out. I wasn't so sure where I was going to go from there. I know I wanted the bird to write words at the end, so in between I need to create some more motion. Perhaps I will have it swoop up, and then down through a field of sunflowers. I need to make sure I move the flowers, instead of the bird, because it is staying in the stage for the most part. I think the most difficult part of this will be keyframing everything to make images appear when I want them, and the disappear when I don't. For example, I may want the bird to go back into my hands at the very end of the animation. We shall see!

Digital Animation

Well. I never quite thought I'd spend so much time making a ball bounce across a screen. For me it was very frustrating to understand the concept of keyframes. It seems simple: each keyframe is a point in time that the object is in a specific location, or a specific shape. You can then "tween" to have the object morph or move between keyframes. However, you must make sure that there is enough time for the object to remain in a keyframe for it to look realistic. This means copy and pasting keyframes before and after the initial keyframe to elongate the motion.

Equally frustrating for me was the idea that in order to make the ball look like it was passing a tree, you must move the tree instead of the ball. Once you know this is the case, making an animation is that much easier.

Batch Image Critque

This critique I found myself realizing that there were so many approaches to this project that I had not considered. I think I took the right approach in not narrowing down the facial features, however. In some of the final projects, some people had not realized that by cropping just one photo so tightly, you may not get the information you want in each of the other pictures because of the orientation of the first.
A lot of people described mine as interesting, but there was one comment that I really agreed with.
The colors of the blocks I had chosen could essentially wash some of the photos out. Because of that, next time I may use more opaque and contrasting colors in my final version.

Batch Image Project

Initially, I thought of this project as another challenge for me to abstract the face. However, after a few trials, I realized I did not want to simplify the face into something as boring as line and movement (although this is usually never boring, it was becoming somewhat predictable for me). So, I decided to focus instead on the composition of all of the photographs together. I decided that blocks of color would help bring out the different backgrounds and object orientation of each photo. I also wanted to make them very grainy to help make them somewhat more digitized, as this is something i often struggle with.

I did not run into very many obstacles in this project, other than in the adobe bridge aspect. For whatever reason, I could not seem to create one folder with all of my batch images there. Next time, I will make sure to go slow enough that I remember where I put my folders and name them appropriately. I also wish I had made my slideshow more interactive with my pictures because presentation can either ruin or make a project sometimes.

1st Crit

Well, I do live critiques! I sincerely enjoy looking at other artists work, trying to dissect what they have done and picking out my favorite parts to learn to replicate their techniques.
I have to say I was very shocked with the response from the group. Because mine was less literal and more of an abstract piece of art, I believe the general response was "that's pretty!". I loved this reaction, because I don't see myself of a literal artist.

However, I would like to be able to create something I would not have to explain entirely. I did hear from several people that "after you explained it, I really got it and I really liked it!". While that reaction was greatly appreciated, I think I will try to make my work a little more obvious when necessary, but will stick with my general abstract work.

I think I am starting to progress as an artist, as I do not have to think so much about what I want to accomplish with each piece. Everyone seemed very pleased with my composition, and I know that I did not really have to take time to perfect it. Because of this, I now have more confidence in my work when it comes to overall composition.

Overall, I think I did very well on the first project, and look forward to the next!

1st Project

This project was a lot of fun for me. As usual, I tried to think outside of the box with my approach. I knew that I wanted to accomplish several goals with this project. I wanted to get more familiar with drawing/painting in photoshop, both realistically and abstractly. I also wanted to get more familiar with layers and creating an overall composition I was proud of. Usually I work too closely to my project, so I tried to take a few steps back this time.

I was very particular with my choice of fruit/vegetable, because I wanted something with a lot of color and form to work with. This project I made sure to sketch out my ideas fully before messing around in Photoshop. Still, I left myself a little wiggle room to explore the options.

I learned that it is much better to approach a digital project with a general idea, and to be open about the possibilities of how to execute my plan. Because of this, I believe I came out with a very elaborate and clean project.

I perfected my use of the paintbrush tool, the smudge tool, and the color mixing tool. I have finally found a way to mimic the way that I paint, which I found to be quite a relieving find. I also worked with the scanner and inverting color/tinting the image, which I would like to become more familiar with.

First Class

Testing, testing...