Food Project (Visual Art Piece)
Out of all the possible mediums I could have chosen to use for this project, I chose Adobe Photoshop. While I used other mediums throughout my process, such as hand sketching and Adobe Illustrator, I was sure to make Photoshop my primary one. I did this because I felt most comfortable with Photoshop, as we have used it all year in various Digital Arts projects. A major goal of mine was to show how much I had learned about the program through my Food Project representation.
To get a generally scary mood to become pronounced in my art piece, I used color to create contrast within the piece of corn. I wanted the soft, benign yellow color of the kernels to be overpowered by the malevolent eyes, so I contrasted the two layers with my color choice. Also, to show how powerful agrochemical conglomerates have become in comparison to local operations, I used proportion and scale. By making my representation of organic farms (the carrot) look so tiny beside the looming piece of corn, I accomplished my goal of conveying the magnitude of industrial power. If I were to do this project all over again, I would take a completely different approach from the start. Rather than stay in my comfort zone and use Photoshop as my medium, I wish I would have tried something fairly new, such as painting. I think developing a more neglected skill would have been beneficial to my overall experience, as I believe I would have enjoyed myself more. |
Ancient Egyptian Art Brochure
For our first Adobe InDesign project, we made a brochure about an art piece or art topic in Ancient Egypt. We learned all about gradient use and proper formatting. While we were given basic guidelines for the making of these brochures, we were given a lot of artistic freedom to complete them to what best fit our topic. I really liked that we got to choose our subject matter, as I found it easier to connect to the material when writing informative paragraphs about it. Because of this, the brochure project was one of my favorite projects of the semester.
Prehistoric Drawing
A primary component of our Art History lectures and activities was our exploration of "prehistoric drawings." The original copies were pencil-drawn, permitting use of two different types of erasers and a set of sketching pencils. we then scanned our refined drawings and opened them in Adobe Illustrator, where we experimented with different thresholds and live trace options. It was interesting to see all the variations in appearance when new settings were applied to the drawings.
|
|
Flash Animation Project |
The Flash Animation Project was by far the most frustrating project we have done all year in Digital Arts. All aspects of the process were difficult, from the frame-by-frame picture taking (moving dolls a centimeter at a time) to the final project assembly (which combined the use of multiple programs). This goes without saying, but patience was a key practice throughout the process. I did, however, learn the basics of stop motion animation making in Adobe Flash, which was quite the enriching experience. |
Photography
In preparation for the stop-motion animation we would be doing for the upcoming Flash Animation Project, photography was a focal point of the semester. We mainly worked on composition techniques, such as the rule of thirds, the golden section rule, and depth of field basics. Below are some examples of lighting and depth of field exploration.