Blog Entry #5: Self-Evaluation

I think the most significant accomplishment is the second image in my final projects shown on the left. I was able to combine many images seamlessly into an entirely new image. It was definitely a challenge for me as well since it took a lot of time and attention to detail to get the pictures to meld together just right. I used the vanishing point filter in order to extend the buildings realistically. I also used a lot of masks in order to blend parts of the images together. The most difficult thing was finding realistic damaged pieces of buildings and placing them together with the new looking buildings. It took time to find these damaged pieces and then more masks/blending with the eraser as well layer blending modes to make the damaged portions appear like they were how the buildings would look on the inside. It was also difficult to match the plant colors since a simple image adjustment will not always make pictures exactly match in tone and brightness. I feel like I was able to blend multiple plant images into a realistic scene of what the world might look like in the future.

The project on the right is our movie poster quiz. I had a lot of trouble initially with this project due to selection errors. I used a select color range and I was getting a lot of filmy background remaining around my image even if it looked like I hadn't selected it. After this difficulty, I learned that since it was so easy to ctrl+click on an image in order to see what all was selected, then it would be smart to do this each time before I created a new layer after selection. This preview selection would show a sparkley little ant trail in every area that was selected. This showed me many times if I had extra things selected and I was able to use the quick selection tool to remove these extra areas of selection. By learning this I was able to easily check my selections each time and then refine the selection edges so that I was able to get very crisp selections. By the end of the quarter I was able to do this quickly and easily so it took less time to touch up my images as I was blending them into the new background.

The image on the left is the combined image of both halves of my midterm diptych and the image below on the right is the first of my final project images. In the midterm diptych image I took a very literal look at reality versus fantasy. I tried to show the various aspects of fantasy when it comes to video games and magic and other things and tried to show reality by showing a real person (myself) and death as well as the real world. Although this method was able to easily show the Big Idea I was striving for, it probably wasn't a deep as it could of been.

If you look at the first of my final images however, I left this image very open to interpretation. The main goals I went for were trying to blend a real-life person into an anime girl and I also wanted the girl to have very real looking emotions. I think I was able to obtain this goal and in doing so I think I was able to show a deep meaning in this image. In fact, I think this image may have brought inspiration to me for my second final image. Even though I didn't really see the whole meaning of this first image initially, the sadness lead me to think of why a person would be this sad. This lead me to the idea of the destroyed world and lack of all human life. So in developing this image, I was able to extend my Big Idea from a simple reality versus fantasy to wondering about the reality and fate of the earth and what might happen to humans if we keep treating the earth like we currently are. This all started from me trying to show a deep sadness in the girl, without making it look overly dramatic or unreal by overusing photoshop effects.

Blog Entry #4: Final Project

For my main final project, my big idea relates to real vs. fantasy in a sense. More specifically it relates to what we think our future will be like vs. how it might be if we keep living like we're living. I combined an image of a city street with an image of a forest line. I'm not quite finished yet but I'm trying to make it look like the forest has overgrown into a world where humans haven't lived for many years. I'm also going to try to degrade the buildings to make it look like a terrible war happened which was part of the reason the humans are all gone. I'm going to use the empty space in the center of the image to convey the lack of human life. This image could serve as kind of a warning against the effects of global warming and war. Environmentalists could use this image in order to promote better treatment of the environment.

My work was influenced by the artist Alexander Casteels that I mentioned in my last post. He takes a darker look into things that would ordinarily seem innocent and childlike. I want my final piece to look serene even though it means that humans have been wiped off the planet. This image from his works particularly interested me. Without that sad little pig, the rest of the image seems like a beautiful dark night on the ocean until you realize that the ship sinking in the background probably caused a lot of death.

I was also influenced by various post-apocalyptic movies such as Cloverfield and The Happening as well as others. For instance in this Cloverfield image, a halfway destroyed statue of liberty is shown.  This image may seem peaceful since nothing is taking place in the image.  But, if we think about what caused this to happen to the statue and what that statue means to Americans then it becomes very disturbing.

A similar effect is gained when we look at this image from The Happening. Again it seems initially peaceful, but then we start to think about why all these cars have been vacated alongside the road. We realize that something very bad indeed must've happened to either scare people away or remove all presence of humans in some other way from these vehicles.

I was mainly influenced by these post-apocalyptic movies due to their increasing presence in modern media. This is due to the Aztec calendar saying that the world will end in 2012. I thought it would be interesting to explore this kind of paranoia that many people feel that's being caused by something that's so very old and somewhat unknown to us.






Since I am trying to show a sadness in this image from the loss of human life, I want to add rain to this picture. I'm going to try and use this method to create the rain. I may or may not include this in my art depending on the quality of the end result, but I'm going to try and add rain since I think it will make the viewer connect with the sadness that this image is supposed to show.

Blog Entry #3: Final Project Bid Idea Artists

While completing my midterm project, a different big idea began to develop in my mind as I was trying to show our fantasy/reality idea. I realized that I like to examine how different artists create people in their works of art. I found an artist that takes a very dark look in how they create their characters. This artist is Alexander Casteels and the image to the right is one of his and it can be found here. I really like the darkness of this artist. He takes things such as fairytale characters and uses literal darkness as well as dark ideals to show a kind of irony of how real life isn't like fairytales. Another one of his works is shown below and can be found here.

His big ideas have to do with emotional darkness such as sorrow, pain, & evil and dreamlike images. I think it's inspiring in how this artist takes fantastic things like the fairytales I mentioned earlier and brings them down to earth. It makes me want to know more about this artists life. His artwork would make me think initially that he's had a hard life and has been surrounded by a lot of optimistic people that he's wanted to share his life with through his artwork. I will use aspects of my life to inspire my final project similar to how this artist has had his life affect his artwork. I will also try to add some darkness to my images. I don't want to add nearly as much as this artist did, but I think darkness helps to bring deep thoughts out of the image.

The second artist is Carlos Ortega Elizalde and his images are more three dimensional. The image to the right specifically drew my attention since it goes along with our midterm bid idea of real/fantasy very well and can be found here. I really like how these images are three dimensional since it gives them more of a real aspect. This artist seems to have big ideas of fantasy and a simple kind of happiness. Many of his images are of strange creatures or robots that are happily smiling. Another image that I liked of his is shown below and can be found here.

I think this artwork is inspiring due to its bright colors and textures. It must take the artist a long time to create the surfaces required to make this art three dimensional. Although many of this artist's images have a simple happiness to them, some of them seem very extraterrestrial and real. There is a serious aspect to these alien creatures that diverges from the fantasy of his other images. I wonder how this artist is able to put himself in these two different mindsets so he can create both types of images. I will use this inspiration to try to make my images more three dimensional both literally and give them more dimensional meaning by trying to put myself in multiple mindsets. I used some techniques in my midterm project to make my artwork three dimensional, but if I can I'd like to use even more in my final project so that my artwork looks similar to this artist's.

Blog Entry #2: Photoshop Bubble Tutorial

I used a tutorial that explained how to take a stock image of a straw berry and a stock image of a bubble and make the berry appear to be a bubble shown here. I used the cherry image shown below & to the left.  I also used the bubble image shown below & to the right.  The tutorial suggested that the fruit image's background be fairly simple.  This is because later in the tutorial you have to remove the fruit completely while retaining the shadows from the background.  I also chose a bubble with a simple background as it was easy to use the magic wand and quick selection tool to remove the bubble from it's background image.

The image to the right shows me lowering the transparency of the bubble and placing it over the cherry.  The lowered transparency helped me see how much I need to liquefy the bubble to completely match the cherry.  I have adjusted the size using scaling transformations as well so that less liquefying will be necessary in the next stage.

To the left shows an image of me in the process of liquefying the bubble around the cherry.  This process is almost completed but a few edges still need to be touched up so that the bubble fits the cherry exactly. The bubble gets desaturated to pure black & white after this as well as being duplicated a few times and getting its transparency adjusted.  The cherry is then extracted from the image & desaturated and set to overlay.


The image to the right shows the next step in the process.  The cherry must be removed from the background layer so that the we can see the background through the bubble cherry.  I used the clone stamp in order to clone the shadow of the cherry.  This was fairly difficult since the shadow is a gradient so I used a softer brush with a lower transparency.  I also used the dust & scratches filter in order to airbrush the shadow since I had imperfect stamping.

Since the cherry now shows the background behind it, it must also show the small bit of stem that is covered by the front surface of the cherry.  It must also show a reflection of the stem on top of the cherry.  I copied the lower part of the stem and placed it below the bottom of the stem slightly to show the small bit of stem that's covered.  Then I copied the entire stem and mirrored it 180.  I had to rotate it slightly more to get the right angle of the reflection.  I also lowered the transparency so that it would look reflective and not solid.

Next I added the reflection of a different bubble.  I had to remove this bubble from it's black background first but this was very easy to do by selecting the color range of black and then unselecting the parts inside the bubble.

The same process as before is used to mold this bubble onto the surface of the cherry.  This time though the bubble transparency must be lowered a lot since the reflection in the image comes from trees and a building.  These things aren't present in the background of our image, but this reflection will do just fine at a lowered transparency.

The final step is lightening the cherry with respect to the background.  This is accomplished by adding a brightness of -40 to the entire image.  Then you simply select the mask layer and erase parts that lay over the bubble & stem.  This makes the background just slightly less bright than the fruit in the image.

The final image is shown below.

Blog Entry #1: Dan LuVisi

Dan LuVisi is a digital concept artist and he works mainly in the video game and comic book industry.  A few of his images are shown below but a showcase of his work can be found here.  I observed several denotations while looking at his work.

Layla

In the 1st photo called Layla there is a girl with mid-length flowing brown hair dressed up majorly in what I'd have to call 80's clothing.  For instance her yellow short shorts and her purple and pink wide-necked sweater.  There are some obvious exceptions to this such as her ipod nano, the nintendo ds strapped to her thigh, her robotic-looking armor on her left arm and left leg and her strange futuristic rocket crossbow.  She also has 80's style roller blades but they don't look like they are plain roller blades since there are beams of light trailing from them due to her movement.  She has several necklaces and a belt that relate to videogame characters and a blocky bright red 80's style watch and large green headphones as well as a pair of dark blocky sunglasses.  The background of the image consists of a blue sky that flows similarly to her pattern of movement with pinkish-white clouds that frame the patch of diagonal sky.

From this image several connotations become apparent as well.  For instance the overwhelming influence of the 80's culture hints at the influence of this era over our artist.  Since he was born in 1985, the 80's probably did have a large effect over his life.  Also on his website it mentions how "inspiration struck him in form of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" which ran from 1987-1996.  Another thing I noticed in this image was how the large sunglasses, the chunky red watch and the green headphones could either be items from the 80's or items from today since some of the aesthetics of 80's culture have been blending into what is popular today.  This cross between 80's influence, the items of today, and the futuristic bow & roller blades show us how things change over time but in some ways still remain the same.  It shows how human technology has evolved and how he might want it to evolve.

Another connotation of this image stems from the overwhelming amount of technology-based items that the girl has in her possession.  Seeing as how she seems to be busy fighting something with her bow or at least trying to destroy something with it, it seems impractical that she would need an ipod nano with her.  This distracting amount of technology fits along well with current society.  With all of the smart phones available and the new ones being designed to "save us from our phones" it seems that we might need to take a closer look at ourselves.  Do we really need all of this technology with us all the time or is it causing a distraction to our bigger purpose?

This image can be downloaded here.

Hailie

The 2nd image denotes a hybrid girl.  In some ways she is very feminine:  her hair is done up into a nice bump, she is wearing makeup, she has very feminine accessories such as a daisy behind her ear, two small shiny earrings, her turquoise-framed sunglasses, a diamond-studded necklace, fishnet stockings, and a skimpy bikini-like outfit all standing against a pink background with lighter pink polka dots.  In other ways she looks like she is ready for war:  her futuristic metal boxing gloves with a sawblade wrist guard, her ammo belts storing a beer (even though they are also storing lipstick and an expensive water bottle) with a punk rock belt buckle, the fact that her diamond necklace is a set of brass knuckles, the top of her boots and neckguard look like they are both heavy duty, her cowboyish bandana, her metal studded bikini top, her muscular stomach with a scar, and her tattoos (even though some are girly things like hummingbirds).

This image comes from Dan LuVisi's book Last Man Standing: Kill Book of A Bounty Hunter which is obviously about bounty hunters, but is set some time in the future during a time when the world is overtaken by World War Z.  Connotations observed from the photo come from this girl's gear.  Her gloves are very menacing and look like they'd give quite a beating.  From this, it seems like the World Wars of the future will be very tough indeed.  This sense of foreboding could stem from acts of terrorism like 9/11 or other calamities like hurricane Katrina that have changed our perspective of the world in recent years.  This could be giving readers a warning of what life might be like in the future and that we should either try to avoid it or prepare ourselves like this woman has as shown by her toned abs and weaponry.

Other connotations come from the shear difference between the war-like and feminine attributes of the woman.  Many women in the media today are taking this good girl gone bad attitude in the way they act and dress.  This tough outer shell could be covering up for either a real or presumed weakness inside.  A good example of this would be the actual Good Girl Gone Bad album created by the singer Rihanna who is a known victim of male abuse.  This image shows how some woman think they need to use this tough outer exterior to protect themselves.

This image can be downloaded here.

At the Image_Self exhibition we talked with several of the artists who had work displayed in the gallery. I found the image that combined the girl and her grandma in one picture that was modified into an old photo very interesting. I really liked how she thought of the idea for her art, that she wanted to spend a day with anyone she could and how she tried to combine features of herself and her grandma to physically show the family resemblance. It was very cool that she was able to make up this memory for herself and in doing so I'm sure she was able to gain more of a bond for her late grandma.

First Post

I'd like to be able to use photoshop like this.