Well, what defiantly helped me most on this project was the basic knowledge I learned of Photo shop. I know the book isn’t flashy, it isn’t even all that interesting but, Well it was a how to manual, you are supposed to read it, not ooo and ahh at how it looks. As far as keeping on a schedule, I defiantly learned that simple is not always a bad thing. There were a lot of things I could have done to add bells and whistles but I didn’t really want to. I didn’t want this to be flashy and showy, I wanted the information inside the book to be worth more than the fancy ways I could have presented it in.
So, for my very first image, I chose it because it belonged to my very favorite gaming studio, Blizzard. Originally there was some text, the Blizzard logo as well as the titles of the three different franchises. I chose to erase this text because; well I think they look better with out it. I mostly just used the stamp tool; it just worked the best for me. As far as maintaining critical perspective I really have no idea. I just did what my gut told me too. Maybe not the best approach but that is just the artist I am.
To be blatantly honest I didn’t really think about being apart of something larger. I feel bad in saying this but I didn’t really care, I just wanted to get the project done. The people I photographed are my cousins, Arena and Merissa, and myself. Merissa is first though she is the younger. I choose them because they are the closest to me in age in my family. Arena is 3 years younger than me and Merissa is 5. I took a photo of myself mostly for ease, though it was just of me sitting in the art lab because that is were I spend most of my free time. Honestly? No, I don’t think I can or will change the world.
The poster project had me really stumped for a long time. I had one idea that I really wanted to do, but could not find pictures large enough to support the size needed for the project. Ine then end I settled on two things I really enjoy and am quite proud of how it turned out. As far as Themes go I wanted to go a little darker, a little more sinister than I had in the past. To be honest I didn't need to use many tools other than the removal tool. And when it came to text I really just rolled with what I thought looked best regarding both groups and what they are known for. As far as effecting the audience went, I really just wanted to catch their eye and leave an impression. With the propaganda poster for Chaos, I could have gone for a more fearful look, but I feel that what i have works with what I wanted to get.
My photos were of a few different things that I thought would work well together. All 4 were pictures I had taken long in advance and just had sitting on my phone (camera) waiting to either be sent to my comp or get deleted. The Tiger is from the Denver city zoo and the girl is my best friend Leah Brown. The other two are the moon in the upper left hand corner, with Canon beach and Haystack Rock in the background.
This sounds really, really bad but I didn’t really notice much of a difference between the flat and continues color tones. Mostly I just did what I always do, find a color scheme that I think works and ran with it. Of all three my favorite is the shadow of Haystack rock. It proved to be the most challenging but also the most fun. I was going for something like the sun setting behind it, I think it came out really well.
I chose colors that I thought complemented each other well, I didn’t worry so much about how anyone else thought they would look, only focused on what I thought looked good and worked with it. For example, my last piece started as just a bunch of haphazardly placed red blocks on a green background. From there I shrunk all the blocks down, and then copied the layer over and over again until I filled up the op left hand corner, then I just merged all the layers into one and inversed it into the bottom right hand corner. It became a sort of flag that I really liked.
Obviously some colors worked better than others but I can’t really tell you why. Sometimes the so called “complementary” colors looked the worst together. So after a certain amount of trial and error I just came up with a color set I liked and went with it. I wasn’t too focused on what colors looked right together as with what shapes I could make, what designs I could come up with and what little creations I could mash together to make a good composition.
