Home Page & Nav System Sketches

Hey all! Sorry these are going up so late! I've been impossibly busy with a seasonal job and tons of essays for other classes. I was really happy with the profile like blog I made for another class, but the website creator lacked all the options and personification that I wanted. So for my sketches, I loosely based them off of that website. I definitely want to create a portfolio website since it's something someday I'll need badly. Hopefully you all like my ideas!

Fantasy Avatar - Elf

Hey all! Here's my final piece for the Fantasy Avatar project! I'm really happy about how it turned out. I took a photo of my brother and created an elf like creature out of it. I gave him pointy ears using the liquify mode and made his skin and lips more gold using a tint. I changed the color of his hair, eyebrows and beard to a purple and green combination using hue/saturation. I made his eyes and pupils larger as well as made them a blue/green color. I changed the color of his clothing and added ivy face tattoos as well as an ivy pattern on his clothes. I darkened and tinted the background and added the fairy and sparkles. I also decided that the photo needed to be horizontal. I chose to make it horizontal because I wanted to capture the odd branches of the bush behind him.This project was a challenge and I used a lot of photoshop techniques I have never used before. I hope you all like it! 

Below are the before and after images:

 

Fantasy Avatar - Sketches

I really wanted to play with the idea of morphing a human with an animal with this project. I really like a few of the ideas; first, I like the elf idea, giving the person a leaf like face tattoo and the pointy ears. The elf led me to a fairy person, I think I could create dome really cool wings and effects to the surrounding with that, However then I really liked the animals. Some of my favorite ideas were the cat/person. I like this one because I love the idea with playing with cat eyes on a human face as well as creating a fur texture blending into the skin and blending in the ears. I surprisingly also like the Spider idea a lot. I hate spiders, but I think I could create a really cool multiple eye effect and it would definitely be a creative challenge. I also kind of like the robot idea. Adding a metal texture to skin could be really fun and challenging. I'm gonna have some difficulties picking which I want to do for my project. Hope you like my sketches!

Book Cover - Final

Hey everyone! This is one of my favorite projects I've done this semester! I chose Vince Guaraldi as the final project because you can't turn down such a happy looking man! So for this project, I drew this version of Schroeder from the Peanuts, and added Vince's oh so wonderful mustache. 

(here's an image if you're not familiar.) 

I love this man! I wanted to do him justice, and how better than with that wonderful mustache on an visualization of one of his favorite creations; music for Peanuts.  I wasn't sure if we were supposed to add text to the back of the cover, so I wrote a little blurb about him and Peanuts although I'm sure more information would be featured if I was really writing a book. 

One thing I really liked about this project was that for the first time I really got to play around with font. I spent a good amount of time trying to find a good font to match with the handwriting like font but easier to read in paragraph form. I also added a drop shadow which is not something I've done before this semester and I love the way it looked. I also did a lot of editing to make the whole book cover look like paper even though I drew the sketch in the upper left corner of a sketchbook paper. I loved getting to draw a cartoon image for a project as it's something I love to do.

Book Cover Design

This project took a little bit of time to figure out what I would do. I explored three different artists; Louis Armstrong, Simon and Garfunkel, and Vince Guaraldi. Each of these musicians are incredibly different yet I explored their background, their accomplishments and their journey. Louis was difficult. One of the sketches is just his face, especially his large cheeks he's known so well for. But the other three are more about him. The place where he played his first gigs, his well known trumpet, and the Star of David, which he displayed everywhere after growing up with a Jewish Family who treated him like their own since they knew he grew up without a father.

Simon and Garfunkel are entirely different. They are naturalists and hippies so I designed two covers that represented that aspect. However, they broke up and had about 10 reunions, so I tried to show that with the band aid. The last design for them was their silhouettes, since they have iconically large hair.

Vince Guaraldi was admittedly the most fun to sketch for. I am a lover of Cool Jazz and his album "The Vince Guaraldi Trio" is one of my favorites, it has the music he composed for many charlie brown specials. Vince wears very iconic glasses and his mustache is unforgettable, so for the first sketch I took them off of him and singled them out on the page. Next, I chose the San Francisco skyline since it was influential in his life. Lastly, I made two sketches to show his love for creating music for The Peanuts. He died very young and they played his most famous piece-Linus and Lucy-at his funeral. To represent the Peanuts I thought that the small piano that Schroeder plays was a great piece and the Charlie Brown Christmas tree since he wrote music for that special as well.

I think I'm going to pursue Vince, and likely will stick with the piano or glasses and mustache option.

Cyber Bullying - Awareness Poster

For my Awareness poster, I was planning on doing a poster for factory farming, something that I know a bit more about than cyber bullying. However, I couldn't get my factory farming poser to work. I wanted it to be relatively authentic. However I neither have a chicken, poorly treated or well treated, nor do I have a cage the right size the photoshop said chicken into. So, in order to use my own images which I know I could accurately use to depict what I wanted to, I chose Cyber Bullying. Below are two versions of my finished poster. I couldn't decide if I wanted the backlighting to be on the words or the figure, so I'm hoping to get your opinions, However I am leaning toward the first poster with the figure highlighted. 

I know a lot of people, friends and people whom my friends know that have been cyber bullied. I've also dealt with minor cyber bullying in my past. I know that cyber bullying can hurt just as bad as physical bullying and that's what I was trying to convey in my poster by having the figure in a aggressive stance holding a bat; which could definitely do some damage to someone. I wanted the font to look like one a chat program might use, basically, to resemble the internet.

If I were to go back to this poster, I might add a "Stop Cyber Bullying" into the bottom right corner. When I was making this, however, I couldn't think of a slogan or phrase that I thought was good enough. Maybe if this poster would be made for a website, that's where I would include the website's address.

Awareness Poster Sketches

I hope that my sketches are not too messy, i tend to do them quickly to help me flesh out ideas. I was more confident with the first two concepts than the last. My three concepts are Factory Farming, Cyber Bullying, and Environmental Awareness. There are two posters I'd really like to make. The first one, the sketch with the large chicken. Battery Cages are cages that egg laying chickens are kept in, which leave less room per bird than a 8.5x11 sized paper. I think it would be good to play with the actual measurements on a poster. The second is for cyberbullying. The sketch with the person holding a baseball bat and a monitor for a head is the one I would pick. I think my brother would be a perfect model for this, although he is far from a cyber bully or bully in general. I just can easily imagine this poster's finished product. I care greatly for the environment, however, I'm struggling to find effective ideas that have not already been done.

Photomontage - Pattern World

Here is my final Photomontage. I used a picture that was originally take using my camera's Black and White feature and took parts of it and added color by using other images I've taken. Hope you like it!

Photomontage Sketches

I hope that you are able to see the sketches that I've done below.

As you can see, a lot of my ideas include people as the subject. I love my family and creating art surrounding them. As I started sketching, more ideas started coming to me, as you can see my ideas start to change and eventually come to a similar theme with the last four, which are the ones I'm going to work into my photomontage. I love paper dolls, and I have always loved stickers. With stickers, I could take sheets of paper that had scenes on them, and put little characters wherever I wanted in the scene, With paper dolls, and a very cool toy that used real fabric called "Woodkins Dress Up Dolls", I could create clothes for my dolls with whatever patterns I wanted. I want to carry over this idea, of putting patterns in for certain parts of photos-sometimes unrealistic patterns, like replacing a person's hair with a picture of waves I've taken. One of my other ideas was to not have them be unrealistic, more like replacing the blue of a sweater with the waves from the ocean, or replacing the greens in a shirt with grass. I look forward to experimenting with photoshop during this project.