Sequential Imagery

For my last three pieces, that culminate into the completion of the project coursework and ‘pull it all together,’ I chose a hot-button topic. Gay Marriage.

For the first ‘issue’-themed project, module 3, I chose a relatively harmless issue, one that couldn’t really be argued against successfully. For this module, I had to push the issue. I know there are two sides to every argument, but with all due respect to anyone and everyone, if you don’t think people in love have the right to marry, you are wrong.  I find it appalling that, if I so chose, I could divorce my husband tomorrow, go to Vegas and have a person dressed like Elvis marry me to a man I barely know, but true soul mates who happen to be homosexual, have no right to get married. My husband’s best friend is gay, and half of the people I know are bisexual, or gay. It’s absolutely ridiculous that they have constraints placed on their lives, during a time when approximately half of all [hetero]marriages end in divorce, and the "Sanctity of Marriage" can be stepped on and battered around by heterosexuals as much as they like, which leads me to my first piece.

 This piece is all about the flash-in-the-pan 55 hour marriage Britney Spears went through, very publicy, making a mockery of the concept of marriage as sanctimonious, or the religious right between a man and a woman. Without actively engaging the religious right, I made this first piece to showcase how casual marriage is allowed to be treated by heterosexuals.

I used a quote from an article on the 55 hour marriage from here: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=128102&page=1. The top and bottom text are stylized with stroke, outer glow, and bevel. The inner picture uses inner and outer glow, and stroke. The images of Britney on the side got a duplicate layer, which a filter of film grain was applied to, then the opacity was lowered. The original layers of the side circle pictures were then adjusted via hue/saturation to a purple/magenta. The banner was filled in using gradient. I used bright colors to really draw the audience in. I know this 55 hour marriage is old news, but it still demonstrates how moronic the issue is in 2011.

I used the following images for this piece:

http://www.popcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/britney-shaving-2.jpg

http://popdust2.presscdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/35Jason-Allen-Alexander_spf071106p_22-321x430.jpg

http://www.therowboat.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/britney_spears_shopping_00.jpg

http://www.abcteach.com/free/b/banner3longbnw.jpg

http://rc.vc/forum/wallpapers/Opera-Background-Colored-Lights.jpg

The next piece was inspired by an article, which I found by clicking a link off of Gay Marriage for New York, a facebook page I am a ‘fan’ of. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Gay-Marriage-for-New-York/78689587354 ; it linked to http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/27/local/la-me-adv-gay-marriage-stay-20110328 which is a compelling article about an old gay couple who have been together 40 years, but can’t get married, and they are running out of time since one of them has Alzheimer’s. I think I did a good job summing it up and making it poignant to the issue at hand.

For this piece, I started by creating the background. To do this, I picked two shades of violet and used the filter, render, clouds. From there, I made a new layer, and applied another filter, halftone paper, using black and white. I changed the opacity on that layer drastically, and came up with the background.

Next I copied the image of the elderly gay couple over, and applied a bevel to it. (http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2011-03/60455062.jpg)

I put in the rainbow down the side next, then put in all the text. I made a grey background for the pink text, then I applied ‘stroke’ to all the text. I left the composition simplistic, yet compelling.

My last piece had the least graphical elements to begin with so I had to make up for it with creative layout and backgrounds.

My inspiration was the very simple but effective image located here: http://i.imgur.com/WBcr4.jpg

To get the background effect, I picked two pastel pinks. I used a filter of Threads, then I used the modify/selection to get a border, which I played with a new layer. I used black and white and a filter of chalk&charcoal, then converted to smartobject, and lowered opacity. I used the shape tools to make the shapes, then added the text, all with black 2 pt stroke, and then finally, I used a new layer and a rectangle with the layer fx pattern overlay, overlaid the pattern and lowered the opacity. Not a ton of work, but some playing around, and it makes a better, cleaner, more engaging version and it still rings poignantly true.

My final culmination, three pieces using techniques learned and improved upon in this class, to support gay marriage,

Digital Enhancements

For the Digital Enhancements project, I chose to touch up (which ultimately lead to me nearly redoing) my poster submission about paper-waste/deforestation from module three. Without trying to sound conceited, and while still retaining humility, I really feel both my Disco Robots and my Dune cover are excellent pieces and I wouldn’t even know how to make them any better.  My poster, though, wasn’t anything special in my mind (even though I don’t hate it, I just don’t love it), and I figured I could try to work some of the new skills learned out of the book to make it better.

 

The original piece.

As you can see from my re-posting of mod 3’s poster, the background is pretty plain. The composition is all right, but the piece certainly doesn’t grab your (the audience’s) attention. Even though it has a message, it seems easy enough to brush it aside as the piece isn’t gripping.

Last time, I grabbed all of my images using google image search.  Since I had such great luck using the image search in NASA’s sites for space related pictures for last module, this time, for the environment, I turned to nationalgeographic.com.
So I got rid of all of the previous pictures. In fact, I only wound up keeping the memo-tree (that I discussed making in the mod 3 blog, which used a rudimentary form of the smart object layers we learned about, before learning about them), and the vertical style of the poster. I changed everything else.

I got a very poignant, more gripping photo of deforestation from nation geographic here: http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/photos/rainforest-deforestation/#/pantanal-deforestation_332_600x450.jpg -- I used that as the main image. Since there were sparse trees in a cut down radius, I thought to use arrows and text to link ‘office paper usage’ to the missing trees, tying it together and really pulling the viewer, the intended audience of office workers, into the situation. The last poster was more ‘polite’ about getting the point across, I wanted this, while still nonthreatening, more in-your-face-here-are-the-consequences than the last poster. I took the image from the site, used some autolevels, and then added a layer fx of stroke.

Next, I found the arrow picture to use: http://www.n3uea.com/geocaching/pics/otherpics/huge-right-arrow.gif, and rotated it, shrunk it, duplicated the layer 4 times, and applied an fx stroke to all of them.

Next I chose Book Antiqua as a font, and applied a small and light fx-stroke and fx-outerglow to help them standout against the image., and put in the ‘messages’ about the empty trees. Then I copied over the ‘memo-tree’ (with an altered drop shadow from the original) from the original poster to the new version. I added the second box for text, added a stroke to it, and then used Tahoma font with its own stroke for the other text. Then I used scale to fit it in the box.

For the background, I grabbed a picture of Redwood trees: http://craftsmandoorcompany.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/Redwood_Tree.118235945_large.jpg. I put that on one layer, and the duplicated the layer. The first layer I changed to opacity 37%. The second layer became a smart object, and I used ‘photocopy’ style filter on it, and then changed that opacity to 67%. Then I used the pencil tool to make a border around all that.

I feel like the message is better spelled out, the composition is more professional, and now this and the book cover and photomontage are all portfolio ready.

 

The finished redo.

Book Cover

 

For my book-cover assignment, there was really only one choice in my mind: Dune. Dune is unequivocally my favorite science fiction book, and science fiction is one of my favorite genres to read. I’ve personally read Dune a half dozen times, and it never ceases to deliver. Over the years, Dune has had some pretty awful book covers (the best being its current cover), and I wanted to take a shot at doing my own version.

A small back story on Dune: its set on a desert-planet, one of its central plot-points is centered around huge sandworms that live on the planet and the indigenous people of the planet who brave the harshness of the desert. Any further information can be found by reading this awesome masterpiece, or by doing a Google search for ‘Frank Herbert Dune,’ though I recommend the former.

Here is how I went about constructing this piece. I first sought out an adequate representation of a sandworm, which is the iconic image most associated with this novel. My husband plays a game called Magic the Gathering (http://www.dailymtg.com), and several of the cards in this game feature artwork of creatures the game refers to as wurms. Many of the wurms on these cards look like they could be from this novel, except most wurms depicted are done so in hues of red and green, which don’t really call to mind a sand-dwelling one. The one card that did manage to pull this off is titled Reckless Wurm. The image I used for my book cover came from themagicland.com (http://themagicland.com/img/1743.jpg). I took this wurm, expertly illustrated/painted by Greg Staples, and brought it into Photoshop, where I carefully used an airbrush setting on the eraser to erase the background of the wurm card, so just the wurm itself was left.

Next, I searched around on the internet for pictures of sand dunes, until I came across travleblog.org, and found some real dune wall papers: http://www.travelblog.org/Wallpaper/sand_dunes_mui_ne.html. I snagged the one used from there, and used the smart object-filter technique shown on page 323 in our Photoshop cs5 book with the charcoal filter on a duplicate layer of the dune. I changed opacity to 62%, and I did this to give the sand dune a more ‘illustrated’ feel, to match the sandworm represented by the reckless wurm. I placed the sandworm on the dune, and used a ‘splatter’ preset brush with a brown and an orange tone, to make it look like the sandworm was kicking up sand, or bursting through the sand’s surface—which is what they do in the book. I then made sure to make the foremost portion of the sand dune not have any of the splatter-brush effect on it, as the worm is supposed to be far away. I added a small, 40% opacity outer glow to the sandworm, which picked up tiny pixels I missed when using the eraser tool, to round out the sand-bursting effect.

Then I did the sky. Using combinations of the burn tool and dodge tool and supplemented by the smudge tool, I managed to obtain the sky’s blue effect. I then went to an amazing photo reference site/archive, powered by NASA, which is http://nix.nasa.gov/; From NASA:” Not a collection in itself, the NASA Image Exchange is a search engine that pulls images from across NASA's Web space.” -- That site can search all of NASA’s pages for images on a subject, which I used to find this awesome Earth-moon picture: http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/images/ESC/small/ISS020/ISS020-E-17867.JPG. I grabbed that moon and placed it on my book cover, but duplicated the layer and then used ‘scale’ to scale them differently. For the big moon, I used the filter technique from pg 323 again, but used bas-relief as the filter instead. For the two smaller ones, I used hue/saturation and changed the hue of the moon to green and red respectively, to drive home the science fiction factor. I gave all three of these lawyers an outer glow effect.

To get the small figure, the main character Paul Muad’dib Atreides, I actually did a search for ‘fremen’ the book’s term for the desert people, and was lead to the Wikipedia article on Dune Sandworms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandworm_%28Dune%29) which lead me to the image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DuneTV-Paul%2BHooks.jpg. This is Paul Atreides from the Sci-Fi Channel’s 2000 miniseries version of the book. I used the same erasing technique I used on the Reckless Wurm card image, but made the hooks in his hand (maker-hooks from the book) a brighter brown. I then shrunk him using scale. I then applied a filter of ‘paint squares’ over top of him to give him a more ‘illustrated’ feel, and then zoomed in and used a 1 pixel pencil brush to dot his eyes with a vibrant blue, (which is another book-plot point, intrigued yet? You should really read this book if you haven’t) and gave him a very subtle, low opacity drop shadow.

I decided early on I wanted the title below the image of the worm bursting from the dunes under the three moon sky of a science fiction planet. If you see the title Dune, you may just run for the hills if you have no idea it is about epic sandworms and so forth. I wanted to capture the audience’s attention and then have the image lead the eye down to the title. I found an appropriate font, for free, under ‘science fiction’ @ www.dafont.com; it’s called Terminator. I used the layer FX stroke, to outline the Book title and author. I accomplished the book cover border by using selectionàmodifyàborder and then using fill.

Overall I think it captures the feel of the novel rather well and really like how it turned out.

Poster Project

For this project, I chose to do a poster about the environmental issue of deforestation. More specifically, I chose to focus on deforestation as a product of wasting paper.  I also wanted to show the dichotomy of technology’s place in the issue, and I wanted to do it all very simply.  A lot of paper is wasted by printing emails needlessly.  At the same time, a lot of trees are saved by pragmatic individuals who do more of their paperwork digitally, without printing anything at all.  Even in this day and age of burgeoning environmental consciousness, there are still places, like my husband’s old office for example, where one can find more than one or two people who print literally everything,  needlessly in almost every case.   I would envision the poster I have designed being displayed around any business office or building.

I started with a bright green color on an 8.5 x 11 inch canvas.  Green inherently instills a sense of nature.  I used ‘select all’ then I modified my selection à  border, and made a border of 40 pixels, which I then filled with a darker green.

I used Google Images again to find appropriate subject matter.  Here are source-links for the pictures used:

http://www.openplanetideas.com/how-can-sony-technology-be-used-to-address-environmental-challenges/inpiration/visualize-deforestation/gallery/deforestation-is-extremely-harmful-to-the-planet.jpeg ;

http://expo2008nepal.edublogs.org/files/2008/04/deforestation.jpg ;

http://www.worldwildlife.org/who/media/press/2008/WWFImgFullitem10928.jpg ;

http://www.nsf.gov/news/mmg/media/images/deforestation1_h.jpg;

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/deforestation-2.jpg;

http://blogs.worldbank.org/files/governance/deforestation.jpg;

I placed all of these on the green background using separate layers.  In fact, I just dragged and dropped them from Internet Explorer into the open document in Photoshop.   I used rotate and scale on some of them to get the layout of the pictures the way I liked them; not static.  I set up a layer fx style, applied to all of them, of a 10pt white stroke and a drop shadow of 145 degrees.

Next, I found some clipart of a tree, specifically just a tree outline (http://tinyurl.com/6f9rvlf).   I opened a second file, and dragged in the clipart-tree.  Then I scaled it large, then I found a generic memo that looked like it was printed out here: http://abovethelaw.com/2007/06/nationwide-pay-raise-watch-a-few-more-memos/; I placed it in a layer under the tree outline.  With the magic wand, I selected around the tree, then dropped down to the memo layer and hit delete. Now I had a ‘tree’ of a memo.  I then I found some crinkled paper in Google Images: http://www.deviantart.com/download/79779014/Crinkled_Paper_by_whippys.jpg; I put this on a layer above the memo, did the same thing to it to make a ‘tree’ of wrinkled paper, but used blending options to lower the opacity and make the memo-tree look like it’s made of wrinkled paper.  I then flattened the image, and brought the tree over to the main poster.  I used an fx of a 10 pt black stroke, and again the same angled drop shadow.

For the text, I used a font called “system”.  I wanted it to stand out against the green and invoke that sense of technology.  I opted for yellow, and since System doesn’t have a natural italic, I used ‘skew’ to italicize it.  Then I used a slightly bigger stroke- 13 pt black- and again the drop shadow, and was quite pleased with the outcome. 

          I think the message is simple, yet poignant.

Photomontage Project

 

                For this photo manipulation piece, I decided to have fun with it and construct a scene of robots at a disco.  I am a huge fan of Eric Joyner (www.ericjoyner.com).  I love his oil paintings, and I’m crazy about retro robots.  Lately I have been really into drawing robots in my personal artwork, and wanted to start collecting them.  I did a Google image search for ‘toy robot’ and found a ton of retro robot pictures.  Many of them came from www.robotisland.com or www.retrotoys.com; a few others came from various sites just grabbed off of the Google image search.  I chose images of retro robots and toys that where just the figure on a white or mono-colored background, so I could easy remove the backgrounds in Photoshop. 

After I gathered a bunch of robot pictures, I realized some of them were facing slightly to the left and some slightly to the right.  Some were even positioned slightly less angled, and I realized I could put the robots in a semi-arc, as if they were all standing around watching something, but what?  Another robot tearin’ it up on the dance floor, of course!  The hardest thing to find was the right background.  Eventually I got the green disco lights by searching on flicker.com for “disco lights”.

I began with a 1600 x 1200 canvas in Photoshop.  I popped in the background of lights, and then used new layers for each of the various robot placements from other pictures.  I rotated or ‘flip[ped] horizontal’ some of the robots in order to get a more even crowd of onlookers.   For the robots in the middle: on one set I inverted the colors to have them appear different, then I copied one of the robots and used hue/saturation to change it to pink.  Stacking the robots via layers, I created an ‘FX’ style for the layers of a 5pt black Stroke, and an Outer Glow comprised of the light and dark greens of the background.  I chose to give them all an outline to make this look more uniform and give a realistic yet sketchy-feel.  Giving them a ‘diffuse’ Outer Glow allowed it to look like the green lights were reflecting off their various metal surfaces and pouring through the various gaps in the crowd.  After finding the main dancing robot in Google image search, I gave him a 7pt Stroke and a purple Outer Glow to bring focus to the foreground.   After all this, I thought it needed a floor, and after extensive searches for ‘disco floor’ I found the one I used, and tailored it to fit my image using Scale. The purple on the main dancing robot matches the purple/blue from the floor.  The final touch came when I added in a disco ball, to which I added a small lens flare using filters.  Below is the 800x600 version. Click on it to download the original, which is hosted on some personal webspace.  

http://www.claytopia.org/imagedump/Robots_Disco-large.jpg