book project: final

FRONT COVER

BASKETBALL

KITCHEN

VIDEO GAMES

DRINKIN'

SEX

BALLER

BACK COVER

Book Project Reflective Essay

I decided to make a book that pokes fun at comic books, video games, and familiar characters. The overall theme of my book is what these characters are up to when they aren't being their character. So, Magneto is chillin' at home with his wife Belle and their dogs. To best serve my theme, I employed a collage technique. I felt making each page a collage would be funny since everything would be out of proportion and look like it doesn't quite go, kind of like the situations in which I placed the characters. I also wanted to use bold colorful shapes for the word blurbs, which were written in Comic Sans as a way of poking some more fun.

Keeping to a production schedule was a weird experience for me. I wasn't thrilled about dragging out a project. I like to work fast and have instant gratification. Maybe that's a bad thing, so keeping to a production schedule pushed me to constantly revise and recreate. It was good that there were clear due dates because I respond well to that. I am a total procrastinator. I am most productive and diligent when I wait until the last minute...because then I have to be.

I will keep one copy of the book that the school prints. Having a copy of the first digital book I've made is a pretty cool thing. Other than that, it will most likely only be viewable on this blog unless someone jacks it and reproduces it...like I did with all of the images I used.       

book project: dummy

FRONT COVER

 DRINKIN'

VIDEO GAMES

  

BASKETBALL

BEDTIME

CARDS

 

HUNGRY

BACK COVER

book project: proposal

My idea for my book is to show what life is like for a superhero when he's chillin at home with the wife, not being a superhero. I will appropriate all of the images and make a collage. The backgrounds will be rooms in the house and have a window or wallpaper design. I plan on using different images of Magneto. I am bombarded with his image since my boyfriend is obsessed with MVC2 and Magneto is his favorite character. I guess I'm poking fun.

As for text, I will probably have a line on every page and use a bold font with all caps. Something superhero or in your face. I might use bright colors for the text or I might just stick to black. Whatever works best with the collage.
   
I will be working within square pages. I think 2200 pixels wide by 2200 pixels high. I think the collage technique will work well with the subject matter. The comic book look is not really what I'm interested in. I want it to look like a story book of collages, not frames right next to each other.

FRONT COVER: Magneto in front of a cute little house, coming home from work with his briefcase. title.
PAGE 1: dinner time. asking wife to cook him something.
PAGE 2: basketball game. maybe horse.
PAGE 3: cigars and cards with the boys. 
PAGE 4: drunk ass Magneto.
PAGE 5: playing video games until dawn and getting mad for losing.
PAGE 6: bed time. gettin it on.
BACK COVER: a blurb asking for maple sausage and waffles.

poster project

Poster Project Reflective Essay

I chose to make a poster for a movie and a poster for a show. I think I chose to do a movie and a show because those are things I enjoy and see a lot, but never really look at and appreciate. I'm not trying to make a difference so the propaganda poster didn't seem like it would be much fun. I made posters of things I enjoy or find humorous. 

As far as compositional techniques, I wanted to keep it simple but bold. For both posters, I used one image and made it the biggest thing in the poster. Both of the compositions have a limited color palette, the second one more so than the first. The titles are the biggest and most important text. Taglines, quotes, dates, and times follow with varying, but smaller, sizes. The sexy time poster is broken up with flat color and shapes, peppered with quotes to help balance the composition. 

The font I chose was important for the effectiveness of the posters. The honey badger poster uses a font that looks broken or separated, conveying an unsettling feeling. The red and green colors also seem alarming and sick. For the sexy time poster, I wanted to use a font that was clear and bold. I think the "in your face" font works for the subject matter, which is something revealing and suggestive. The starkness and boldness of the white and black text also helps support the message.

  

picture project

Picture Project Reflective Essay

I really enjoyed doing this picture project. I like the "Alphabet Soup" portion of it a little better than the "Picturing the Other" part. It was more of a challenge to find and capture the letters in nature so I think that made it a little more fun. Plus, I would rather take pictures of nature than people. Even the picture of my friend is out in nature. The way I framed my alphabet pictures made an impact. I had to think about which composition within the frame was most appealing and interesting to me. Photographing the letters one way may not read as a letter the other way.

At first I did not approach the "other" person (the stranger) that I photographed. I just found him sitting in his office and started taking pictures. He noticed I was snapping pictures of him, so I asked through the glass if I could continue. He said yes and kept going about his business. The picture I posted was taken after I asked permission to take his picture, but I believe it is candid.

For the most part I wanted all of my photos to look real since they are of nature and people. So I didn't make anything black and white or bring out other colors in an obvious manner. However, I did crop or adjust all of them in at least one way. In every picture I bumped up the clarity so it would show more detail. For the "Alphabet Soup" part, I cropped the image so the letter would be the main component and easy to find. For the "Picturing the Other" part I photographed everyone straight on, portrait style. But I thought it would be boring to put a person smack dab in the middle. So the two "others" are pushed to one side of the composition, allowing the background to provide some information about the person. 

scratch project

Scratch Project Reflective Essay

For this project I chose to work with bright colors. The first composition I created is made up of analogous colors. I felt that by using colors next to each other on the color wheel, my composition would be more harmonious. I counteracted that harmony by sporadically placing dots all over the image. The large light blue shapes have hard lines coming to points leading the eye around the composition. I liked creating shapes with flat color because it was easy to set up a bunch of different compositions.

After the first image was complete, I chose colors I like. The purple and orange landscape only uses two colors at different opacity levels. The purple has more blue than red so the orange works out nicely. The colors are simpler than those in the first image, due to the fact that I only worked with two, but the technique is more complicated.

For the last composition I started working with too many colors. I had to narrow it down to a limited color palette. I ended up, on accident, working with the complementary colors blue and orange again. However I changed the opacity levels because the blue I started with was bright and obnoxious. So now it looks like shades of green, which is more muted and not so irritating. Another reason I softened the color is because the composition is rather busy.

collage project

 

Collage Project Reflective Essay

Constructing these two collages had its ups and downs. In the beginning I had the theme of marriage in my head so I found symbols relating to that subject. I used two goats with their noses touching, rope tied in knots encompassing the two goats, and the famous sculpture of an orator. I also used a picture I took of a sidewalk with trees in Jacksonville that looks like an aisle. I originally wanted to put in other symbols, but I found that to be a challenge with the vertical orientation of the collage. It seemed like less was more. I thought it would be easy to execute my idea but it wasn’t.

I did not really have a clear plan in mind when I sat down to make the second collage. I knew I wanted to continue to have a natural background and work with images of animals. The second collage was more comical and fun because I put different types of animals in a setting where they don’t belong. I just chose images I found to be funny or aesthetically pleasing due to their color or character. It didn’t matter so much that it made sense. I found it easier to include more images with the horizontal orientation, but I still appreciated using fewer pictures.

There were stages when the collages were unsettling. At some points, they just got overcrowded and I had to take a few images out or make them smaller. I found the lasso tool to be very useful, but following up with the eraser tool got old. It was hard for me to get really close to the image without going too far. Overall, it was a fun project and it would be cool to do one on a larger scale.

type project

Type Project Reflective Essay

For this project I experimented with many different typefaces, which was good and bad. The advantage to checking out a bunch of fonts allowed me to set up a bunch of different compositions. It allowed me to appreciate the different lines and curves of each font. However, I may have had too many options. It took a while for me to find fonts I really liked.

When I first started making these compositions, I picked the first letter of someone’s name. I soon abandoned that idea because after looking at so many fonts I discovered the letters that held no significance to me were more aesthetically interesting. I then started looking at the whole alphabet in different fonts and picked the letter I found most appealing. Most of the letters I chose were very linear but I played with curves too.

My favorite composition is the letter  “y” with the yellow background. This font is like an outline of the letter, you can see the background through the letter. I like the tension between the letters and the square as well as the tension created between one “y” and another “y.” I wanted all of the colors to be different to create more of a pattern and not just a bunch of same color lines. I also think the colors are somewhat competing with each other, causing a little more push or attention. This font made it easy for me to know when I was done. When I had too many letters it became covered with too many lines and bright colors. It would just get too chaotic.