Final words

Well, last post. Goodbye High School.

I especially enjoyed learning about Android Jones as an artist, since I studied most of the art movements my class talked about in the earlier years of Digital Arts classes.

Vectors introduced me to Adobe Illustrator, even if we couldn't go in-depth with it that much. The Anti-bullying poster involved a lot of Photoshop. The Android Jones portrait introduced Painter 12, which was a lot of fun to play with. The T-shirt design was also lots of Photoshop. The Animated Still in After Effects was the hardest part of the class. The one thing I learned from all these programs is that technology can be a pain in the butt if you don't know how to use it properly.

I wanted perfection for all of my pieces, but certain submission requirements (coughcoughThreadlesscoughcough) and surprisingly enough, my own work strategy got in the way. The latter point was discovered when I was working on the Android Jones portrait, when Ms. Thompson was telling me that just going nuts with the portrait face was okay, to which I responded, ". . . But that's not logical."

I hope that my vision as an artist has improved greatly over the past semester. I've learned that an artist's process can work several different ways. Sometimes the method one artist is most used to is not the best method. New strategies and styles allow them to branch out, although it may be uncomfortable for them.

Animated Still

This is my final project, a still image animated with After Effects. For the sake of time, I used my portrait of Metanine for the image. The animation is at the very end of the video.

Animation in After Effects was a pain in the butt. The tutorial we were told to use was working with a different version of the software I was working with, so it was very difficult to make progress. Learning about the program first really would have helped. However, once I figured out the software, it was very fun. After mastering basic movement of the figure, I played around with the puppet pin tool. It's not perfect, but I don't want to undergo the two hour rendering process again!

I hope the end result rustled your jimmies.

I learned the basic controls of After Effects and that creating Art often comes with serious frustrations.

Proof of Completed Project

Proof I posted my t-shirt design to Threadless. Eat your heart out, Ms. Thompson.

I got comments! :D

dunno if they're readable like this, but oh well.

I made a T-shirt!

 

Yet another project we were assigned was to make a T-shirt design  for Threadless.com. I didn't have many ideas based on the prompt, so I just went with my gut and made this design for Threadless' general submissions.

I learned that contests can be very picky,and coming up with minimalistic ideas based on a theme is tough. The major difficulty with this project was making sure the design and thumbnail adhered to Threadless' size requirements. Why do they have to have so many little requirements?!?

Below is the finished T-shirt. (Only comes in white)

Go to this page! Vote for this shirt!

Portrait!

This project was a portrait with the Android Jones Creative brush workshop. Instead of a self portrait, I chose to make one of my original characters. an android named Metanine, the subject of the portrait.

I learned more about the importance of composition while doing this project. The most difficult part was making the face appear three-dimensional with shading and highlights. I wanted Metanine's face to appear youthful and bright, but the heavy shadows around the eyes made her appear scary and older. Playing with the various shape patterns was fun, so I used a lot of those shape patterns for the background. I also made a pattern that resembled a section of binary code. (It probably cant's be seen unless you go into detail.)

Anti-Bullying poster

Here is the finished Anti-bullying poster. It took a while to find the right typeface because some of the fonts i downloaded were missing their capital letters. Finally, I found a good one, even though I had to substitute the question mark in a different font. Yes, I am person shrinking away from the hand in this poster. The hand was originally a stock image which I vectorized.

And here's the final product! It's been revised a couple of times.

PONY!

Another piece of Vector work. I sketched out this pony by hand in Photoshop, and finished it in Illustrator. Cute, isn't it?