Sunday, March 28, 2010

Sketches



This is one of the latest sketches I have done. The objective of this sketch was to look at an object and draw it with the negative and positive space reversed. I chose a butterfly on a ring that I was wearing. Butterflies are one of my favorite things and I really like to draw them so I thought it would be cool to use one for this type of sketch because it would look a bit different. I feel this sketch is my best one yet because it shows my progression in sketching and I like the way it turned out. If i had to change something about this sketch I would make the antennas on the butterfly skinnier. Since I am very satisfied with how the drawing turned out I feel it doesn't reflect any weaknesses I have with drawing.








This is one of my earlier sketches I have done this year. It is of my keychain laying on my desk. I like my drawing but it is not one of my favorites. I feel it reflects a time when I had not been sketching for very long, therefore I was new at sketching. I really like my idea of sketching my keys because there are quite a few objects on my keychain that represent who I am and I like how they look. But, if I were to redo this sketch I would definitely concentrate on proportioning when drawing. The "WSU Cougars" lanyard looks like it is as small as my DG keychain wallet when it is actually a lot longer and bigger than it. I feel like I overlapped things well but I need to work on making my drawings cleaner.










This is a drawing of a corner of a room before I learned how to do one-point perspective. It is also one of my earlier sketches. I like this drawing because it is the corner of my dorm room. It had a good amount of detail and depth I could experiment with. My goal for this sketch was to make it look like it was quickly done rather than very precise and time consuming. If I were to do this sketch over I definitely would incorporate what I have learned about one-point perspective and spend more time on it to make it look more professional. I feel for only being a beginner at sketching, this sketch and my other two are pretty well done.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Swedish Textile Design




This goal of this textile design was to create a piece that represented my swedish heritage. The actual textile is at right, and the picture at bottom is the textile being repeated which creates the final product.First, what I did was find a few images that were related to Sweden. The colors in the Swedish flag are a deep blue and bright yellow, which is why the colors of the background and flower are blue and yellow. The “Dalecarlian” horse originated as the symbol of Dalarna in Sweden and later became the symbol of all of Sweden. The woven looking background was chosen because Sweden is very known for its intricate weaving and stylish clothing that is made from crocheting or knitting. The woven background was originally a white and brown color. Using the opacity tool, hue/saturation tool, and brightness tool created the bright blue color it is now. The horse was cut from its background using the Magnetic Lasso Tool, and blurred at the edges to make it look smoother. When cutting the horse in half, the Rectangular Marquee tool was used. The flower was also cut out using the Magnetic lasso tool. Its original color was red, yellow, and blue. But by using the hue/saturation tool and the brightness/contrast tool the new color became a yellow, green, and purple color. The different sizes of the horse and flower were created using the Transform tool.


What I liked about my piece is the colors and the images I used. What I didn't like about it was the sharp overlapping look it has to it. If I could change one thing it would be to blend the images together better. From this project I learned more about photoshop tools and how to apply them. I also had to be very patient when doing this design because there was a lot of cutting and at times I had to redo the cutting of the same images.

Quilt Pattern



For this piece, I first chose a blank quilt pattern that I thought would create a pleasing and eye catching product when I added my images to it. I then chose 6 digital pictures that I had taken and used a variety of tools to distort the images. After playing around with photoshop and adjusting the images, I experimented with putting images in certain places on the quilt pattern. I had to cut and crop the full images to fit perfectly within the shape guidelines. After a lot of messing around with the shapes and images, I came to what my final product looks like now. I really like how it turned out, there are so many different colors and shapes it makes the eye move around a lot. Most quilt patterns you look at have many different designs and naturally makes the eye scatter around the piece, so I felt I succeeded in doing that. My favorite part about my Quilt Pattern is the parallelograms. I really like how the multicolored disfigured lines guide the eyes to the four corners of the piece. My least favorite part about my quilt pattern would have to be the four big triangles pointing toward the middle of the page. I feel the image I used for those shapes isn't distorted enough and is too busy so it takes away from some of the other shapes. Overall, I feel that I did well on this piece.
Doing the quilt pattern helped me teach myself a lot of different things in photoshop. I learned how to distort and adjust images using tools like brightness, hue, contrast, distort, watercolor, and other adjustment tools. I also used the marquee tool quite a bit when cutting the images to the right shape and dragging them onto the quilt pattern. Since this was my first time doing a quilt pattern, I feel that if I were to do it again I would use images that all related to each other in someway whether it be color or meaning. I would also know how to use all the tools and where to find them so I would finish the piece more promptly. For next time, I need to focus on being neater, not rushing myself, and experiment more with different ideas.