WEEKLY LAB POSTS
Course Reflection
What is the most significant critical concept you learned in the Lecture?
The most significant critical concept I learned was encoding which is establishing meaning in a creative work intended to communicate with an audience. I feel like this is the most important because it is the ability to communicate with your audience without using words. In every work the artist is able to implant some kind of meaning. Whether the audience will understand what you are trying convey is up to them through decoding. I feel as though the meaning behind the artwork is what is most important because that is where the artist is drawing inspiration from and is the reason why they are creating this piece of art in the first place.
What was the most significant practical technique you learned in the Lab?
The most practical technique I learned in lab was either the selection tool in Adobe Photoshop or the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. The selection tool was a constant that was used in all of my iterations in Photoshop. I would mostly use it for selecting an objects and then making it a layer mask. I love collage work so using the selection tool is a big part of making collages that are clean and have a wide variety in them. The use of the pen tool in Illustrator has been something that has been very valuable to have knowledge of how to work. I know I will be using that feature for a very long time to come.
How will you take this knowledge with you as you move beyond this class?
Graphic design is something I want to do in the future so this class has been a very good foundation for learning about it. I feel like I was able to expand my creativity throughout this class because all of the projects were based on my personal aesthetic which is things that I love. A lot of tools we learned I know I will be using in the future and it was very nice to learn how to use them now so then I can build on them in the future. It was very helpful to learn shortcuts for Photoshop and Illustrator because it makes doing the work so much more efficient.
Emoji
Final Project Proposal
Iterations
Title:
Grecian Cowboy Boots
Culture:
I am drawn to any shade of blue and love intricate pattern seen in Grecian style plates and china. The cowboy boots I own are one my favorite possessions and I thought it would be cool to bring together the Grecian and cowboy aesthetic.
Theory
Remix Culture relates to my final project because I am going to be using a photograph I have taken and create vector paths and fills to make it into an illustration. I am also going to be using Creativity because I came up with an idea and by mixing my two ideas together, I will create something new. I am using Denotation as well because everyone knows what a cowboy boot is. It is a shoe that many people wear and is widely accepted by the whole culture.
Calendar
1st week:
-Preliminary sketches to see if they like my idea put together.
-Get Grecian background design done using procreate or Illustrator.
2nd week:
-Recreate cowboy boots and person picture using vectors on Illustrator.
-Put the two together using photoshop and make any final adjustments.
Research
Inspiration:
-http://www.anna-bond.com/
-I love her color palette and it perfectly aligns with my personal aesthetic. I am inspired by her pattern and that something like that is what I want to aim for my background.
-https://jamesgilleard.net/
-His work is inspiration in what I am going for the cowboy book illustration. I like his style and how all of his work is filled in with different shades of color.
Plan:
-My plan is to make a light beige background and put my Gricean design pattern on top of that. I want the pattern to be a light blue color. I then plan to make an illustration of the photo I have taken above. Then I plan to put the cowboy boot illustration on top of the Grecian pattern. I will see how that looks and then potentially add a dark blue border around the cowboy boot figure to make them stand out more.
Aesthetics
InsPIRATION
Anna Bond
http://www.anna-bond.com/
Culture
I think that Anna Bond’s personal aesthetic and my own align very well. I am drawn to bright, pastel like colors which is evident in this iteration. Anna Bond seems to be drawn to the same colors as well because all of her designs focus on them as well. We both used variations of blue, green, and coral in our work. Our works also align with the patterns we use which are mostly floral or plant based. Anna puts her designs on wall, plates, or pots and I put floral designs on all the sails of my sailboats in this iteration. The patterns we both use remind me of sheets or a grandma which I love so I really leaned into that feel in this iteration by making the boarder of my designs look like quilt squares.
Theory
Sign: anything that communicates meaning
Anna Bond’s work communicates meaning by creating digital flowers, plant, and fruit designs. Her artwork does not consist of actual physical flowers, but she creates a design that resembles a flower which communicates to the audience what it is supposed to be. The sailboats I created in my iteration also communicate meaning. They are not real physical sailboats but just a digital compilation of shapes. My iteration also communicates to the audience that the designs are quilt squares due to the dashed lines to represent stitching. They are not actual quilt squares, but they give off that effect.
Remix Culture: a tendency to emulate, appropriate, and rework creations
Anna Bond creates beautiful floral patterns but then she tends to put her work on top of a plate, pot, or wall. She is not making those things, so she is modifying the original work by adding her artwork to the top of it. I also incorporated Remix Culture into my iteration by embedding an image into the sails of my boats. I created the boats but then modified the artwork of another person from the creative commons by making it a clipping mask and putting it on my sailboats.
Practice
Anna Bond mostly focused on using the pen tool and paint tool to create her work. Her lines are very organic and look like they were drawn so she definitely used illustrator or procreate. She could have also used photoshop to use the rectangular marquee tool and clone stamp tool to repeat her pattern all over the page. One tool that we both used is the eyedropper tool to fill our designs and match colors. We also both adjusted the stroke of our lines to make them bigger or smaller. I also used Illustrator for my iteration. I used the shape tool to create all of my shapes and then I used the subtract pathfinder tool to cut them all down to exact shapes I wanted. I also embedded an image into the sails of the boats by creating a clipping mask, so it exactly fit the shape I made previously. I created a border around my designs by using the appearance panel to create a custom pattern with the shape tool.
Remediation
Inspiration
James Gillard
https://jamesgilleard.net/
Iterations
Culture
In both James Gillard’s work and my own it focuses on what I call calming colors. He focuses on blues and pastel colors that I find in my personal aesthetic. In this iteration of mine I used a more neutral color palette but colors that still fit in with my personal aesthetic. I also think our works relate because in one of his pieces in particular, it is kind of unrealistic and the viewer can‘t really identify what is going on in the piece. In my iteration, I feel like the viewer can tell that it is coffee but with the colors over it you can’t really tell that it is ice cubes in coffee it kind of just looks like filled in color cubes which I kind of like.
Theory
Mimesis: representations that mimic the real world
James Gillard’s work mimics the real world. Whether it is mountains, city streets, or water he makes all of his work look realistic even though none of them are photographs. His works look like they could be real, but everything is a little too cartoonlike and saturated for it to be. In my iteration, the ice cubes in coffee mimic the real world but it is not a photograph. The inspiration was taken from a photograph but was filled in with vectors and colors to make it mimic a real cup of coffee.
Icon: sign that perceptually resembles the signified
In a lot James Gillard’s work he uses water. He creates water by using differnet shades of blue, yellow, and pink for reflections. This resembles water but is not water because it is not photograph is a digital artwork. This is also shown in the mountains he creates because his artwork looks like a mountain, but it is not an actual mountain. I did this in my iteration as well with the coffee and ice cube. My iteration resembles coffee in the way that the colors I used are the colors of coffee and the ice cubes look like they could be ice cubes but are not an actual photograph of ice cubes.
Practice
I think the main app that we both used was illustrator. We both used the pen tool to outline mostly geometric shapes in our works. We also both used the eyedropper tool to match color throughout the artwork so then we could color fill all of the outlined areas. I am not sure if James used the width tool because no lines are evident in his work, but I used the width tool in my second first iteration to adjust the size of the lines and to get the ice cubes to pop out more from the background. To get the desired outcome, we both adjusted the fill, stroke, opacity of the objects so they would blend together and flow. I am drawn to anything that flows, in this iteration it was coffee and I think it is the same for James as he used a lot of water throughout his works.
Remix
Inspiration
Charlie Davoli
https://www.charliedavoli.com/museocapodimonte
Iterations
Culture
Throughout all of Charlie Davoli’s works there is a lot of nature and I find my personal aesthetic in nature. He focuses on a lot of clouds, and I also love incorporating clouds into my work. Many of the colors he uses in his artworks line up with mine as well and they give off the feel of being calm. In the remix projects especially, I feel like our works are alike. In Charlie Davoli’s Museo Capodimonte collection objects are coming out of the framed artworks. In one piece there is a waterfall coming out of a painting and in another a man's arm is coming out of a frame. In my remix iteration I wanted the objects to look like they were jumping out of the pages, so this connects with Charlie’s work.
Theory
Appropriation: The act of recontextualizing content to communicate new information
Charlie Davoli takes images that are realistic and then adds unrealistic flare by adding things that would not originally be in the photo. A lot of his work looks like it could just be a photograph but then you notice an arm coming out of the photograph and it instantly becomes new. In my iteration I also strived for this. I took photographs and added clouds to make it as realistic as possible. Then I added the book and everything coming out of it which made it look unrealistic and gave it the same flare as Charlie’s work.
Encode: To establish meaning in a creative work intended to communicate with an audience
Charlie Davoli establishes meaning in his work by having objects pop out of or flow over the frame. He takes an image of man looking at a piece of artwork in a gallery and makes it come to life by having the waterfall painted in the picture look like there is real water coming out of the image. In my work, I tried to make the book pages come to life to give the audience the idea that the people and words are literally jumping off the page. I wanted it to look like it flowed so I added butterflies as well.
Practice
Charlie Davoli used the lasso and selection tools in his artwork. Specifically in the waterfall image, he used those tools to outline the waterfall and birds from different images and then added a layer mask. He then pasted those images into his background image and adjusted the size and layer adjustments to make the waterfall blend in and flow through the image. In my iteration, I used the lasso and selection tool to outline and layer mask the clouds, book, people, flowers, books pages, and butterflies. I then put them all on the beach background and adjusted the opacity and adjustment layers to make the images blend in with each other and ultimately look like the images are jumping off the pages.
Myth
INSPIRATION
Erik Johansson
https://www.erikjo.com/work
Iterations
Culture
I find my personal aesthetic in anything in nature that flows, sways, glows, and swirls. Examples of this would be water, clouds, or book pages blowing the wind. I am drawn towards calming landscapes. I also love bright colors, pastel colors, and any shade of blue. I feel as though this digital creative has the same ideas. Erik uses clouds, blues, sunlight, and water in most of his images. In one image of his in particular, water is flowing out of a picture frame and the water that is coming out is almost glowing. In my archive, I have many images of water glistening while the sun is shining on it. Erik also has an image of a book page turning with clouds on the page. As I said before, I find inspiration in clouds and the sky, and it is clear from his artwork that he does too. I find the hour before sunset to be the most enchanting and Erik is also inspired by this because many of his pieces have sunlight filtering in which illuminates the objects in the image. This is what I was trying to capture with my iterations.
Theory
Culture: The human development of knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors that depend upon social learning
Culture is shown in Erik Johansson’s work through the sky. As a culture we know that the sky is blue. It can’t be proven wrong because everyone knows that it is blue because they see it every day. In Erik’s work the sky is always blue, he never messes with that staple idea. He also always has some sort I horizon line in all his images. The perspective in which he set up his works is realistic; it is set up like the way it would look if you were in the image looking at the landscape. In my iterations, what society knows to be true is that a healthy willow tree is green. In one of my iterations, I edited the saturation of the green, but it is still green. It is widely accepted and known that a tree’s roots are in the ground and the branches are up in the air and I stayed true to that in my first iteration.
Myth of Photographic Truth: The assumption that photographic representations convey reality, but due to subjective framing and editing decisions there is an inherent lack of accuracy
The Myth of Photographic Truth is shown throughout many of Erik Johansson’s works. In one image the sky has the texture of water. The sky is in the right place, but it is glistening and has waves which leads the viewer to believe that it is water. In another one of his images there is a vase of flowers which look realistic but the size of them is what is distorted. The bouquet of flowers is the size of the house which was mostly likely edited to be that size. In another one of Erik’s works he has a picture frame of sailboats and water which looks how it would in real life, but the sailboat and water seem to be falling out of the frame which distorted the reality of the picture frame. In my iterations of the willow tree the top half is like a regular willow tree with the branches growing downwards but the bottom half I have flipped so the branches reach upward which causes the work to not be fully realistic.
Practice
Erik Johannson used saturation and hue layers to change the color of the grass and make it more vibrant. I adjusted the hue and saturation of my image to make the willow tree look like a darker green and I added sort of a blue hue to the leaves. He could have used the rectangular marquee tool and clone stamp to get the water sky that he has in one of his images. I used the rectangular marquee tool and clone stamp in the second iteration. I cloned the top branches and then flipped them, so they looked like they were growing in the reverse direction. Erik used some blur in the background sky of some his works. I used blur in the foreground of my first iteration, so the tree truck and branches stood out more from the background.
Questions & Archive
I see my personal aesthetic as anything in nature that is calming. Anything that flows, sways, swirls, whether that is ocean waves, willow tree branches, book pages in the wind, clouds, or just a warm breeze. I am also compelled to anything that is bright or glowing, like the sun glistening on the water or shining through the trees. I find myself gravitating towards light and bright colors like tangerine, coral, sage, and any shade of blue. I find the world to be most magical an hour before sun sets when the angle of the sun makes everything glow, light up, and come alive.