Archive for the ‘Visual Assignments’ Category

 

Visual Assignment: A Debut Album

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

An Album Cover: Create an album cover to a fictional band.

Following the assignment’s directions, I generated the following:
Band Name: Philipine Legislative Election, 1946
Album Title: “Save what you choose to impose” (Which comes from Alan Moore’s Watchmen. The full quote is, “Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose.”)
Album Image: “nightways” by Flickr user brian hefele

Here’s what I came up with after several hours of trial and error:

Album by Phillipino Legislative...

Preparing to go platinum

CC Attribution_NonCommercial_ShareAlikeClick here to see this image on Flickr.

It’s got a real grunge or rap feel to it, which wasn’t intentional. It just kind of went that way. I wanted to stretch myself in both Photoshop and graphic design, so I tried mixing texture and colors, messed around with filters and just about everything I could think of. Oh, and also the colors. I’m terrible at picking out matching/appropriate colors. Thank goodness for my trusty color wheel. I didn’t go into the project with a plan in mind, and it resulted in a hefty amount of work. Next time, I’d like to have a picture or end result in my head before I get to it.

I visited dafont.com, where I picked out some Horror fonts.

The most difficult part of this was finding a place for the band name, and the right font. It needed to match the grunge of the album title, but it couldn’t be too similar or it would all look the same. Photoshop doesn’t do much in the way of grunge and dirty fonts, but I finally settled on the one you see now.

Maybe I’ll make a little video showing you all the layers and the settings I worked with to create this thing.

I’m not completely happy with it the way it looks, but I’m not repelled by it, either.

Maybe this makes me a creeper!!

Monday, June 11th, 2012

I am truly in love with Jacob Black from the movie/book saga Twilight. I know I am a little to old to be obsessing over tween movies.. However, he is super hot! I simply cut my face out of a picture I already had, and laid it over the face of Bella Swan.

#obsessed

Defamiliarize: A Stranger in My Own Room

Monday, June 11th, 2012

pic7
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favorite watch
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For this visual assignment mission, I had to take 10 pictures of a place familiar to me and show them in a strange way, with odd zooms and effects.

I took pictures of things around my room. Some of the pictures I left as-is b/c of a natural blur in them, or very zoomed in view. Most of the pictures though, I edited using pixlr. I’m loving this online software, it is so much easier to use than GIMP for me, and some of the features it has are awesome! I went a little crazy with some of them, but hey that makes it all the more unfamiliar.

 

The Real Ben Franklin

Sunday, June 10th, 2012

I really liked this assignment I think its a fun idea. My thinking behind this photo was that I just wanted to have fun with the assignment and use some of the tools on the website that would make a funny picture of Ben Franklin because all the pictures you see of him are always so serious. The website I used was http://www.befunky.com , it has many tools and funny animations you can use to edit your photos and most of it is free there are premiums items that you have to pay for but I found the free ones to be enough. I used a tool to change his eye color then I tried using a wrinkle reducer but it did not look good so I removed it. I then added glasses and a gold chain to make sure the photo had the right amount of ridiculousness in my opinion.

 

 

The new Ben

An Album Cover

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

Screen shot 2012-06-05 at 9.57.36 PM

First, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The title of the article is now the name of your band. Next, go here: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 Go to the bottom of the page. The last four to five words of the last quote are the title of your first album Lastly, go here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Select the 3rd image. It is the picture for your album cover. Manipulate the picture, resize it, add some other color, whatever. Do the same with the band name and album title, put them over top. However you wanna do it. Make it look cool.

Not usually one for the visual assignments, I saw Jeff McClucken’s effort to capture the essence of his new band, Swiss Emigration to Russia, and succinct breakdown of how to create the album cover and went through the brief process of creating a band and finding an image.

After being introduced to the Dactyloceras lucina – a species of moth of the Brahmaeidae family found in central and west Africa – I went a little further with the image search, consulting Flickr’s the Commons under the search tag for Interesting and found my base layer, which I then uploaded into pixlr.com, an online photo editor that let me add text and diffuse the picture to give it the grainy/painting effect.

Other than not creating a square image – as I believe is one of the requirements – I also think I could have done a better job capturing the essence of my randomly generated quotation, which I’ll share in full here as a fond greeting to my camp and bunkmates, but also an acknowledgment of Camp Macguffin’s initial honeymoon period (I mean, not in Bunk X, but for the other campers):

The only thing that lasts longer than a friend’s love is the stupidity that keeps us from knowing any better.

Randy K. Milholland

Visual Assignment 1 — An Album Cover

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

An Album Cover — DS106 Assignment here

So here’s something fun for everyone to do, should be quick and easy, but try to make it pretty. First, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RandomThe title of the article is now the name of your band.

Swiss Emigration to Russia is my band name

 

Next, go here: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 Go to the bottom of the page. The last four to five words of the last quote are the title of your first album

“Contemplate What Is Happening” is my album title.  [Appropriately enough for a digital media course, it's from a line by Marshall McLuhan.]

Lastly, go here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Select the 3rd image. It is the picture for your album cover.

I had several great images, but none of them were creative commons licensed.  Given that I was going to be changing it around, I decided I wanted to have something with some clearer copyright.  So I thought of the Flickr Commons, the partnership Flickr started with the Library of Congress (though its promise is mostly unrealized still).  There I found this image (3rd in the random Commons Sampler). Given my band’s name and album title, it seemed perfect.

Views in Sydney and New South Wales, 1930-40 / by Charles F. Walton

Views in Sydney and New South Wales, 1930-40 / by Charles F. Walton

Manipulate the picture, resize it, add some other color, whatever. Do the same with the band name and album title, put them over top. However you wanna do it. Make it look cool.

 

Then I dumped it into Photoshop, cropped it to a square, and used the Sun Faded Photo style to make it a little more yellow so that I could more easily put text on it.  I did some new layers with the text of the band name, which I changed to red.  I had initially thought I would try to place the title of the album on the hanging clothes, but “contemplate” and “happening” are awfully long words.  So, instead I went with this, which I like better in terms of spacing.  I also like the way “happening” ends up highlighting the two people just visible at the edge of the album cover.  Contemplating what is happening is exactly what I hope this design causes people to do.

 

Fake album cover for DS106 class

Swiss Emigration to Russia (2012)

Troll Quotes

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

For this assignment, I found an image of a (fairly) well known figure, Coco Chanel. Then, I added a quote by Marilyn Monroe, one that I find mildly amusing, and attributed the quote to Audrey Hepburn. I knew I wanted to use these three women. Marilyn Monroe has a pretty distinct image, so I decided not to use a photo of her or attribute the quote to her. Coco Chanel is not recognized as easily as Audrey Hepburn may be. They both have a pale complexion and shorter, dark hair. I figured the two would be easiest to interchange. Therefore, “nothing about [my] image is correct, and [I'm] trolling fans of all three characters at once!”

I used the text feature on the PicMonkey website. Because of the variety of dark and light, it was hard to find a text color/font that would be bold enough to show. I went to the Effects editor and chose “Soften” and moved the sliding cursor under “Fade,” so the picture would not be as dominating over the text. Then, I chose the font, “Marcelle Script” in white. It is bold and sort of rustic looking. I also liked the name! If only there was an “a” on the end instead of an “e”! (My name is Marcella ;) )

Visual Assignment: Pippin a la Warhol

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

Warhol Something: Andy Warhol was an iconic pop art mastermind. Now you can be one too! Take a photograph, or use an existing one, and create a piece of pop art.

Pippin a la Warhol

Son of a Took!

Click here to see this image on Flickr.

I’d wanted to do this assignment for a while, and since graduating, I’ve had a bit of time on my hands. I began with a photo I’d taken about a year ago of my boyfriend’s dog, Pippin, and followed the very useful tutorial provided by the assignment’s creator. The process was more complicated than I thought, and I had to bite down the urge to go off on my own. I’m glad I chose to stick with the directions, because I learned several new things, like creating sets/groups, texturizing, and the “load selection” ability, which wowed me.

I’m happy with the way it turned out, and I may even print it off at Kinko’s!

One thing the tutorial suggested that I couldn’t do was attached a signature. I may end up pulling out ye olde clunky scanner and digitizing my John Hancock, since I thought that was a neat idea. I might as well “own” my creations. I’ve been really surprised by my skill for this stuff.

Visual Assignment: My Cabin at Camp Magic MacGuffin

Thursday, May 10th, 2012

Pitch a Tent in Camp Magic MacGuffin: Help create Camp Magic MacGuffin! Visualize the tent or cabin you’re staying in; show us what Lake MacGuffin looks like!

My Cabin at Camp Magic MacGuffin

Feelin' Rustic!

Click here to see it on Flickr.

I was really excited about Camp Magic MacGuffin, and I wanted to set up at my cabin right away! I threw together a quick little shelter inspired by a trip to Mexico I took several years ago. Then, with the help of Photoshop (a popular place to visit), I crafted a sign to warn paserbys that things might get crazy while I’m at work. I pulled out my laptop (on loan from katsushiro on Flickr), proudly erected the Camp flag, and called it a day. Wooh!