Archive for the ‘VisualAssignments’ Category

 

Trollin’, Trollin’, Trollin’

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

I spent some time visiting the blogs of fellow campers this afternoon.  I stumbled across the Troll Quotes assignment on Marcey’s Blog and knew that I had to do this one.  I decided to use a handful of pop divas.  Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Cyndi Lauper look out!  Here’s the result:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found an image of Madonna by searching Google Images.  The quote is supposedly from Lady Gaga.  I haven’t heard Lady Gaga say this, nor have I read it in print, but it came up in a Google search, so it must be true.

I imported the Madonna pic into Adobe Fireworks.  I then added the text and green stroke effect.  All of this was added using Fireworks too.

ds106 – Make a monochrome photo

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

Today I mashed up the Daily Create with the “An Album Cover” Mission: DS106 visual assignment. Last time I attempted the cover, I ditched some of the random elements (the name of the album, the album art), so – after catching fellow campers’ work – I wanted to design a more random cover in the spirit of the assignment.

So here is the cover for List of Women’s Football Clubs in Spain’s new album, I am not mad.

I am not mad by List of Women's Football Clubs in Spain

I am not mad by List of Women's Football Clubs in Spain

I captured a square screen shot from the original image and dragged it into Acorn. I cut out the dog. Then I applied a green monochrome filter to the rest of the image and adjusted its saturation and brightness. I picked green because of the lush vibrancy of the original photo.Then I pasted the dog back in, blurred it, and bulged its head. I wanted to isolate and transform the dog from the rest of the image to create some ambiguity about the album’s title and its speaker or subject.

I inserted the text thinking about this week’s photo tips encouraging the use of a 9-square grid for arrangement elements in an image. If the boy and the dog make up the skewed squares on either side of the image, I hope the lettering fits into the squished middle squares in a complementary way.

Rocking Out to the Orchestral Funk of Sid Hammerback

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012


cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I cannot believe by good fortune to come across the mint copy of the Sid Hammerback group’s groundbreaking introduction album “Let the Rest Go By”; from everything I have read, the last public version of this disc was seen in East Berlin. Not long after the album was released in 1978, lead glockenspiel player Ken Hubbard contracted a crippling bought of whooping cough, and the loss of his sound for ever crippled the band, despite the later infusion of congo virtuoso Bertolt “M.C.” Winkler…

Okay, this is my effort at the ds106 Album Cover assignment; after having seen a number of students do this last semester (it has been done 47 times as of this post), and just this week, Jeff McClurken undercovered the cover for the death grunge sound of Swiss Emmigration to Russia and Bryan Jackson reminded us of the goth soul classic Dactyloceras lucina, it was high time for me to spin a cover.

Step 1 is the band name, generated by a random Wikipedia article, in my case yielding Sid Hammerback, a character from the show CSI NY. This is one where the band name sounds like it is an individual, by in reality (the one I make up), it is a group.

The album title comes from the last 4 words of the bottom quote of from a quotations generator- the last quote on mine was Ken Kesey’s “Take what you can use and let the rest go by.” so my album is Let the Rest Go By.

Last was the flickr suggestion for the album cover, the 3rd photo from the last 7 days interesting collection on flickr – I ended up with a nice one to use, this red brick and window:

But the problem I have now with this assignment is that most of these images, including mine, are not creative commons, so I do not have the right to do a derivative version. So I changed my approach, and took the third photo from the Creative Commons flickr group pool

or


cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by pareeerica

So now I have all my pieces… except I am still feeling lost without my copy of Photoshop, so I had to monkey around in GIMP. I got the hump effect on the text, which was one of the distort filter effects (curve bend), and the layer mode is set to “dodge” to give the layered effect. I deleted the white space around the blue planet and put a layer in back with a random generated color pattern. The layer effect on the text for the album title is “difference” which complements the crazy background.

In writing the fake intro; I used the Snarkmarket Musical Genre Name Generator to come up with ones like “Orchestral Funk” and “Goth-Soul”.

This is a very playful kind of assignment because it does have a formula to follow, but I consider all of the rules open to be done differently, as long as you can make something interesting.

I’d write more, but I really want to lay in the hammock behind my bunkhouse and let the Sid Hammerback sounds blast out of my cabin….

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

Mission: ds106 – visual assignment sprint

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

I found some time over the past two days to sprint through a handful of Mission: DS106 visual assignments. My notes are spread over a few devices (including my favorite red-covered Moleskine), but I’ll try to get my thoughts in order and give a full accounting of each assignment. I’ll present them in asynchronous order by complexity, from what felt like the least complex task to the most complex one.

For these activities, I used a MacBook running OSX 10.6.8 on a 2.26 GHz Intel Core Duo 2 with 2 GB of memory. Chrome is my current browser of choice. When I talk about drawing or coloring something, I mean “drawing or coloring something with a Wacom Bamboo tablet.” (These are like my global variables, thus called.)

Stories Written in a Window – 3 stars

I wrote Still Alive and Climbing the Walls in iTunes. I tried to pick songs that reflected what I have on this computer (which carries only a bit of my poor, neglected-on-an-external-hard-drive music collection). I also tried to include a few songs by friends and friends of friends that I hope folks will go out and find and/or hear on DS106 Radio.

Most of what I listen to is pop of one kind or another, so I wrote a love story. Here it is:

"Still Alive and Climbing Up the Walls"

Replay Value – 3 stars

I call this one The Love Triangle. Though the assignment is worth 3 stars, I’ll only claim one here. I’m not entirely satisfied with the result, but something about it’s glaring artificiality defies any further editorial meddling from me.

"Love Triangle"

For this piece, I imagined Steve, Pip Boy, and Journey’s Protagonist meeting in a desert (alas, alack, and rue the day, I couldn’t find any cc-licensed pictures of Lucky Wander Boy).

On Flickr, I found cc-licensed pictures of each of these characters being cos-played. Here are Steve, Pip-Boy, and the
“>Protagonist
.

I used Acorn (my trial is almost up, so I am sad) to ditch the backgrounds by using the magic wand to outline and then cut the characters out of the pictures. I then saved just the characters as .pngs with transparent backgrounds.

Then I brought everybody into ComicLife against a desert-climate Minecraft screenshot I took from the DS106 server as viewed from my own computer. I used ComicLife to compose the piece because I wanted to add a witty caption or bit of dialogue. However, after seeing the look in Steve’s eyes, I decided to keep quiet.

Since Steve is armed, I put the characters into a triangle and imagined them embroiled in some kind of emotional struggle with one another – how does one adapt to finding other people where there should be none? What emotional habits kick in once we enter community?

Comic Book Effect – 1 star

I used Photo Booth to grab a silly picture of myself and then headed over to Acorn to throw a half-tone dot effect over it. Once I achieved half-tonality, I opened up ComicLife and set up a half-Dark-Knight-Returns, half-Scott-McCloud, half splash-page layout to show myself sitting the Marvel Way. I look just like my dad looks when he plays video games, but he sometimes sticks out his tongue. Like Jordan. My dad is the man.

"Sitting Down the Marvel Way!*"

Draw it. – 2 stars

I remain drawn to the portrait I used for my Daily Create trace drawing. The amount of detail in the photograph captivates me – it speaks to the part of my brain that has been filling up bookscovers and meeting agendas with cartoon eyes, cross-hatching, flames, flowers, spirals, and stick-figure legs since 1990. I went back to the same portrait for this exercise and the next.

I wanted to find a combination of filters that made the portrait look like a pencil drawing while preserving the volume of the subject’s beard. I clicked through a number of combinations in Photoshop Elements 9, and eventually settled on the pencil cross-hatch effect combined with fully desaturated colors and dust and scratched noise to soften the cross hatching and add volume back to the beard.

"Beard with Volume"

Warhol Something – 3 stars

This was the first visual activity I tackled. I found myself using several different programs to get it done. Each program had bits that seemed intuitive to me, and each had bits that seemed obtuse, so I bounced back and forth between them at my whim.

I went back to my portrait and pasted it into SketchBook Pro. I added a layer and colored in different areas with colors that appealed to me in vaguely Warholian ways.

Then I went to Acorn and used the magic wand to prune a copy of the original image so that I would up with a layer of details I could paste over the colored image in SketchBook Pro in hope of creating a silk-screen effect.

I dig it.

"Beard with Warhol"

An Album Cover – 2 stars

My random Wikipedia search turned up Konrad I, Duke of Glogow. I rolled through his dad’s page and found the Piast Dynasty and its arms.

From there I did a cc-license search for Piast on Flickr and found a sculpture of the arms.

At that point I decided to try something inspired by the work of Rose Chase, a high school drama club pal, who designs for the Lower Dens, a Baltimore-based band.

I am no Rose Chase, but I went into Photoshop Elements 9 and equalized the images of the Piast arms. Next I put a blue photo filter on the image, blurred it five times, and desaturated the colors. To create the band of arms, I threw a 4-panel kaleidoscope effect on the arms, separated out the lower elements, and stitched them back on to the side of the upper elements. I drew, shadowed, and copied a few gold chevrons to represent one of the Piast colors and Konrad’s military victories. Finally, I dropped in the band and album names, adjusting the kerning on “Konrad1″ and the line spacing on “The Duke of Glogow.” I picked Trebuchet MS – a favorite sans-serif font of mine – and pink so that the lettering would conserve some interior weight and pop a bit.

Get ready for the drop:

"Konrad1 - Duke of Glogow"

Picturing Prufrock – 3 stars

I love comic books covers by Brian Bolland and Jim Steranko, and I staggered after them here.

First, I printed and read the poem, marking up lines that spoke to me. Then I started sketching street signs in my Moleskine. Pretty quickly, I decided on iterating a picture of a faceless man whittling a mask while seated on a pile of discarded faces. I gave him some shirt-sleeves because why not?

I went into SketchBook Pro and did a blue-line drawing, which is something I picked up from traditional comic book pencilling – artists sometimes layout a page in blue pencil (which doesn’t photocopy) before drawing “finished” pencils on the page for photographing and inking.

"Blue-line Prufrock"

On top of the blue-line sketch I drew a black-line picture of the man and his faces.

"Black-line Prufrock"

After that, I opened Acorn to get rid of the background and keep the figure and faces.

I added a nerve filtered to translucency in a layer behind the figure, and behind that I added a circular patten, coloring every other ring yellow as the fog curling around the house (sorry – couldn’t help it). I also inserted a text layer in a modern font with the lines that inspired the work.

I saved the image and exported it as a .jpg. I brought the .jpg into comic life and added the marquee lettering, which I wanted to be a bit jarring – this would be a Vertigo title, no? I used our bunkhouse logo for the publisher’s imprint and priced the comic according to my ever-loving whim. Finally, I added a lovely portrait called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and pushed it to the back of the image to take care of some of the negative space underneath the circles. I liked using a huge face that someone shot to represent the poem because it fit with what interested me about the poem this time around – the creative donning and murderous abandonment of different faces and identities.

Here is the cover as it stands around, maudlin and modern:

"Prufrock - the Comic"

I’m still processing all the work, but I felt delighted and surprised throughout by how some pieces defied my expectations of myself and came out much better – or even much worse – than I imagined. I would like to practice enough visual arts this summer to get a better feel for the kinds of tools and design approaches that can consistently get me into a flow state in pursuit of work that delights me. And I want to connect it all to what I’m learning about coding while noodling about in the shallowest kiddie pools of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and game design.

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 ;) )

Warhol Me

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

This is my first assignment for this session of DS106 Warhol Something

Take a photograph, or use an existing one, and create a piece of pop art. You can use something ordinary, like Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup can, or do a portrait, like Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe. This can be done in Photoshop, Gimp, or whatever photo editing software you have available.

I’ve done something of this sort before, tracing photos with drawing software (the face trace below from 2007) and even did a wee tutorial using the smartboard software to do the same thing, great fun for kids tracing a giant face.

It is even easier to do with photo booth, I am sure there is even an iPhone app that would do the job. But on of ther aims of my ds106ing is to lose the photoshop fear, so I loaded up the recommend Andy-Warhol-Up Your Photographs with this Photoshop Tutorial and followed along. The tut does what it says on the tin. I could have spent a lot longer tweeking the modes of the layers and messing about with colours, but this is enough for one day. (I’ve been ds106ing a lot over the last few days, mainly due to having a couple of days holiday

 

Flash Face Trace
Photo Booth
Photoshop Effort

Remixing Some Sci-Fi Cult Classics

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

While I am already a bit behind and feeling some self-imposed pressure to keep working in DS106, I took on my first visual assignment. I am, after all, still trying to wrap up the school year with my own students … Continue reading

Captain America at Work

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

Of course, Captain America would choose the BGY-11 as his background. They're both as American as apple pie.

What does Captain America do when not saving the world from crazed Nazi scientists? We know he served his country as a part of the U.S. armed forces, and is an integral member of The Avengers, pontificating on what is or isn’t righteous in a rather old-fashioned Americana way. Most recently he spent a few years thought to be dead, only to be reborn in mid-2009 when it was deemed that a character of his moral fiber was needed once again (translation, he had been dead long enough to capitalize commercially off of it). But what does Captain America do when he’s not busy stomping enemies of the USA and being six feet under?

While I might have a Herculean task comparing what most public school teachers do for a living to Captain America’s exploits, the question I found myself pondering today was what do teachers, much like super heroes, do “behind the scenes” that the public doesn’t get to see? How do we unwind ourselves in such a difficult time (at least here in Michigan), where it seems as though all of our traditional foundational structures are shifting out from beneath us? Captain America and the rest of the Avengers can hang out in cool secret flying military bases for only so long before they must have to seek out something to stave off the boredom in between world-ending evil plots. As the summer looms large for many educators, some already on break, I wonder what my colleagues do in their “off time”.

I know that some tend to small family farms, others do driver’s education (more teaching), and tutoring (ditto), but I’m always curious about the teachers that have jobs beyond what you might expect. I used to work at a small independent children’s bookstore in the summers, which actually complimented my growth as an elementary educators, but I do know a few that have tended-bar, played “dj” for the summer, and one recent discovery was a teacher who has taken a 2 year leave of absence to join the Peace Corps. Those are certainly “un-teacher” like in much the same way that Captain America typing away on a computer doing data analysis or input would seem rather “un-hero” like (even if it is just a tiny LEGO model of him).

I don’t have the luxury of unwinding anymore; I work almost all year long (save for July) in my position as an instructional technologist. The summer is different, where I get to develop and work on curriculum and plan for the coming year, but it’s still in the same environment as the rest of the school year, and I miss that “down time” of being able to turn off teacher-me and do something completely else. Which is probably why I’ve been so enamored with ds106 this past year, and plan to spend a great deal of time this summer learning a lot of new tech tricks and tools thanks to creative assignments such as the “comic book effect” image above. I hope it can get me through the rather lonely weeks of late June and early August when the buildings are close to deserted and I have to force myself to stay on task, with only the clock as my closest reminder of any deadlines.

For those curious about creating the  comic effect above with Photoshop, I found a rather ridiculously easy tutorial on YouTube that you can watch below.