Week five Blog nineteen

Time management is something that I feel like I’ve done pretty well throughout this assignment. After doing the calendar for the first week on day one I realised that I have a pretty busy life compared to some others in the class. Where I was having around three hours on a night people had around ten and that got me starting to worry if I had enough time to even do the basic parts of the assignment. 

To tackle this lack of time I looked to see when I was free and that didn’t help as much because I didn’t really have much spare time. This was when I knew I couldn’t just have spare time and do nothing and needed to take advantage of the time I had. 

In the first two weeks I just focussed on the analogue part of the assignment and managed to finish it all in this time. Looking back on that I might have taken too much time just on that section of the assignment. I also feel however that those processes do take longer than the digital product which is quicker and when making a mistake less perminant. 

Overall I got the assignment finished in the required time and I’m happy with the results. 

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Week five Blog eighteen

Week five was the week where we needed to sum up everything we’ve done and really get this assignment finished. This was the week where I was able to get a lot of the assignment done because they were all quick and easy digital pieces. 

One of the bigger pieces I finished was this composition which took a while due to the lighting. The lighting between the stock photo and the one you took is always the biggest part of this process and needs to be done properly to be believable. I really like how his one turned out and I think it is an amazing piece for my assignment. 

Another piece that I finished was the polka dot pattern. The image bellow isn’t the final one but you can see that one on the final day. I actually really enjoy the polka dot one as it gives that pop effect to the image that I really enjoy.   

This is another piece I did that involves using an image and incorporating the written text over the top of the image. I saw a similar image online that had this going down the face rather than across. That exact techniques didn’t work on this image however I made my own variation that turned out pretty well.  
Overall o managed to get a lot done in this week. There was more than what is shown here but I wanted to keep some things a surprise for the presentation.  

Week four Blog seventeen

Saturday 12th March 2016 

So today I had my friend come over and model for me. As always taking the photos was a fun experience and I planned ahead this time and made an album of all the shots I wanted to get. I did this because I had ideas already of what I could do with those shots if I got them as well as guaranteeing I did get good shots and not like one good one.  The album included images such as these. 

    
    
 After getting all the shots I needed I started playing around with the them on Lightroom and Photoshop and these two were my favourite from the day.    

 The first photo I really enjoy because it has the mix of a dark and light theme with the knife in one hand and the flowers in the other. Overall I just think this shot just looks good and is deffinely being used in the assignment. The second favourite is one which was inspired but an image above. Basically the concept is using the blade as a mirror and also having that dramatic lookin away from the camera effect. This one looks nice in the plain black and white where as the other I prefer in the split toning of orange and blue. 

Overall I have a whole bunch of amazing photos that I’m really excited to share in my presentation of my assignment. I didn’t want to give them all way but there is just a sneak peek of the type to come. 

Week four Blog sixteen

Friday 11th March 2016

I started doing a digital image with illustration over the top. This was my first time trying this with a digital photograph and I wasn’t too happy with the result. So here is what it turned it to be and I’ll explain my likes and dislikes bellow and why I have those thoughts. 

  
So for this I have used Photoshop with the brush 36 tool on my tablet. This brush has a sort of crayon effect and is much lighter in opacity to other brushes. It has a rectangle shape and is on an angle. 

Likes

• The fact that it brought that child like effect to a serious image. 
• I liked the brush type. 

Dislikes 

• The colours that I chose. I don’t quite know why I chose those colours in the first place as they are really primary school colours that don’t go together very well. I would have to say that they are a major factor as to why I don’t like this image. 
• I don’t like the technique I have used on the image. The squiggly lines across the dress and shoes for example just don’t look right. 

I am not going to be including this in my final portfolio however I am trying other techniques at the moment to see if something else might work better. 

Week four Blog Fifteen

10th March 2016 

Today the lesson was focussed on photo compositing. Basically photo compositing is when you take an object or a person from one image and place them on another background or area. It isn’t as easy as it sounds though. The problems with this is that they are two different photographs with different colour balances and lighting so it is clearly obvious what you’ve done if you don’t fix it. 

So we started off with an image of Hugh Jackman in his refuse background. Then we used the quick selection tool to pick which parts we wanted to keep and remove. We used things such as refining masks to get clean edges the blended well. My favourite trick we learnt though was to get the colours to balance easily is to duplicate the background. Then make it the average colour and have that over the top of the image placed ontop of the background. For me this has dramatically evened the colour balance on all the ones I’ve done.    

I really enjoyed this lesson as it was able to teach me something I’ve never known how to do before as well as gave me an idea for my assignment.   

Week four Blog fourteen

8th March 2016
Today we had the annimation lecturers teach us some techiniques in Photoshop and illustrator. We started off in Photoshop just using the regular brush tool in painting the monkey. This was very simple however it was good to touch up on this skills as I don’t often paint in Photoshop. 

Then we went on to do some work in illustrator using the different brush styles. We each picked an image that was provided and worked on it with different sizes, brushes and colours. Again this was quite simple however it was good to just play around with some brushes I’d never needed to use before.   

This was the final product. I just used a water colour brush in colours that I thought went with the image. Very simple outline however it goes well with the type of drawing. 

Week three Blog thirteen

Thursday 4th March 2016

After the DGD220 class on Thursday I went to the animator showcase. There was some really cool animated scenery and inspiration for those designs. I found interest in a medieval assignment that feature a lot of swords and knives in the inspiration. These got me interested in some photography ideas for my assignment. I went on Pinterest after and looked at looks I could try photographing.   

  
I am going to try all of these looks and see what I can achieve. I didn’t want to just limit myself to knives but other types of knives like swords. 

Week three Blog eleven

Wednesday 2nd March 2016

I have always been one to go between the two programs of Adobe Photoshop and illustrator. They both have their pros and cons depending on what you’re working on exactly. If I was to be honest I’d say that I know how to do more stuff in Photoshop which is quite common.

In illustrator however I have a more basic view on how it works which probably needs to be fixed. In the class on Wednesday we looked at using illustrator in the form of drawing something from scratch, bringing it into illustrator as an image, image tracing and filling in with colour.

I started off with a drawing that looked like this  and yes I know it looks rushed and quite messy.

 I brought this image into illustrator and used the image trace button to create the outlines of the shape. This button automatically expands the image however double checking they’re all seperate shapes is suggested.
At this stage every space is seperate and you can start by filling them in with colour however you need to create a new layer for each one as it can become tricky and confusing later if you don’t.  After the entire shapes are coloured you can go in using the blob tool around the edge with a colour that is on another tone to give the that shadow effect.  

This was the final product for this particular piece. I also did another one with ocean waves which I’ll include later. I found this class very interesting as I hadn’t ever done drawing in illustrator like this before and it taught me a lot.

Week three Blog twelve

Thursday 4th March 2016

Today was another photography class however with this one we were using two lights instead of one. We used the same equipment as we did last time in the film studio with the same photo taking process of everyone taking photos of each other. We also took product photography and the set up for this look like this.

 We used the trolley as the table with the back cloth and white paper as a background. The two lights are facing down towards the the product and due to there being so much light directed as one spot settings did need to be changed to be able to not just see white.

We also got to use the macro lenses which I found very interesting. The first one was just a regular macro lens which was easy to use and gave a really nice look. The last lens I used was this lens which zooms to a crazy amount. The fact that this lens zooms in so far means that it doesn’t have auto focus so I needed to move to try and get focus. This is definitely a difficult lens to use as the slightest shake will mess up the photo. 

 In all I found this photography class as all of them very interesting and I learn something every time.