Shawn Hebert Final

Making a Shoe Ad

For the final project of the year we were tasked with designing a shoe in Illustrator a then using this to create an ad for it. It was similar to the cartoon we created in the previous project with the exception being that it was colored with gradient tool in Illustrator rather than with paint tools in photoshop. Mine turned out well enough, again like always with some parts stronger than others. A weaker point to start off would have to be how I handled the areas between sections of the shoe. What ended up happening is that some differently colored sections would have non matching borders that unrealistically stood out, this could have been fixed by just altering the color of the sections so they did not clash. A stronger aspect of the piece would be how the shoe was sectioned off, this ignoring borders. The shapes seem to flow like a real shoe and the overall shape works making the shoe itself look better. Some things could still be worked on while others are well enough as is.

Being not the first project in Illustrator anymore but still earlier in my use of it there were still some difficulties. After setting the initial shapes for the shoe it took a while to make sure that there were no gaps. This took a lot of finagling to make it still look good while also being solid. By contrast an easy part of the project was adding the stitching onto the shoe, all this required was to select the dashed line option and to draw a line where it was needed.

The objective of the project this time was to learn and use the gradient tool, this was used to make basically the whole body of the shoe. How it worked was we would need to make closed shapes with the pen tool and turning on fill with color using the gradient tool created the gradient effects visible in the above image of the shoe. All that aside I would still change a few things, one of these would be to use more layers when setting up shapes. When making the shoe off of an original image the work I did sometimes made it hard to see for later shapes, with more layers I could just switch them off and have a easier time.     

Cartoon of Me

For our first real project in Adobe Illustrator we had to create a cartoon of ourselves. How the project worked was using pencil and paper we would draw ourselves to use later as a model, afterwards we would take this and create an outline in illustrator. Once the outline was complete we would transfer it to photoshop where it was colored, shaded, and completed. All and all I think that my project turned out well enough, having both its stronger and weaker points. Picking the strongest aspect of the piece would definitely be the very general outline of the body I made in Illustrator. The proportions of the body are reminiscent of actual proportions and they don’t have too many rough edges like in real life. On the other hand in the fine details I more or less failed. Observing the claw like hands and the right elbow it just does not seem to fit negatively impacting the work.

Being the first project we’ve had in Illustrator some new difficulties were attached, also with photoshop being involved there was a familiar easy part of the project. In Illustrator using the pen tool for the first time to get decent lines for the outline of the project entailed a large amount of trial and error and redos making all around the most difficult part of the project. The easiest part of the project was, like said earlier, was in photoshop. To get the initial color of the cartoon all I needed to do was select a color and paint it where needed which did not take much effort or time making it very easy.

The objective of the project this time was to learn and utilize the pen tool, select tool, and direct select tool. The pen tool was used to create the lines observable in the cartoon , making the skeleton of the work almost. The select tool of the three was used the least but was still used. When I wanted to move the outline of the pen tool to get a better look at anything or anything else there it was. The direct select tool was heavily used. When I drew a line with the pen tool afterward I would use the direct select tool to select a segment and move it to the proper place to look good. Even though I think the cartoon turned out alright I would change a few things. The first change I would make are the detail errors I talked of earlier such as on the hands and arms.

Hybrid Animal

For our third to last project this year in Elements of Design we had to take parts from three animals and combine them into one new animal fusion. The new creature would have to look realistic, having well blended parts that fit and transition naturally, but could also combine animals that would immediately make a person question it due to odd part arrangements. For the project we were introduced to two new tools in photoshop, the stamp and healing brush tools. It was our objective to use these two tools to make the fusion look realistic. When it came to the stamp tool it was used often. In order for me to transplant the red panda head in the image onto the bird for example and do it accurately I would get the stamp from the panda image and on a new layer paint it on where it could blend realistically. I would go onto to do the same for some fur/feather blending and putting sloth claws where the bird feet were. For the healing brush tool it was useful in altering the original bird image, which served as the base for the whole work, to accommodate new animal parts. An example of this would be getting rid of the original bird feet by replacing it with painted on wood so the new claws would fit and doing touch ups on the fur.

The objective isn't the only part of the project. I had some strong aspects such as how well I used the healing brush. In getting rid of the wood the product looked realistic which was a good base for the new animal to sit on. A weaker aspect would probably be the job I did blending, in some areas it's easy enough to tell that parts are not of the same image such as the neck and lower claws. I should probably have focused more in those areas.  

Like every other project of the year some parts of the project were easier than others. The easiest part was definitely transplanting the head of the panda onto the bird, all it too was to properly size both images then carefully use the stamp too on the panda head and start painting in the same spot on the bird. The hardest part by contrast would have been using both the stamp and heal brush tools to get the sloth claws to connect to the bird body. To make it look good I had to play with the opacities of both and paint new bird parts over the claws to make it so they weren’t floating, painting over the claws easily and at some points made unnatural looking straight lines which were hard to iron out. Taking into account the harder and easier parts of the project I would probably not work with birds. Compared to other animals they have more fine details, such as their feather and thin feet, which requires someone to work more carefully with the two new tools.

Ai Curves / Corners & Curves Activities

Painting In Photoshop

This time in Elements of Design we still stuck to using photoshop, but did something unlike other projects. Here we were tasked with painting in it and having the final result be purely by our own hand. What we would do is take a photo or picture from the internet and trace it followed by painting over it making it look semi real with a couple tools associated with the exercise.

For my project I made a painting of the Iron Giant, who is very geometric in shape, this translated to some areas of the project being extremely easy and others being tedious, time consuming, and generally a bad experience. On his chest piece and head there were large sections of monotone plating that only required to be filled in with a respective color, doing this covered nearly half of the image and took probably a fiftieth of the time securing its spot as the easiest part of the project by far. By contrast his neck, upper chest, and hand all were made up of small segments that had to be individually colored, blended, shaded, and more. Every piece took a similar amount of time regardless of size so this part ate up almost the entire project duration and most of my attention making it easily the hardest part.  

No work I did this year has been perfect and I don’t think anyone can say differently regarding any work, this implies that different parts of the work can be improved. One thing that falls into this category is my blending job between like and contrasting colors on the body. The background I used left, wherever blending occurred, a blueish tinge that doesn't belong. On the other end of the spectrum what ended up being a stronger aspect was at some points creating a seamless edge between color contrasts without shading that made the area look less like a cartoon.

The objective of the assignment was to use the brush tool, including the mixer brush tool, and the pencil tool,  along with the other tools we learned to use in the past to take the original photo, transfer its colors, and give it a sense of realness and the aspects of a painting. In my project I use the pencil and brush tool extensively in first tracing the original image and then to get all of the colors of the original onto the new work. After this I used the mixer brush tool to take all of the rough lines caused by the trace and make an appeasing gradient between contrasts. After doing all that the project was completed and looking back there are a few things I would change. For one I definitely would have chosen a more organic subject to paint. There were very little to no gradual color changes in the original that makes a subject look real and it was hard to create these in the product. However, all the same i’m not disappointed with how everything turned out in the end.  

Andy Warhol was a major contributor to the modern art scene with some of his most famous work being Pop art. It would take a person and warp their color onto a gradient plain making them look like an object. For our fifth project in Elements of design we were tasked to create our own pop art with an image of ourselves or a friend. Compared to other projects this year it took a short time to complete and on a personal level I think it turned out nice.

In making my Pop Art a lot turned out well and in some ways unexpectedly. Its strongest aspect would have to be how the image composition worked with the cutout filter and coloring to improve its original quality. The original picture of James, the subject, had his eyes almost closed and had parts of his face out of focus. But, after all the necessary transformations he now looks like he has a deep expression and pops from the background. By contrast the weakest aspect of the work would be how color variation and complementation is lacking some images, specifically the purple and brown image looks out of place.

Given that this project took the least amount of time to complete there was a lot that was easy about it. What was easiest was the setup for the image so you could transform it into pop art. It was as simple as taking an image and putting it through a filter or two, after this you just need to adjust the size and that’s half the project. What was most difficult about the project, though still comparatively easy to other projects this year, was getting the colors onto the gradients of the transformed image to make it pop art. Sometimes the magic wand tool would not select everything it was supposed to if small lighter areas were isolated, this even happened with contagious unchecked. Messing around with the tool to get it to work was tedious and had some difficulty.

The project’s objective this time was to use a multitude of tools to properly transform the image, these included the crop, magic wand, paint bucket, and paint brush tool. The crop tool was used to take the original image and size it properly after sizing it up to the project size, you use it by just selecting an area and pressing enter to get rid of the unselected area. The magic wand tool was used to select each grey gradient which would then be colored. The paint bucket tool could fill in a selected area while the paintbrush tool does the same thing except you do it by hand. I my project I used the tools in this way to take the grey gradient of my picture and make it pop with color. If I had to do one thing differently though I would definitely use lighter and more vibrant colors. Given the context they just look better than browns and darker purples.

The fourth project in our elements of design class was to use both photoshop and art of our own making to make a combination where a picture of us would be featured. Our personal picture would be displayed as a collage of polaroids that combined give more or less the full original image.

In this project I encountered a lot of difficulty and it, in the end, did not turn out as well as I hoped. The weakest aspect of the work if I had to name one was the basic composition, in initially making the polaroids too large I covered far too much of my supplementary drawing. This in turn also made the work look crowded and messy once I started bringing parts of the drawings forward. All this probably could have been avoided by using less or smaller polaroids. The strongest aspect of the work would probably have to be my original drawing… maybe. Before it became crowded with the polaroids it didn’t look too bad, but it also wasn't the best drawing i’ve ever done.

In working through the project I found some easier and harder parts. Personally the hardest part was getting the polaroids to appear on top of each other. It involved both selective and tedious use of the magic wand tool needing to select each layer before working and pixel perfect erasing after still needing to be careful of layers. The easiest part ironically came after and because of the difficulty in changing the polaroids. It was erasing parts of the picture of me where the polaroids did not fall that was easy, the polaroid frames let there be a lot of room for error and let me easily tell where I needed to erase.

The objective of the activity was to mix the two media sources that we had, the polaroid photos and our work of art. To do this I took parts of my drawing, which was in the background, and brought them forward with some of the polaroids. To do this I used the magic wand tool on parts of the drawing and copied what was selected. I took this new copied layer and dragged up in priority, they still covered the original parts but they also looked closer now. If I had to change anything about what I did with the project it would definitely start with the polaroid size and number. I would make them smaller and possibly less numerous so that the my drawing could be better seen and its aspects that were brought forward would make more sense. In conclusion I am not terribly happy with how this project turned out and I do think it is my weakest one of the year, but if I had to do it again I think it would turn out better.

Tattoo Illusion

The third project of our Design class was to create a tattoo and then using photoshop take the tattoo and impose it onto a picture of ourselves making it look realistic using multiple tools. We used tools such as burn to darken the tattoo to match the shadows of our bodies and dodge to lighten it on light parts. Blur is used to blur the tattoo to help it blend with the body since the picture of the tattoo is sharper than the larger body image. Multiply would get rid of any of the white from the tattoo image left over from the original image since it was from the start on a piece of white paper. Finally warp was one of the most important tools, it allowed us to bend the tattoo image to fit the shape and contours of the body as a real tattoo would act. The end product would be the two images appearing together as one and the picture of us looking like we had a tattoo. In my own tattoo I utilized these tools to help blend the tattoo achieving the project goal.  

Other than the use of new tools and incorporating non digital resources the project was similar enough to the others we have done. My work had some stronger aspects such as the original drawing that became the tattoo, it had a good flow that fit the area of my body I put it on (my side). One of the weakest parts of the work would definitely be how the original image was maybe too grainy which forced the tattoo to be blurred. It ultimately made the image look like a mediocre picture of a real tattoo which could be improved by a picture retake and a refitting of the tattoo.

The project had its own easier and harder parts like most others. I personally found the drawing of the original tattoo picture easy abet still tedious. To me drawing was never too hard yet at the same time I was never very skilled, the tediousness came in with text seen in the image, it involved stylized text that required a large time investment to get right. The harder part of the project was definitely playing with the image playing with multiply and the magic wand to get it to select the whites I wanted to delete. The paper I was using was off-white and it sometimes failed to select it while sometimes it selected blending on the handle for deletion. In the end some of the handle blending had to be deleted to get rid of all the white.

I liked the project well enough and hold regrets as well as content for its aspects. If I had to change anything it would be the original body image. At the time I was not in the clear of how it should have been taken for the best results and it ended up being grainy. The grainy image force the tattoo to be a little grainy and detracted from the whole work.         

The selfie Project

Our second project this year in Elements of Design was to create an image in photoshop using a mish-mash of other images we found on the internet that represents us. In creating the image we were tasked to use a couple new photoshop tools that helped us alter the images we found to fit our own uses and look good together, along with this we still had to follow some of the four design elements we used in the first project. The new tools were using filters on images to change their look, using the layer makes to change how they look on top of each other, and blend modes that makes the images used seem to be continuous. Other than this the basic art elements such as contrast or proper alignment, in my image proper alignment was achieved through avoiding the middle of the image and having focal points on its fringes which the film strip helped in. Contrast in the picture was seen in multiple areas such as the night sky verses the computer board on opposite ends of the picture or Hobbs being bright colors on the dark background of the night sky.

My project has its own ups and downs having areas I like and areas or aspects I dislike. The works strongest aspect I think is how it is split into two areas of ⅓ and ⅔ creating an appealing proper alignment. On the opposite end of the spectrum is how I think the figurines on the filmstrip itself turned out, they don’t look like like they belong on the background and don't blend very well. This may be fixed by moving them somewhere else, changing the film color, or maybe playing heavily with filters.

There were some hard parts of the project as well as some easy ones. The easiest part was definitely setting up the background that only took a couple swipes of the erase tool and simple filters after the images were selected. The images on top of the background such as getting the space man right took a lot of work and sweat. From cropping him off of a similar background that messed with the magic wand tool to getting the the filters to not destroy parts of the image which made me hand color some parts differently, in all that part was a pain but turned out well.

What I would change if I had to do this project again is how I used the blend and layer mask tool. I did not use them liberally enough which resulted in some unneeded rough edges that pulled the work down and also made the overall lighting weird. Otherwise I am happy with the result and would not change too much.

For our first art project this year in Graphic design we had to create an image partly using only one letter of the alphabet, for this I chose the letter C. Which should be expected for the first art project and for the first time using photoshop there were both times of difficulty negatively affecting aspects of the work and times where through inference or learning I was able to successfully use a tool that made certain parts of the piece look good. My strongest aspect of the work was probably in the blending of colors of the moon, stars, and sky. It more convincingly mimicked light effects than other parts of the picture, had better placing than the sea, and had much starker contrast with the background than anywhere else that culminated to a more attractive area. The weakest area of the work was probably the boat floating on the sea. It had poor contrast and overlap with the sea as well as not blending well, it just didn’t look too in place which could have been improved by putting a more precise touch on the above described aspects.

With all projects or works some things are easier done than others. The easiest part of this piece was definitely the placing of the Cs in the sky. In putting them against the background they did not require any shifts after the fact and the only difference between them is font size and location. The hardest part of the work was the placing Cs in the sea and how the shading around them worked. Each C required multiple movements and shifts while the blending between the sky and the sea was slow and tedious with the brush in order to get the varying blending effect. The sky ultimately took less than a class to complete versus multiple classes getting the sea right even though it took up less of the image.

The project was not purely independent but instead we had a set of objectives we had complete. We had to use proper alignment, contrast, proximity, and repetition. Proximity was nice and variable between different Cs in the photo and repetition was achieved through the many Cs being present. For alignment I was careful to avoid the center of the image putting key focus points on the bottom and sides and finally contrast was created between the dark of the sky with the blue of the sea and the light of the stars. Nothing in the picture I made was perfect and there are plenty of things I would do differently if I had to do it again. An example of this would be not exploring more into the various blending tools available to manipulate the background. I would use the 3D tools as well to make the image look less flat, especially the sea. I would also consider doing an entire different setting for the picture to see if that changes anything. The project as a whole was a good kickstart for the year to introduce us to Photoshop.