Seventh Week of Intro to Digital art

 Wow, late blog again. I really need to be more on time with these. Anyways last week was interesting since we talked a lot about surrealism. I've heard of it before and have seen a couple of documentaries on the topic. I find it cool how surreal painters have always tried to bridge the gap between realism and fantasy as closely as possible. Of course, I don't know everything about the subject, so I'm curious about how exactly this art moment started and why. Was it World War I or perhaps the booming economy that occurred after the war that allowed many artists to financially take risks towards making art that was something new and otherworldly? I'll be sure to do research on that. Although the main point of talking about this topic during class was to prepare ourselves for the next art project, which was coming up with our own surreal piece. The media we would be using is Photoshop on a couple of photos. We are expected to combine several photos to make something unreal, and it's been fun doing the project. It's really unreal what Photoshop can do with its tools. I recall back last week, when Professor Garbutt was showcasing the tools that we could use, and there was one that allowed you to make an image look like it belonged in a different image, and it did so by messing around with the values of light for the object. It blew my mind how much that object harmonized with the background now, after the usage of the AI tool. Overall, I'm looking forward to finishing my dreamscape project, and I hope that the end result will be surreal enough to make people go wow, that is realistic and fake at the same time! 

My progress so far with my dreamscape project. I wanted to create a mesmerizing, peaceful setting of an old man fishing atop clouds as the sun sets, with the viewer watching it all unfold within the confines of a plane. I hope to evoke a sense of hope and fulfillment in anyone who sees my piece.

Sixth week of Intro to Digital Art

 Time flies by, one day I'm entering class for the first time in January, now I'm writing about it in March! This week, we had to finish our photography projects, but before we could do that, we had peer reviews. The peer review went really well, thanks to Professor Garbutt and my peer, who, while not having 5 photos for the day, the ones she did show me were heartwarming and cute, and I wish her luck with the project since they were nice photos. Before I got to class, I made sure to at least have some semi-completed photos. I tried to experiment with every tool that I learned this week in Lightroom, but I found out when I got to class that there were more that I didn't know about. The professor showed me the separate color sliders that you could use along with a graph where you could manipulate a line in the middle in order to make values darker or lighter. When finishing up my project, I made sure to experiment with these tools. Some of the photos, I used the color tool more heavily than others. Overall, this wasn't that hard and honestly really fun. I am for sure going to use Lightroom again, and now, since I know a bit about how it works, I'll use it on some of my other photos. It really does wonders for how they look, and it helps deliver a certain mood in the photos. 

At the beginning of this Unit, I felt that I enjoyed doing photography, but I've never really tried to tell a story in the majority of my photos. However, now that I have finished this project and this unit, I'll try to tell a story more often in my photos by incorporating elements of art and design. This shift mainly happened because of the interesting video we had to watch; it made the idea of storytelling in photography and how to do it seem easier to me. To answer the last question, it felt fine to share unfinished work for me. I know for some people, they might be anxious since people judging their work while it's not complete can sometimes seem unfair since they aren't seeing the completed vision, but in my opinion, it's a great thing. It helps you rethink your decisions in your workflow, which could save you time and improve your vision. That if you receive constructive criticism, as I did in the peer review. 

This is a photo that I took of the San Carlos Beach when I was on vacation last summer. I edited using Lightroom and the summer preset that we had to do for an assignment this week.

Week 5 of Introduction to Digital Art

 

Photography has always been fun for me, and this week has been a great example of that. We are learning about composition and editing for photography, and it has been going well. I enjoyed the walk near the school campus this week, and thanks to Professor Garbutt's help with her showcase of the rule of thirds and other compositional techniques, I would say that some of the photos that I took during that session actually came out better than what I expected. One of my favorites had to be the "Dog Rose Above" photo. The main technique for that one was the rule of thirds. I also took another photo of the same subject without using the rule of thirds, and I have to be honest, that compositional technique genuinely makes more of an interesting photo to look at than the one that has the flower in the center. We are also using the Lightbox app, and I think it's pretty neat that such powerful editing software can be on our phones. We really have come a long way from the 90s. Overall, this week has made me think about my process of taking photos, because while going to photography class in high school and being friends with a photographer who has done professional shoots and recordings, I've never really given a real effort in putting more work into my photos than using the usual "make things pretty" techniques. I would like to incorporate more story elements and complex compositional elements. Since this would not only make my photos look stronger but would also greatly improve my other forms of artwork. 

This is a photo of a Chinese Rose that's in my backyard. I love the colors and shape of the flower.

Fourth week of Introduction to Digital Art

The fourth week of class had us finish our album artwork. It was fun, but I would be lying if I said I didn't have any difficulties. I wanted to make a cover that was reminiscent of the Luke Vibert Big Soup cover, since I really like the album. So, having the idea in mind of how I was going to create this, I went and drew and inked the center focus of the artwork, a Gundam space warrior. Then I took a picture of it, removed the background, and imported it into my Photoshop file. I knew it wasn't going to be easy, but I also thought it wasn't going to be that hard. Well, it wasn't that hard, but it did take a long time to do. I thought that I could use the remove background feature that was in Adobe Express in order to make the process quick and easy, but when trying to do so. I had a lot of difficulties in removing the background since the remove background tool kept removing both the spaces inside and outside of the drawing, which is not what I wanted. What I wanted was to cut out the character but still have the paper space and texture in it. Overall, I had to manually cut out her using the magnetic lasso tool in Krita. I did use Photoshop for everything else, but felt that it would be easier for me to use a program that I was already used to for that. The thing that convinced me to do this was when I wanted to transform the title for the album artwork. All I wanted to do was make the title seem like it was going towards a one-point in perspective, but when trying to achieve this in Photoshop, I couldn't do it! I spent a couple of hours trying to figure it out, and I couldn't. So, instead, I opted to use Krita. 

Honestly, everything else besides that was easy for me since a lot of the stuff that we had to do on Photoshop was already old information for me. Although I didn't know there was a shortcut to resize the entire image, that was cool, and I can see myself using that in the future. I would mostly use it for just studying references. It's great to have the image right next to your drawing. Although in case I'm doing any photo editing, like stitching together different parts of an image, I can see that being a time saver for me as well.

                  Before and After:

Lastly, I forgot to mention this, but the character that's on my album cover is a bit of a Frankenstein creation of mine. It's not the original drawing I did, since, when doing the inking process, I messed up on the proportions of the legs, and I didn't know whether to just continue or trash the drawing. I couldn't give up on it, but I was also unsatisfied with the result, so I remembered that we were using a photo editing software! So, I edited the drawing in a way where I manually cut out the leg, copied and pasted it, and used that copy as the other leg. Photo editing software is really like magic sometimes.

Third Week of Intro to Digital Art

 

The third week of class was pretty nice. We did peer critiques, which were really helpful for people who got them, since one of the main ways an artist could improve in their craft is to get feedback from other people. A lot of times, we artists are our worst enemies. Some have egos about their artwork and don't notice obvious mistakes. Others may have self-appreciation for their art that's so low that they tend to criticize every little thing that they do, leading to constraints in their creative endeavors, which is why receiving feedback and critiques is incredibly important. In general, discussing what speaks about an art piece and what we feel could be improved on was a bit of fun for me. I don't often speak in this way, using art terminology with a lot of people. Although sadly, we ran out of time, so I wasn't able to show my artwork and get feedback for it, which was a shame. Hopefully, next time I'll be able to do that.

This wasn't the first time I've participated in a peer art critique, but I'm still new to it since I haven't done it that often. I didn't really feel anything when I shared my work, because I wasn't able to :(. One element of art that was discussed and was personally brought up by me was the choice of colors. There was one piece that had a lot of cool colors, so I said that it gave it a calmer vibe. 

This is a placeholder sketch for the main subject of my next art project for this class, which is an album cover. I wanted to design and draw a character that screams futuristic warrior.

Second week of Intro to Digital Art

The second week of class was nice. I have been enjoying it, and I honestly can't wait to learn more about digital art. I'm especially excited for the illustration assignment that is to come near April (I wonder what it is?). One thing that stood out to me, and honestly, was shocking for me, was when we were assigned the copyright assignment last week, and I didn't know that copyright laws applied in that way! Everything that I've drawn, according to the law, is under my copyright. I've always assumed that you had to go to the courthouse to sign a document to have your stuff be under copyright or something similar to that. This honestly makes sense since I have seen people, especially those abusing the copyright system, be able to use their copyright, even if they have never set foot in a courthouse. 

As well, the digital self-portrait was pretty fun to do and was definitely a new experience for me. Not in the sense of making self-portraits, since I've made plenty in the past, but more as using Adobe Express. Adobe is one of the leading companies for art programs, I think, and since their services are very popular, many professionals use them. I feel that learning Adobe Express is going to be a benefit for me in the future because, while I probably may not be using Express, I might use other programs that are similar in nature to it (not only from Adobe), so learning how to use its tools and controls would be good for me.

Here's a comic that I've been working on recently. I'm trying to create a scene where a pair of adventurers are tasked with fixing something, so the man with the long chin (lol) asks his partner if she has put everything in place correctly. She proclaims that she did, but it's found out to be not true, so she starts to panic. I've done the line work with pencil and a 0.30-micron pen, and the reason why the image looks weird in the middle is that I used the stitch feature of my scanner while scanning, since the original paper for the comic was too big.