The pictures this time

Template

Creative
Collage

Post all 3 concept boards on blog explain which board communicates your concept & why

This is my Collage Board. It conveys a couple of concepts, the domes, the arctic environment and the clear ice as glass windows. However I don’t find it at all engaging and there aren’t many design principles present to take away from.

This is my creative board, definitely the board I’ll take inspiration from, I put the most amount of work into this and it has the most I can take out of.

The Inuit child represents the native land and it’s people. Having her blend into the ice communicates the way that Inuit was part of the land and the way that the arctic formed them.

The Ice has micro level aspects with the glistening jagged lines and speckled appearance. It also frames the wider landscape, alluding to the nature of the atmosphere in the arctic. This is also communicated with the stark sunlight and dancing, soft lights of the Aurora Borealis.

The Igloo itself is backlit to convey the sense of warmth within. It also has a satellite dish on it. I’m not sure whether I’m glad I didn’t remove it or not. At first I left it because I wasn’t sure how I would remove it but now that I could I’m not sure if it belongs or not. My concept is very much based around the nature of the landscape its people and the unity of the Igloo adjoining the two, however I think that having left the satellite dish opens a window into the contemporary and perhaps discusses the fact that Inuit are also a current race with current, modern issues, lives and cultures.

This board needed more work, plain and simple. The blue colour – supposed to be the colour refracted through arctic ice, is not the depth, saturation or opacity I wanted and the supporting pastels were a bad choice. I also would have wanted the intense colour green from the Aurora Borealis in the other two boards as I now think this will feature in my designs.

The pictures on this board are well chosen. They may not be the same as the other two but they do convey concepts I wanted to communicate. So does the font, I’m happy with both the colour and the typography. With a little more work I would have been more content with this board and perhaps been able to get more out of it.

For anyone that missed writing this down:

Homework – BLOG

List 5 things that you have learned (photo-shop) from assessment 1.

Post all 3 concept boards on blog explain which board communicates your concept & why

Bring To Class Next Week: 1 DDS Scan (Shirt Scan)

For photo-shop in the concept board work I spent a LOT of time on the net. This sounds like I didn’t have much work happening but it was really great actually. I’ve never felt like the Internet had much to offer for skilled education. But Youtube, font books, and brush books, blogs – all of these became very important for me to produce my concept boards in the best way I could.

Firstly I re-learned the pen tool, the method is still not as good it could be, but at least now I understand the concept and I can move a little quicker. The tutorials on Youtube for pen tool vary a lot but they are all somewhat useful if you keep watching.

I needed pen tool for the pictures in the collage and the creative, the collage just didn’t look right with the pictures stuck as squares, as Igloos are domed and needed to communicate this.

Then I taught myself how to find and import new brushes and fonts, I know we also covered this in class but now I actually know what I’m doing and I’ve found a few sites that suit me. For brushes I really loved this one:

http://www.photoshopsupport.com/tools/brushes.html

There are tutorials, beautiful brushes (which is where my aurora borealis on the creative board came from) and it is a well set out website, which makes it feel a little more safe than the ones with flashing advertisements blaring at your eyes.

Then learnt how to blend colour, not very well until the end but I learnt what the Burn Tool, the Smudge Tool and the Eraser Tool all can do and where they are useful - AND where they aren’t J

I used all of these to try to gain more synergy between the picture layers on my creative; they weren’t working for me though. I tried the pain brush to just recolor but this was also a problem. And so I then discovered the clone stamp tool and my world had changed forever!! There is a fantastic tutorial for it on Youtube with a woman showing how to use it on water with a picture of a rowing team – definitely worth watching. The way it works is incredible, taking pixels from one spot and cloning them in another. This meant that all my mistakes were a little less worse for wear. It was hard to get a hang of as it is easy to want to just keep going and not worry about when the pixels are matching a different area but once you’ve got used to going back and re-sampling it can look amazing.

The next best thing I learnt was a complete accident, I was trying to erase a label in the bottom corner of the creative without having to crop it when I stumbled upon the Magic Eraser Tool, which I clicked twice on the Inuit Child (I was on the wrong layer as well, which may have had something to do with the fact that I couldn’t get rid of the label.) Et Voila! She was hazy and broken looking, and blended on the ice perfectly. This is exactly what I wanted to convey as the fact that the Inuit were native to the land, a part of it, and that each entity communicated to the other.

Scanning

Scanning for my Canon PIXMA MP500 wasn’t to hard, I did need to download the drivers and navigator program (the printer is second so not really surprising), but once that drama was over it was fairly straightforward J

Using the Navigator Program, select the options yo

u want for the scan – resolution, Descreen, Unsharp Mask, document size and type – put the document in and hit scan. Simple pimple!

So Descreen is an important option to be aware of. With

out it pictures, fabrics, specialty papers can all come with Moire Patterns – the things that make your eyes bug when looking through two layers of polyester chiffon. Luckily for us MP500 owners Canon has given us the option to turn it on and remove the risk.

descreen off

descreen on (both 150dpi)

To Scan specifically for internet you want a good quality picture with no Moire patterns, this would be recommended at 360dpi Descreen on however my Navigator program only does 300 or 400 dpi options so I went for 300dpi as I know that is still a good quality resolution and I wasn’t sure if 400dpi would make the file size a bit big (?). For print it depends on the type of document it is: for photos, no more than 600dpi or it gets to heavy with ink, for picture like this 300dpi is a good start point 360dpi if you can. Here are three resolutions for a look at what they do on the net -

75dpi

150dpi

300dpi

Why is it blue and underlined?

Anyway....... Here are examples of a couple of other document types:

Illustration 300dpi, descreen on (not really needed)

Patterned Fabric 300dpi, descreen on

Scanning H/W

I don't have the scanner software for my multifunction printer waaaaaaaaaaaaa :(

What I Know about layers!

Layers make a photoshop picture what it is. They can be transparent, coloured, textured and so on. This means they can act as embellishment, background, main focus (like our pen tool exercise below) or change the colour overall.

In this picture created in class today there are 5 layers! The beach scene is the background, meaning it is layered underneath all of the others. This can easily be done in photo shop by dragging this layer to the bottom of your layers list in the "Layers" window (usually to the right of your workspace on screen).

The next layer (so moving up the list) is the glowing blue around the model, this layer is called shadow. Shadow was created using the brush tool set to airbrush and semi-opaque (about 50%). These modifications can be done in the top menu when the brush tool is selected. You can also can the size of the brush either by pressing command or using the option in the top menu.

The third layer was created as a tester that was the beginning of our fun with layers :) using the elliptical selection tool (the square one, hold down and choose the circle) whilst pressing shift, which makes a perfect circle (also valid for straight lines etc.). Then in swatches window on rightside change colour and in edit menu select fill, it should say use foreground colour which is what you've just changed, and ok!

The second layer is our pen tool exercise and the first is using the text tool (the big T in your tool box) - if you hold it down you can do vertical writing but otherwise go to edit and select free transform and you can pull and move your text anyway you want.

Once layers are complete you can place them in any order you want, if you click on the layer and click the trash can at the bottom of the same window you can delete a layer but for these pictures all five layers are still present if not somewhat invisible :)

Mushroom pleats

ok mushroom pleats are actually quite boring as far as i can tell. You know those lamp shades that are frilly round the edge and have a crinkled, scrunched fabric as the shade - thats mushroom pleating - ew!