Progress:

After a quarter of learning new techniques in this course, it is now time to kick back and take a look at all that I have learned. This entry is an evaluation of my progress throughout the entirety of the course.

1.What is the most significant accomplishment in looking at your Midterm or Final? You can talk about technique in Photoshop, investigating your Big Idea, creating a meaningful artwork, etc.

I feel like the most significant accomplishment was learning how to properly convey my message through my pieces. At the start of this course when I would look into what to create I would focus more on technique and visual concepts more than the interpretation. For example when looking at my original concept for my midterm project, the piece had no real solidified concept behind it.



But once I sat back and thought about what I was trying to convey, I ended up with not only a well rounded visual product, I also came out of this with a piece with a perfect visual represntation of the meaning behind it.


2.Choose a project in the class and discuss your most challenging learning experience in Photoshop. Focus on a technique or concept from Photoshop that was difficult at first, but that you mastered by the end of the quarter.

The most difficult project that we did in class was the second selection piece. I feel this way because that project was the most tedious. But after much practice I was soon able to make a number of different images perfectly mesh. This is seen in quiz 4.






3.Compare two projects from the quarter to compare and contrast how you achieved making meaning in the work. Try to showcase in your examples an improved capacity to making visual images that mean something as opposed to being a showcase of technique.

My final and midterm project I believe are my best when it comes to achieving meaning in my works. The use of different blending, gradient and selection tools to take a number of different images to create one single piece shows the ability to not only make a visually pleasing project, it also shows the ability to create a piece with deeper meaning.

Blog 4

For my final project I will explore the taboo of just being exceptionally different for the youth. I will have a school playground scene to help convey this. This is because most taboos that people deal with that have a huge effect on our lives come as a result of what we see in our schools. There will be different types of cliques such as, the high school “loser.” “The Nerd.” “The Dungeon and dragons group.” I will use this to show how such taboos lead to the most grave of situations. For example, the Virginia Tech Shooting and Columbine. I was thing that I would maybe turn a last supper type of scene into this piece. I would have all the food be playground equipment. And at the Table I would have the teacher be Jesus and the others at the table be different types of taboos on the playground or on campus and in the shadows of the scene, I will have the woes and negatives being depicted in an eerie fashion. I can see this work being used as a memorial for those who fell victim to the outcomes of these taboos.

As far as the pieces that influenced me so far in this project, most of them have unnamed artists but they are different renditions of the last supper scene.







I will also use some of these shadow techniques to express the darkness and sadness that lurks in the shadow of these taboos.


Shadows
Out of Bounds Shadows
Shadow Techniques with Light--Giant Elephant

Midterm

I started out with this.. yea...





Then I scratched it and moved onto this...





Made from these...







yup...

Taboo: Social Do's and Don'ts

This work by Kim Joon is about the social taboos of nudity and tattoos. In this piece, the artist uses the body in its entirety to convey this big idea. He uses the beauty of the human body and the perfect mesh of colors to highlight both of the taboos in their forms. He turned the nude bodies into something more visually appealing to those who see nudity as taboo and he also turned tattoos into something that can be see as aesthetically pleasing rather than an eye sore.

From this piece, I feel like I can take away the ability to use colors and shades to mask and convey my image’s message.







This piece here is about the social taboo of picking ones nose. In the description the artist speaks about how this common act has become so taboo that it is instilled in our minds, from the early youth, as a social taboo. The artist uses the famous ‘Mona Lisa’ painting and edits it to depict her picking her nose. This was meant to show how the taboo that we take to be so serious, is in fact silly. The artist main goal was to show how ridiculous it is for the simple act to have such serious ramifications. Especially when the act is something that is a bit normal.

Colorization of Jay-z

For this project I really wanted to figure out how people did colorization's of old black and white photos. I thought it was a bunch of air brushing but once I came across This tutorial I realized that you really do not need all of that. So here it is: The Colorization of Jay-Z






Right here is the before. I had to do very few edge ups because the quality of the photo is not too bad. I Selected the skin to adjust first. Followed by the Glassed, Top Hair, Side burns and then the back ground last.






After everything was finished I gave the final image a blue background tint, similar to the example and I also selected the entire image of jayz and did a few last adjustments.


Here is the Final Product:

Connotations and Denotation: Pieces By Jerico Santander

The two pieces that I picked for this entry are by Jerico Santander.

In this first image the denotation that we can see here is just simply a sort of heaven, earth and hell scene. The guitar in the image plays off as earth with a lot of green plains, ice capped mountains and blue bodies of water. Towards the very top of the guitar we see that the neck has become the base for the trunk of a tree that branches up to the sky. The tree branches sprout out CDs and even host as home to a nest where a newly hatched "musical note" takes flight. When I start to break this piece down to figure out the connotation behind the imagery, I cant help but notice two possible themes that Jerico may have made attempts to convey. The first being that the strategic placement of the guitar is supposed to symbolize a balance between two extremes. There is peace and serenity being shown at the top of this image. The use of flourishing nature along with bright shades and life signifies happiness while on the exact opposite side we see lava, dark shades and dead earth (barren rocks). The other theme I see in this image is the use of music as a medium to peace and happiness. If you start from the bottom and read the image upward, you see that through music one is able to take themselves from a place of distraught to a beautiful place of peace and relaxation.

In the second image I looked at we can see that there is an old mans head formed by earth and old buildings. We can also see old architecture crumbling apart in a rain forest setting. I get an old Mesoamerica feel when I look at this image. When I started to think about what Jerico was trying to convey in this, my initial thought was that it was simply an image of an ancient man slowly fading away being damaged only by the forces of time. But as I began to write out this assignment, what also came to mind is the possibility of Jerico trying to show how the old is the aging rain forest suffering from the act of man. by looking at the face of the old man we see that he is looking down in a sad state with rivers of tears flowing from his eyes.