Weekly Reflection

This reflection is for the week of March 28th.

This post goes over my 11B assignment which deals with 3D effects.

My apologies in advance for not screenshotting my steps as I usually do, but I will walk you through everything here.

The top "lip balm" was easy to make. First, create the appropriate shape. I used an ellipse. While selecting the ellipse, go to Effect > 3D > Extrude and Bevel. Rotate your shape how you want it (noting that the blue face of the example cube will be the face you can map art to). Before you accept the 3D adjustments, click on the button that says "Map Art..." Assuming you have a symbol already made that you would like to use, you can adjust it accordingly to fit the face of your 3D object. You can also apply a drop shadow (as I did).

The bottom "Cell Soap" required similar steps. Make a hexagon. You will also need a symbol to use to map to the face of your 3D hexagon. You can round the harsh corners by going to Effect > Stylize > Round Corners. I created the sponge by making a circle, applying 3D > Extrude and Bevel at a slight angle, then adding Filter > Artistic > Sponge for the spongey texture and Filter > Distort > Roughen to roughen the edges. I also applied a drop shadow to the cell soap containers. Admittedly, it seems a little off, but I didn't know how to fix the shadow and make it look more realistic.

The awesome bee (pattern) brush was also made by me! See the previous tutorial on steps required to make your own awesome bee brush. I just made a straight path, applied the pattern brush to it, and copied it two times to make it a snazzy border.

Weekly Reflection

This reflection is for the week of March 21st. I'm not sure if I needed to do a reflection over spring break. Knowing that instructors are sometimes out to get you... I made sure I did one anyway!

This reflection goes through the steps required to make a pattern brush in Illustrator.

I drew a cute little bee! Anatomically incorrect, but it is trying really hard to be a bee.

I then selected the bee and all of its components.

With the bee selected, I clicked on the new brush icon in the brush window.

Select the radio button for "new pattern brush."

Play with settings until you get the desired result. Also, don't forget to name it. Mine is called Bee Brush!

I then drew a wavy line with the brush tool. The brush that I last had selected got applied (charcoal brush).

Make sure the path for the wavy line is selected. Then go to the brush window and click on the new bee brush pattern. Ta da! Bees are now magically on your wavy path!


You can now do fun things with your new brush. Think of all the possibilities!

Illustrator: Assignment 10F

I know that you are all deeply in love with my fictional creature, Worm. He made an appearance in Photoshop merely two reflections ago, and now he is back and more vector than ever.

I began using basic shapes like rectangles and squares. Using those shapes, I pulled at the anchor points with the direct selection tool until it looked vaguely like a head or a segment. I then used the warp tool to push it around and smooth it out.

Later, I used the pen tool (on the back segments near his butt) and the brush tool and found that those worked really well, too. I hope it's not too noticeable that I used many different techniques. Many of the segments on his back were copy and pasted, slightly adjusted, rotated, etc. and put into place. The two smaller legs are actually the same, I copied the first one and rotated the segments so they wouldn't look copy-pasted. Hm.

His eyes are just ellipses. His head was originally a rectangle. His legs and back segments were also rectangles. His teeth were 3-sided polygons. His bottom jaw is a combination of rectangle and ellipse, combined and warped. I touched up my paths with the pencil tool. A few of the belly segments near his butt end were drawn with the brush tool. I used the charcoal brush stroke - I thought it looked very artsy.

I'm a total newbie when it comes to Illustrator. This was my first attempt at making a complicated piece. It was quite a struggle.

Ready, Set, Photoshop Actions!

In Photoshop, you can record the steps it took you to do something and save it as an ACTION.

This is useful if you need to apply the same effects to a batch of images. Some things you can do with actions:
Resize or crop
Auto Color
Auto Levels
Auto Contrast
Apply various filters
Rotate
...and much more!

If you have to use an action on a lot of images (say, hundreds), you can go to File > Automate > Batch. Then you can choose to run an action on all of the images. You can make Photoshop open each image, run the action, save the image, and then open the next image, etc. I don't have much use for that, but if you are taking images to make into a time lapse, this is immensely AWESOME.

One of the graduate assignments deals with creating actions. I will talk about them here. I made two fabulous actions, one which will take perfectly good images and turn them into washed out versions with sepia overtones, and another that takes a decent image and makes it into a fake-artistic, rotated postcard! I know you are excited, so let's see what they can do!

This is a screenshot/explanation of my actions. It would be helpful to read, especially if you've never made an action before.

Washed out sepia action - for all of your washed out sepia action needs.

Because it's fun to make everything look like a badly painted postcard.

You'll notice that the image of my cat appears to have a thinker stroke than the other two images. It was still the same action, but the image was much smaller, so a 15 px stroke looks much thicker. The two insect images were probably 3-4 times larger than the cat picture, I just scaled everything down to a similar size.

Now, go out there into the world and make actions happen (preferably actions that serve a greater purpose than my own).

Weekly Reflection

Reflection for the week of March 7th.

I drew a fictional creature. I fondly call him Worm. He is big - there is nothing present to show scale, but he eats dogs and other hapless animals that happen to wander by his burrow. We won't discuss the physical impossibilities of growing that large with an exoskeleton or how he can acquire enough oxygen without real lungs. Moving on...

Here is the final image. I will take you through the steps. Come along!

Here is the image, layer by layer.

Step one: Draw a sketch.

Step two: Outline the sketch. In this case, my sketch was very clean and didn't require much erasing.

Step three: Choose a direction for light and add lighting. In this case, I just added patches of light brown with the brush tool and used to smudge tool to push it around.

Step four: Add shading where appropriate - I used a darker brown than the background color and added patches with the brush tool, again smudging with the smudge tool.

Step five: Added color to the eyes, claws, butt spine, and teeth.

Step 6: On a layer beneath the lighting and shading layers, I used a richer brown to block in his top half and legs. I also added a few more touches as well as my signature. I originally stopped here; this was my finished product.

Step seven: I thought my worm looked a little washed out, so I saved a new copy, merged all the layers, and tweaked the levels and curves.

It took about 5 hours to color. I had the sketch on my tablet laptop (which I shamelessly drew during Mycology class last semester). I pulled it off, touched it up, and it became a reasonable piece of art.

Weekly Reflection

Weekly reflection for the first week of March.

Behold, my most horrible creation, stitched together from the world's fiercest animals. It will take care of all your pigeon problems, guaranteed.

Body of hawk:

Head of cute, toothless lizard:

 

Eye of snake:

Bony crest of sungazer:

Tooth of cougar:

Claw of other lizard:

 

Leg of yet another lizard:

And you get a good pigeon eater!

You like?

Typography: The good, the bad, and... that's it.

It turns out that if you google "good examples of typography," you get bad examples of typography, too. Go figure. I guess people have varying opinions, am I right?

Bad example: I don't like it. The font type and size keeps changing. It's jarring to look at. Some in all uppercase letters, some in all lowercase letters. Serif, san serif, and hand-written style. Lots of empty spaces. Some lines are very long while others are only comprised of one to three words. I do not approve.

Target audience: No idea. Rebellious teenagers? Students who are looking for examples of bad typography (that's my guess)?

Good example: I like it. While the font type and size keeps changing here, I feel like it works in this particular typographic piece. Only a few repeating and subdued colors are used, which is pleasing to the eye. The words have the perfect spacing and size to allow them to look like little colored blocks in a tower of words. Every word is a brick.

Target audience: Nutritionists? Dieticians?