Help

This is an ancient exercise that existed ages ago. Now i will dig it up and redo it. Well, in truth, this is a practice for the assignment 2 which is coming up. The blending technique is applied here. I find that it is really useful to make object different from its original form. In this exercise, i do not repeat exactly what the tutorial said, but instead i try to make go other ways. The picture this time has a more of a horror feeling. I like horror, therefore i made it look like a horror movie. In fact, i attempted to make a horror movie poster. I even thought of a plot for this imaginary movie. The plot should star a female character who was trapped in the maze of her own mind. She tried to get out of all the illusions while seeking for help. In the picture, i only used clipping mask once time to make the the eyes blend in the background. I also added some blood, gore, and even some blood vessels on the eyes.

The "K"

This is the letter "K" i made for the exercise in the class. The idea behind this letter was when i came across the symbol of the Griffindor in the famous series Harry Potter. It was a Griffin, and then the Slytherin symbol, which was a snake. I took the idea of making the "K" looks like a three-head snake, or a Hydra- mythical creature in old stories. I decide this typeface you be serif, with the head and tail of the snake to be in bigger size than the rest. Althought the sketch was pretty good, the drawing on illustrator was not very good. I still can't use Pen as fluently as a real pencil paper.

Photo Edit

This week i have learned some new techniques which are mostly used in photo editing. Today i will experiment photo retouching method that i think is very impressive and adoptable to different occasions.
As we can see, below is a photo that i took of my friend, Van. She is very cute and smile very brightly.






I use Photoshop to add a thin white layer and make the photo become much better. Duplicate that source layer, then apply Filter->Gaussian Blur and adjust it to an appropriate amount depend on the size of the image.






The above is the result of the first touching. We can see that the photo become much brighter and more sparkling.
Then we adjust the contrast a bit to make it more indepth using Adjustment->Brightness/Contrast and turn the contrast bar to max.
After that, to make it more glamorous, we can randomly add some shining rays of light to the photo using the following technique.
Create a new layer, then use Filter-> cloud then filter->Different cloud. Then we use Filter->Motion blur and adjust the direction of the blur the appropriate way. After that, we duplicate the layer to make it brighter. Then choose the blending option for the rays of light "Softlight"

The result is shown below






To make it even more sparkling, we can add some colours to the rays of light.
Make a new layer, then use a brush with big size and orange or yellow color to brush as follow the direction of the light. Then we apply "Softlight" blending option to it.

Below is the final version.

Practice 3

This week i continue with another practice. The picture below was made using photoshop. My inspiration came from 2 films "Lost in translation" and " The Da Vinci code". The wave of words in the picture describes the large amount of knowledge flows throughout the universe. It expresses an infinite source of knowledge and the desire to overcome even the vast space of human. When i made this picture, i had a feeling of faraway space, a distance and mysterious world. Somewhere out there, it should exist other entities, other form of life which we never know
I made this picture using the star field layer which i made and the wave of words using Filter->Wave. Other stuff was made using mostly Filter to add effects.

Practice 2

This is another practice for using Photoshop and Illustrator to create a live trace of human face.

The below is a portrait of my friend which i drawn. However, for some reason, it looks like a donkey more than a human. Whatever, we can see that the portrait is unclean and pale with lots of erased lines still exist. That's why we need to make similar trace version with it for higher quality purpose.





Firstly, I erased all the unnecessary part (unrelated to the portrait) . I found it easier to edit and modify the photo this way. Then i adjust level for and threshold to make the contras more vivid and reduce some noise occur. The result is shown below.








After that, i moved to illustrator to attempt the live trace tool. After using live trace, we can see the shape of the whole face change somehow. This is inconvenient, but it is to be expected since live trace is quick and all. One more thing unrelated to the process, that is i found the curves made by using the live trace are somewhat interesting and creative. It can be used as materials for producing new texture easily :D.






The last part, i used the Live paint bucket to colour the face. The below picture show the process of colouring.








As a result, i found that live trace is a very useful and convenient tool to make a quick and easy trace without taking a sweat. However, on the down side, live trace sometimes doesn't not produce the ideal result as it is still somewhat a "fast food" tool. Normal trace with hand and pen tool and zoom in zoom out is still the best and hard working trace tool produced. One more up side, live trace product can be used to up scale as much as possible without losing the quality.

Practice

During the last class. I had a chance to study the techniques using masks and clipping mask. The below is a small practice in using clipping mask to apply new texture to words. This also be used for images and photos.

My inspiration came from the font Showcard Gothic. When i saw the uneven lines in each words, i had an idea to remake those words using just circles.





















The circle is kind of unequal and feel distanced. I tried to make it as precise as possible. This is just like tracing a picture.





















Finally, i added some textures and using masks to apply the new texture to the words. The texture on top of each word was made using the filter cloud-> different cloud +filter fiber. It looks somehow weird and flammable.

Wallpaper

This is a wallpaper i made during my free time. It took very little time to do, so it may not look very good. However, i recently take an interest in creating objects based on 2 colors black and white. I like the idea of making small random objects and sticking them together, changing between black and white to make them appeal more on the background. Let's say this is a small experiment.

Gestalt exercise

This is the Layout for my Gestalt exercise. In this exercise, i use appropriate materials to illustrate the content "The Secret sex life of plants".
In the layout, i have expressed 2 ideas of closure and continuance.
+Proximity: The two text boxes which i placed closer to each other but in different line. The uneven text boxes also help to reduce the difficulty in reading to many words in a whole at once.
When looking at the total layout, we can easily spot 3 groups of objects. One is the title boxes group, other is the text boxes group and the flower picture group.
+Continuance: Normally, readers read texts from left to right and from above to bottom . Therefore, this will help them easier to read and revise after reading. Also, it helps increase the reading speed and reduce confusion in reading texts.