A shrinking world.

I can't remember where I found this image, but I did not make it and it does not belong to me. ;D

Communication is a wonderful thing and in terms of digital artwork, it can be portrayed in many ways. In my sketchpad I explored a few selections of how I could illustrate communication in my final piece.
One of my first mock ups in Photoshop were two postcards, as postcards are a form of long-distance communcation that is slowly dying out with the introduction of the internet.

Both of these images I took myself on holidays earlier in the year. I played around with colour levels and contrast as well as adding different overlays to create different effects.

HOWEVER...

The first thing that jumps in to my head when I think of "communication" is, admittedly, cyberspace. As we've moved slowly in to a digital era are lives are almost totally entwined with the internet. We shop on it, bank on it, socialise on it, make phone calls on it. We now have internet access in pubs and on our mobile phones. Photoshop can actually be very good at making some neat cyberspace effects, with simple tools like skewing that can create the cliché "parallell plane" type of image. I looked at a few existing images of cyberspace to research what type of effects would succeed in getting my piece to look "electronic".

 None of the above images were made by me, and all we found on google image so credit is to go were it is due. However, they served the purpose in showing me what type of layers make up a typical interpretation of cyberspace; wire frames, circuits, glowing lights, binary and pixels.

Expanding from a quick doodle in my sketchpad of a binary earth; (binary being the primary language for computer circuits) I whipped up a graphical image that expresses pretty much how I see cyberspace.

 

There is quite  a lot of effects going on in this image. My very first starting point was to create a layer of binary over a world map where the continents and landmasses were replaced with 1's and the water with 0's. Once it was complete, I selected a section and spherized it a few times, adding shadows as I went, to create a realistic sphere that is meant to represent a planet. 

The background is made up of several layers, the first being a painted world map which I painted myself using very saturated blues and greens. I also used the "Extrude" tool to create square blocks of different depths to represent pixels that make up visual displays on computers. As well as this, I included circuits which I texturised, pixellated and faceted white areas and a layer made up entirely of LCD pixels.

A place of great disorder and confusion.

Visual Literacy; Week 3

Chaos... Could pretty much define my entire university life right now. But hey, that's what independance is about, right? From the state of my room to the state of my artistic thought processes, pretty much every part of my life has full potential to be chaotic. It's an interesting word to demonstrate as it is entirely dependant on perception. What I might think is an organised mess might be another person's nightmare.

The opening of Primark in Oxford street, London, is one of the most chaotic things I have seen on the internet. Several people were injured - all for the sake of cheap clothes.

A photograph I took outside my university halls. It's a police barrier that is put up every night to prevent drunken crowds that pour outside of the nightclubs getting in to the apartments. When I see them stashed away the next morning it reminds me of the chaotic groups of drunken people I hear shouting and singing outside my window.

Expanding from the idea of riots and anarchy being symbols of chaos, I decided to play around in photoshop to achieve different flame effects. They could be useful in my final piece for chaos if I decide to create an image orientated around riots as molotov cocktails are particuarly iconic for such disorderly events.

Simply using this tutorial, and making use of the smudge tool and linear gradient tool in photoshop I was able to create a quick and simple flame effect:

A students' room is very chaotic, because we're lazy and quite often hungover. (Disclaimer; this is totally not my room, but I did help to mess it up.)

I wanted to play around with the photo of my flatmate's room but I wasn't sure what sort of theme to aim for. I thought... What art style would I consider "chaotic". Fractal was out of the question, I don't see how I could apply that to the photo; but then I thought... doodles! Doodles by their very nature are chaotic. They're formless and often done when we're absent mindledly laying pen to paper.
Expanding from that, I decided to play around with the photograph in photoshop by drawing over it with the paint tool. I came up with a rather nice result.

Adding different effect filters gave my image different results. I included layer maskers and solarized the palette to add a gloomier mood to the overall image.

/needsfinishing/

v. fell (f l), fall·en (fô l n), fall·ing, falls

Visual Literacy; Week 2 Word

Fall was a pretty interesting word for me as I found a lot of paths to explore the word and meanings behind it.Taken in a literal sense it is a verb; to descend in free fall under the influence of gravity. However, it can also be used in non literal contexts.

To fall for Temptation;;;

One of the ideas I played with was the idea of falling for temptation. It is human nature to give in to our own will and eat that last tempting biscuit. Expanding from this, I brainstormed some of the most common things to tempt people.

 Food;;

A lot of us can hold our hands up and admit to being guilty of giving in to our sweet tooth - especially during the festive season.

(All credit for this photo goes to www.orcado.com, were I found this image.)

 Lust;;

At the very base of things, underneath our MAC make up and Superdry tshirts is our primal animal self - our natural feelings of desire and lust can be hard to overcome at times and such it was labelled one of the seven deadly sins.

(All credit to photo goes to Wisdom Quarterly Blogspot, were I found this image.)

 Materialism;;

It's common knowledge that as a general rule of thumb, females love to shop. Fashion is a massive part of our culture now with idols such as Lady Gaga and Beyonce pretty much dictating what styles are "in" for the season. With many women admitting to being shopaholics it can certainly said that innocent window-shopping can be, at times, too tempting to remain cost free.

(All credit for the photo goes to www.pinkandgrey.ca, were I found this image.)

Using the idea of the relationship between consumers and materialistic goods I decided to play around in photoshop with different atmoshpheres and effect. I photographed one of my bright pink high heels to start with, importing it in to photoshop to start the work.

The first image I came up with was a girly, stylised version. I used lighting effects on the shoe itself, as well as adjusting the levels to create a good colour range for editing. The use of the facet effect on plain polkadots resulted in a nice dual-colour effect, and accompanied with a pale central gradient made for an appealing background. The finishing effect, I found, is the sparkles I have distributed sparingly around the image of the high heel to make it seem more "glitzy" and desirable.

The second image I ended up with was a lot darker and more orientated around the idea of seven deadly sins and their taboo. The background was started off with rendering clouds as this makes a very solid base for working with. I messed around with the saturation and colour levels alot to get the dark feeling right before applying a plastic wrap effect. These combined, as well as a few miscellaneous adjustments gave a background that is very alike to blood.

To fall in love;;

All credit for this image goes to Marc Webb (Director of 500 Days of Summer)

Recently I watched '500 Days of Summer'. I love the way it portrays the process of falling in love as something more delicate than boy-meets-girl. The whole film is filmed in soft brown tones and the characters are developed to be quirky reflections of our own relationship experiences.
Everything the characters are feeling is demonstrated through their quick stealing glances, the close ups on Summer's smile, the evasive body language. It's a fantastic example of how emotions and tension can be displayed on the human body.

Falling snow;;

As the winter set in in Dundee we were subject to a lot (by my standards anyway) of snow. I remember distinctly looking up at the sky during a night out to watch the snow fall past the moonlight. This moment of inspiration was luckily capture with my camera;

How pretty!

Expanding from this, I decided to create my own image of snow falling in photoshop in order to control the atmosphere.

Click for full screen version.

The main purpose of this image is to capture the sight I saw when I looked up during the first snowstorm of Dundee. I had great fun creating this image. I started off with a base layer of rendered clouds to achieve an overcast feel, adjusting the layers to darken shadows accordingly. The edges of large clouds were created in a similar method to creating lightning on photoshop; a black to white gradient with difference clouds on top, and then colour levels and contrast put up until only a thin jagged strip of grey remains. The snow was created with scattering on the default photoshop brushes and then "pinched" to give it a swirling, spherical effect. A 1-pixel brush was used to create wisps of hair to give the impression of looking up and whipping winds.

To fall as a city;

I wasn't very happy with the way the materialism/temptation theme panned out so I decided to try to explore the word "fall from a very different view point. War and broken governments lead to the fall of cities and nations, as can be seen in any account of world history. Therefore, I decided to play around on photoshop exploring different ways to visualise falling cities.

This image was a pretty simple mock-up. It depics a skyscraper (a very typical icon of modern day cities) being shattered in to many pieces. To achieve the shards, I used the polygonal lasso tool in photoshop to seperate pieces of the skyscraper image. The original idea was to have the shards slowly transform in to fighter jets to keep with the warfare idea.

However, I then changed my idea to something else...

And so I present, my final piece!

Curiosity

Visual Literacy; Week 1

My first mini-project for Visual Literacy is to fully explore the word "curiosity". I'd say it was the hardest word for me as I just couldn't decide on how to go about portraying curiosity in just one image. I started off with a few ideas including the cliché "curiosity killed the cat" and closed diaries but none of them really took off in to anything more.

One thing that did catch my interest though, were these two leaflets created by Abertay Union (Artist Unkown) to advertise the Christmas Masquerade Ball. Masks are very interesting things, because they can create mystery (and thus, appeal) in onlookers. Plus, Venecian masks are very pretty to look at anyway.



Luckily, I own a handmade venecian mask that I played around with trying to obscure my face and encourage "curiosity". I played a lot with the contrast and colour levels of the photographs to concentrate natural shadows a lot more and heighten the feeling of the unknown as shadows are incredibly good at obscuring things.

  

I particuarly like the photograph below as half of my face is in darkness whilst the other half is lit up, but showing only an eye. I think the contrast works really well in fitting with the "what's behind the mask?" theme, as only a slight section of my eye can be seen beneath all the lace and sequins.

I then developed this idea further by making my own masquerade ball advert as my final piece. I wanted to keep the theme venecian, with scrawling fountain pen as Venice is also famous for it's traditional glass venecian pens which are dipped in ink, much the same as quills. 

However, the parchement I used was just an image from the internet so I could visualise how my end product was going to look. I scrapped it, and followed this tutorial to make my own parchment background, finishing my final piece for curiosity.