Entry Three: Digital Art
I found this digital art piece called "Drug Free Zone" by
David Fuhrer. I think the reason I was drawn to this piece is because it depicts a miniature world that's very fanciful and different from reality. I like how at certain parts it's very packed and crowded and then at other parts it's very open and spacious. I also really like how it combines nature elements (the sky, the tree branch things) and the human-made elements (the houses, the barbed wire and the street sign). It has a good message and I'm going to make the assumption that the graveyard and barbed wire before the sign represent life with drugs and the happy little village beyond the sign represents life without drugs but I'm not going to lie, I often don't really care very much what the message of certain things are, especially when they are as cliche as this one seems to be. But aside from the obviousness of the message, I still really do like the style of this piece.
Entry Two: Materials for Project One
For my first project in this class, I decided to do a little research on how to change the tones of my pictures. Although I have had some experience with changing the hue of pictures, matching tones and shades through the 'curves' menu selection is something that is a bit new to me. I found an interesting tutorial here that goes over a bit of what we saw demonstrated in class but goes a bit further too:
I was concerned about matching the dog in my picture to the human figures because several of my human figures have some form of bright sunlight hitting them whereas the dog picture was taken on a cloudy day. I found this superb quick, easy and to the point video tutorial that shows a way to add sunlight. I figured out a way to make a few adjustments to it to apply it to what I'm doing. Instead of the regular lasso too, I can use the magnetic lasso tool to make a selection around the part of the dog I want the sunlight to hit. I didn't have to use a gaussian blur, but instead was able to change the lighting to overlay and I got the effect I was looking for. I'll need to really lower the opacity to make sure the dog isn't too bright on one side. After lowering the opacity, I was able to really tone down the contrast from each side of the dog but there was a still a dividing line from where I drew the magnetic lasso tool. This can be fixed by selecting the smudge tool and going over the line and a few other places to hide it away. The change is subtle but it really makes a big difference overall.
I'm probably going to do a little more work on the human figures in my picture and I want to possibly add flowers that some of them are holding so I'll have to go dig up some old pictures I took over the past summers since we're kind of in the dead of winter.
Entry One: The Beginning
Hi, and welcome to my blog. My name is Taylor and I'm a junior from Chicago, IL. Currently, I am pursing a B.A. in Telecommunications (design and production and media and society) along with a fine arts minor. My interests include claymation, interactive media, storyboarding, 3D modeling, web design, graphics, TV production, video editing and sculpture.
Although I am influenced now by a lot of claymation artists (i.e. Tim Burton, Aardman Animations) I wasn't exposed to any of that when I was younger and a lot of my influences came from Broadway musicals (think intricate sets and costume designs). Currently I draw a lot of inspiration from movies like 'Pan's Labyrinth' and other stop-motion animation shorts that have innocent story lines that are made complex by the animation or graphics around them.
Here are a few of my sculptures that I have recently worked on:
One of my favorite websites is here:
http://www.gelaskins.com I absolutely love the art featured on this site and think the way it's made available and marketed is brilliant. It's become usable in an aesthetically appealing way and the style of it all is definitely what I'm drawn to.
I'm influenced also by a lot of urban art and am a huge fan of both grafiti artists, Banksy (
http://www.banksy.co.uk/)and FAFI (
http://www.fafi.net/). I love that their art has meaning in a straightforward way that isn't really at all abstract.
I found this digital art piece called "Drug Free Zone" by David Fuhrer. I think the reason I was drawn to this piece is because it depicts a miniature world that's very fanciful and different from reality. I like how at certain parts it's very packed and crowded and then at other parts it's very open and spacious. I also really like how it combines nature elements (the sky, the tree branch things) and the human-made elements (the houses, the barbed wire and the street sign). It has a good message and I'm going to make the assumption that the graveyard and barbed wire before the sign represent life with drugs and the happy little village beyond the sign represents life without drugs but I'm not going to lie, I often don't really care very much what the message of certain things are, especially when they are as cliche as this one seems to be. But aside from the obviousness of the message, I still really do like the style of this piece.
