Digital Art

First Project

Originally, I wanted to have a black room with a monster leering over in the corner of your eye. However, due to space filling and detail, I had to add more detail to the background. Now the image is a monster leering over the corner of the screen in a hallway leading into the rest of the house. As it stands now, it is unfinished. I wanted this piece to instill a sense of eeriness to the viewer; the kind that can be seen in a lot of Trevor Henderson’s works.

I tried my best to make everything as realistic as possible, which is most likely what led to me not finishing the work. I worked on the surroundings before I worked on the monster, which was probably not the best idea in my case. For the monster, I wanted to go for dry and leathery skin; almost like a death angel from the film, A Quiet Place. Everything else is self-explanatory. Drywall for the walls, hardwood floors. I was going to worry about the shad and coloration later. If it was finished, it’d have a dark flashlight-like vignette over it with a somewhat misty blur over the background. This would’ve helped the idea that you just woke up to a noise in your house and are going to check it out.

While I am proud of the linework I managed to get done on the unfinished monster, the rest of the surroundings are either not to the level of detail I want or too detailed for the insignificance they hold to the overall piece. My biggest challenge has always been deadlines, which is why I wanted to originally make it a black room, but I had to go for a more detailed background in order to get full credit for the assignment. If I could go back and change what I did, it would’ve definitely been just doing a black room. I spent way too much time working on the background.

I learned how to animate and tween efficiently with Photoshop which helped me make all of the moving parts of this project effectively. As simple as it is, I’m really proud of how the grungy grainy effect looks as it cycles on the screen. Another thing would have to be the way that the animations sort of fade in and out in a way that keeps the motion that was intended, but also adds to the unpolished feel I went for.

Nostalgia: Grunge

(my two favorite bands: Nirvana and Alice In Chains)

I am really proud of how these turned out. The entire project emulates the exact vibe I was going for when creating it. I also wasn’t insanely behind on an assignment for once, so there’s that as well.

I chose nostalgia as my theme for this project. While I wasn’t alive during the peak of the grunge rock scene that I used for this, I chose it as sort of a way that displays my envy for people who got to experience that era first hand. The main focal point of the piece is lead singer of Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, and lead singer of Alice In Chains, Layne Staley, along with albums and other things that allude to their careers as artists. To get that nostalgic feel of the early-to-mid nineties feel, I went for a grungy, scratchy, and unpolished look that is often correlated to that time period.

I made the logo of myself colorful and vibrant to express that I am a somewhat extroverted individual, while also, somewhat, limiting the colors used because I am a simple person who doesn’t need a whole lot of colors to be content. The main colors I did use are magenta, orange, and blue; the browns are like a neutral version of orange, so they don’t count. I used the colors to create a goop, or cloud, or something, (I don’t even know, It just looks cool) flames, and a splash of water. The fire and the water are there because they contrast each other, which is meant to symbolize how all over the place my mind can be. The pink thing in the back is there to look cool because I didn’t know what else to put there. If I just put the fire and water, it would have looked dumb, so I added purple goop or gas. (I still don’t know) The face there is obviously my own face. I feel like it is self explanatory since it is MY logo.

My Logo

First I had to do this little planning sheet that I barely based my final product off of because my ideas change fast. After that, I drew a few (a lot) sketches, and picked the one I liked the most to put in Adobe Illustrator. When I got onto the program, I put a screenshot of my sketches and copied down the one I coined as the best and started adding details. After that business was finished, I had to find a way to incorporate my name into the design, which took way too long just to end up liking one of the first few I made. I finally tidied up some of the “tangents” in order to make the logo easier on the eyes and less busy. Then voila, I finished the logo. One of my favorite parts of my logo is the shadow under that hair. Something about the way that the shadow goes under the elements while the hair goes over just adds a really fun depth to the piece that gives the idea that the elements are more mental than physical, if that makes sense; I’m not explaining it further.

Illustrator Project:

Minimalist - Agents of Fortune Album Cover

For my Illustrator project, I redid the Agents of Fortune album cover in a more minimalistic style. I chose this because that album cover has always been iconic and I thought it would be really fun to recreate it in a different format. I had to use a lot of aligning along with getting the shading and the color just right, as to be detailed enough to know what you’re looking while also keeping it simple.

AnimateProject_3.3gp

While the work I did was pretty amateur, considering that one half is a ball bouncing around and exploding with the other half being a rotoscoped clip of DJ Khaled dancing, I think I did a pretty good job in making the finished product look as I imagined it. A great strength of the piece was definitely the simplicity. This helped me finish the assignment on time, in spite of the several days I missed. A great weakness could also be the simplicity. There isn’t a whole lot going on in the grand scheme of things, which could have the animation be seen as bland. If I had a lot more time, I probably would’ve added a lot more detail to the tween frames where the billion dollar corporation’s elite animating software didn’t want to work with me and the shape tweening feature.

Adobe Animate Project:

The goal of this project was to improve my animation skills while conveying a short message. First, I found a song that I really liked that has a message to it. Then I made the animation sync with the beat of the song, along with making the animation entertaining. My most utilized form of animation was definitely shape tweening with a hint of frame-by-frame in order to get exactly what I wanted out of the finished product. I faced many challenges while creating this simple animation.

Here is an example of one of my challenges: for shape tweening, if you try to turn a circle into a complex shape, instead of the circle branching out into said shape, the circle will fold in on itself between the frames. This led to a gross kaleidoscope effect in between the tween frames, because lord forbid a billion dollar company that makes you break the wallet for their software to make something easy and simple. After seeking assistance from my instructor, I tried using the hinting tool. The hinting tool is meant to show the shape tween where to start and end from between the two keyframes so that it moves correctly. However, it was beyond my limited knowledge on this subject that the hinting tool provided by the “best program available” did not work in the way that it had originally intended. This led to me having to animate what I wanted to go for the old fashioned way, which included frame-by-frame animating.

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