Well, everyone, with only a few days left before graduation, I have been getting creative with some new photos I took and the free trial of Photoshop CS 5.1 I recently downloaded. Here are a few of them for your viewing pleasure!

This is a dandelion! The colors were not added, simply enhanced. Who knew these white fluffies were actually opalescent and colorful?

This is a closeup of a necklace I made, I edited the colors to bring out the copper-colored lutz charm. :)

Rum and strawberries with background colors removed, then enhanced VERY slightly! Daquiris!

These are the before (bottom) and after (top) photos I dedicated to Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of "Where the Wild Things Are" and other beloved children's stories. Sendak passed away on Tuesday morning at the age of 83, and the Wild Things are in mourning. Wild Things inspired my childhood imagination, and I hope it will ignite the wild rumpus in the minds of my future children. He'll always be remembered as the true king of all the wild things in my mind.

This will be my final post for Web Design. I bid you all a fond farewell as I graduate and move on to other things. It's been real, guys.

Illustrator Creation #2: 3-Dimensional Text

I played around with this one for a long time! I had a hard time making it look the way I wanted it to, but finally, after many references to the tutorial, and lots of adjusting the 3D grid, I finally got it to look like actual 3D! I'm pretty excited about this one, but I think I still like my guitar better! :P

Illustrator Creation #1, Simple drawing. I spent a lot of time experimenting with brushes, and I came across one that I liked, the artistic ink brush. I was just sketching a little, and wiggly lines became a rough guitar. I added minimal shading and a little writing. This was simple to do, but I kind of like the way it turned out!

Design Articles

From the website given to us, I LOVED the minimalist movie posters, because I am always really struck by minimalist art in general. As an advertiser, I have spent the past years learning to say as much as possible, to as many people as possible, with as few words as possible, and I think that minimalist art is often the best way to accomplish that. The way artists are able to incorporate so many elements of a story plot into a simple picture on a solid background with so little detail, gets their message across at a glance, and I strive every day to be able to communicate so effectively to people through creative design. http://www.webdesignbooth.com/minimalist-movie-posters/

The second article I really liked was the amazing print ad article! I'm seeing a rise in digital everything, and even though I think that print advertising, as well as print media in general, is slowly starting to phase out of our society, I still really love magazine ads. I always have. They hit me the same way the minimalist posters did, and the work of Olly Moss does, quick, big, straight to the point. They offer visual stimulation, a product, and a little quip that's just relevant enough to fill in your own narrative. They encourage imagination, they're often funny, and they sometimes require a little thought. I think that the most effective way to sell something to somebody, is to let them put something together in their head, laugh about it, have a revelation, and feel smart. Making consumers use their own mind to construct the narrative behind a print ad, is much like performing "Inception", making the reader feel that investing in the product was not only fun, but their idea.
http://www.kitaro10.com/inspiration/30-new-amazing-print-media-advertisement/

Completed Art Poster

My art poster is finally finished. As you may remember, it was inspired by the minimalistic but deep work of Olly Moss. Visual art constructed from scratch is not my forte, but I was able to capture a little hint of Olly Moss's superimposition-like design in making one plot-specific object merge with another by making the main character's wristwatch coincide with the core of the granny smith apple. I also took a little inspiration from one of the original film posters in which a period at the end of a sentence falls toward Will Ferrell's head, but I made it into the dot of the first "i" in fiction, and decided in the interest of minimalism, not to use a photo of Ferrell's character. I decided that the apple should be the only photorealistic element in the poster in an effort to keep it simple.

My poster does not look exactly like the work of my inspirational artist, but that's to be expected when working with different media while trying to keep a little originality, and overall I'm very happy with it.

Photoshop Color Manipulations

This is my photoshop color manipulation photo. The image on top is the original color image, which was converted to greyscale and then back to RGB Color so that I could use the history brush tool to bring blue
back into her eyes. I then added more blue to her eyes with simple brush tool paint, and then a very low opacity blue tint to her pearls. I then used a very low opacity pink to bring soft color to her cheeks, and a little to her nose and bottom lip.

Art Posters

The artist that I would like to emulate in my art poster is an artist called Olly Moss. He is not particularly well-known, but his Star Wars Trilogy poster reimaginings are recognized web-wide. I think that these posters, as well as his other, primarily minimalist, works are very creative and really cater to true fans who have high familiarity with the content of what he is representing.