Here, I decided to grab a picture of Sean McGloughlin (Jacksepticeye) for Lab 1. I had a great time making these, even if they were a bit extensive.

I learned more about the Mixer Brush tool than I thought I ever would, mostly because I don’t deal with much digital art that requires it. However, I found that it’s a fantastic tool for different jobs and that it’s malleable for many settings.

In my opinion, making the sketch and trying out different filters were simple and engaging activities in the lab. I already love messing around with filters in other programs, but I just found it fun to do all over again.

Planning out and designing the brush and smudge image was the most arduous activity in the bunch, giving me the idea of covering an entire image as a time-consuming task.

I suppose, to ease the burden on myself, I should have chosen a smaller image to go through the activity. That way, I can come up with the same quality in a shorter amount of time.

Perhaps next time, the assignment could also call for fewer filters for us to try out, expand the limit of brush size for the “brush and smudge paint,” or remove the “Connect the Dots” activity for the sake of time conservation.

I see myself using these features in future assignments for designing large-scale backgrounds or textures in video games or rendered productions where detail isn’t highly-regarded but needs a slight touch-up for presentation and aesthetic.

Regarding my previous line art inspired me to work harder to accomplish the arrangement of details in the sketch version of the picture, as I could understand the importance of features and the leniency of sketches in their own right.

Even after using Illustrator in Intro to Digital Media, I could not have been more unprepared to work with the pen tool, but luckily the directions were available on the template itself.

I found it easy to keep up with the directions and successfully draw the shapes I needed to. I’m happy I could understand so that I wouldn’t waste much time trying to figure out the controls.

The only real trouble that I had with the pen tool was that it would sometimes not give me the expected results, even if I had tried every curvature mode that I could think of. I also found it hard to memorize these tricks, so I’ll have to come back to the document and brush up.

I’m not looking forward to using the pen tool in the future, but I know I’ll definitely need to. In those cases, I expect that it’s to carefully dissect an image to grab some elements out of it and use them elsewhere, and I suppose that goes for many images from nature, which is not very geometric by default.

I think that the Lab 5 screencast helped me through this the best. I think it’s interesting that I was so lost before using screencasts that they help me a lot more when I end up watching them.

After using Blender haphazardly about a year ago, it was fun to come back and learn new skills in making 3D objects in the program, such as extending the cylinder that I was using and scaling its components.

I thought it was easy to recognize the 3D view controls, in addition to repositioning the camera. I’ve used similar programs to Blender that have many familiar controls.

I knew I’d try and modify individual points of the shapes to provide some added style, but I found that it was more pointlessly time-consuming, so I decided to leave that for another time when I didn’t have a deadline.

I look forward to using this kind of 3D modeling to create models of my own for various programs that I develop. Most likely, I’d be creating this kind of model for chess games, but I suppose it would be nice to see fancy chess pieces strewn among collections of knick-knacks.

The Exercise 6 video was a great help. I’m thankful to know that we can still receive instruction like this in such a difficult time.

Finally! A brick rose!

For this lab, I learned a few skills that let me take pictures from a foreground image and apply them to different backgrounds. I also learned how to use shapes from other layers to form easy pattern designs out of background images. Here, the magnetic lasso tool was used on the above rose, and the pen tool was used on the above banana.

I thought the easiest part of this lab was using the magnetic lasso tool to cut out the rose. I’ve done something similar earlier in the semester in DMA201, so using what I had learned wasn’t very difficult.

The most challenging part of this lab was having the patience to work with the pen tool. It took me a few tries to find the right pen tool so I could use it how I wanted to. In the end, I think it worked nicely.

I think that I can improve the rose. Part of masking the rose out of the original selection based itself on removing the alpha value of some of the petals, and that doesn’t satisfy me very much in terms of appearance.

I think that the directions for the Background Eraser were a little ambiguous. Perhaps it’s my version of Photoshop or it’s a different feature, but I found it a little confusing that setting a protected color didn’t have much use, as the first color the eraser is introduced to will start becoming erased. I had to actively start erasing the background itself for it to work properly.

If I’m ever introduced to an image with foreground elements that I want to isolate, I can be sure to use these tools to apply them to different backgrounds and expose backgrounds to patterns. I suppose I’ll have use for it soon as my digital art and influence develops.

Here is the textured fill layer and gradient layer of my Lab 4. I figured I should include the gradient layer simply because the gradient shape didn’t export to jpeg very well, and I love gradients regardless.

I learned how to create a new texture with the offset and clone stamp features, and I figure I may use it in the future for specific reasons, but not for general backgrounds or important features because of its repetitive nature.

I found it easy to use gradients, as my past experience in Krita and Photoshop gave me the insight I needed to use them correctly.

I didn’t quite understand why creating a seamless texture was so difficult… Even before settling with the cork board shown above, I experimented and found that many factors of everyday textures are chaotic and frustrating when offset and edited to appear seamless.

Perhaps next time I can find a more interesting pattern.

I’d still appreciate it if pattern making wasn’t so difficult, and now that I’ve made one, I don’t think I’ll be using it for any large-scale projects.

I’ve learned to be more patient with my work, and I plan to carry out more projects with this newly-gained fortitude.

I didn’t find any particularly inspiring articles or works of art to help me with what I did here today.

Was not specifically instructed to make a blog post, but now I see why… That picture is very small.

Although the construction of the card is relatively easy, I soon learned that the separation of the front of the card and the back of the card in separate artboards would prove to be difficult, as it’s somewhat unclear as to what needed to be done for both artboards to show up in the final pdf. I understand, now, that the image above is supposed to reflect the outside of the card, when I was planning on having it reflect the inside, but it’s still just a minor fix. As far as I was concerned, the reading didn’t help me much with fixing this issue, but I learned enough from what it was communicating in terms of creating such works.

Upon creating these images, I hoped to see some sort of difference between the default coloration and the gamut-decreased version but learned that there was “not much” for Photoshop to change.

The gamut difference didn’t prove to be much here, either. I wish I’d known how vibrant Photoshop considers pixels in order for gamut reduction to make any difference. This was perhaps the most challenging part of the assignment since it took me longer than I expected to notice any difference, but in the end, I couldn’t find anything.

When it comes to saturation differences, I’m usually skilled when trying to identify by pixel, but I’m terrible when it comes to blended colors and images. Perhaps that is somewhere that I can focus to develop a better sense of image design in the future.

These images of my water bottle are both taken from my phone, but the first of the two was taken with the phone’s selfie camera. My biggest note of the difference between the two shots is that the sharpness is much greater in the front camera, where the selfie camera feels softer, and doesn’t differentiate well between shapes that are further away.

Now to look at something up close…

My second observation between the two cameras comes from this set, with a magazine from my house’s newspaper shelf. I noticed that the selfie camera adds some sheen of light that doesn’t show up from the front camera. I’m guessing that the selfie camera is more generalized to deal with all kinds of light, where the front camera has the capabilities to adjust to different situations and help improve the quality.

These four images follow the scan instructions for the lab, and I can see that the clearest difference between all of them is the size that each of them takes, thanks to the resolution that they all share. I admit, WordPress helps to show this difference because of the resolution it tries to keep. Thanks to my home scanner, each image is also cropped precisely to the size it needs to be to show all the content, emphasizing the difference.

Finally, there’s this small flower sketch that I used in a photo editing program. I gave these dimensions to the image since there’s nothing very lavish about the image itself, but I figured it should have a good ratio and orientation to offset its mundanity.