I decided to grab a picture of Mark Fischbach (Markiplier) for Project 1. Creating it took a while, but it was worth the effort.

For Image Tracing, I learned that I needed to choose the Extend option to show the paths of the traced image and use the Re-Color option for the custom palette. (There’s nothing particularly interesting about how I used it, but I know there were some difficulties about using it in the last lab.)

I found it easy to use the filters and image editing techniques that we learned from the first two labs. Although some of the work took time, it’s intriguing discovering the outcome.

The most challenging part was deciding the variety of content to use for the image. I didn’t have much content to begin my illustrating with, after all.
Next time, I think I should spend more time finding a celebrity who has more Creative Commons usage to their name. Markiplier, fortunately, has much content available to the public, although I couldn’t access most of it in picture form.

The selection of inspirational art was impressive and informative, but I’d still like to see examples that relate closer to the project we’re currently doing than various, unrelated artists.

With the time I’ve spent on the project, I think it was worth the redundancy in visual effects and decision-making that I now have an idea of promotional illustration and development. I don’t have any doubts that many people go through the process of creating multiple works in short amounts of time, and I think this project was a highlighting point of what I might be in for if I go into graphic design. \

The “EXPLAINING HOW I CREATE NEW DIGITAL ART” video was a great source of inspiration since my idea of making digital abstractions wasn’t too strong when I began. With the idea that I could still use something so precise and definitive to make something wacky, I felt empowered.

For this project, I came to understand the importance of compression, whether it’s lossy or not, and to know when is the best time to use each for specific jobs. Especially, in this case, the lossiest compression was the only way I could reduce the file size of some of these images.

I found it easy to practice level and curve adjustment when it came to touching up these photos. It was interesting to see the photos change drastically, and shift in tone and presence as if they weren’t taken from a camera after all.

The most challenging part of this project was its longevity. There weren’t too many times that I found myself completely disinterested in the process, but I found that it was getting repetitive when I had to crop every image the same way when all I really could’ve done is use a batch function or separate UI to crop multiple images at once. I don’t know if that’s possible without letting my computer catch on fire, though it’s certainly not a bad idea.

My submission could be improved by finding a better variety of images. Plain and simple.

I can’t be confident whether it would help, but instead of moving images to InDesign, each image could be placed onto a new artboard in Photoshop and be converted into a page each through its export function.

When it comes down to creating future portfolios, I will consider using this kind of formatting again. I don’t plan on doing it any time soon, but I might not know until I need it.

Here it is! My Project 1 in all its spookiness!

With this project, I learned the means of using an artboard, where I can save lots of material on different panels and groups of shapes for easy reference and removing the need to tab back and forth between collections of images. I found it easy to work with these artboards, and I found it very fun to use the selection tools in order to eliminate some of the unnecessary white space that was included in some images. Printing and saving the card to a PDF were the most challenging parts, as I first found it confusing that Photoshop only saved one artboard to a PDF at first, and then printing the PDF didn’t allow the use of RGB, which made my card look sad and poorly-saturated. In the future, I think I should print from home where I have that luxury.

I don’t have any recommendations for updating this assignment for future classes.

In the future, I will consider artboards more frequently. It helps when I find greater value in constructing greeting cards instead of buying them.

The Wikipedia article on Print Design inspired me to do more with the text, even though I really ended up considering pre-made shapes and fonts. It was still inspiring, and it made me consider multicolored text in the same lines and colors that correspond to the schemes and themes of the pictures I included with the card.