Poster Samples

Black & White + One Proposal

1. How can I express the theme Black and White + One through photo-based artwork?

I came up with a few ideas for what the + One could be representative of; my favourites being movement, focus and effect. Movement: capturing a motion of some kind in a still or a series of stills. Focus: having one particularly detailed/focused image/object in the photo. Effect: Isolating one section of the image and applying a mask layer with an effect. I decided to basically merge focus and movement but I decided to exclude the effect idea, I figured it would be odd when paired with a black and white image.

The idea of motion made me think of city streets, trains and generally traffic. So I thought to convey the theme Black and White + One (Movement) I would do a series of images in metropolitan areas showcasing the motions of the space. There is so much meaning in motion as well as in the concept of black and white as being representational of something greater.

2. How can I explore using the medium of photography in a way that stretches my current knowledge and understanding AND suits my interpretation of the theme?

Photography is not really my strong suit and I often have trouble getting my photos to consistently have high detail and so I decided to look for a photography technique that would allow me to use blurs or distortion artfully. My first photo inspiration was a motion-blur image of a pair of dice which led me to a photography technique that seems to most commonly be called Long Exposure Photography.  

The motion blur suits my theme of movement having greater meaning. For example one of the ideas I’m exploring is foreign/out-of-place objects in settings with high movement backgrounds to highlight life moving on around them/without them.

GIF Assignment

For my GIF assignment I had a lot of trouble getting started. Picking a clip was made hard by the multitude of choices and styles. I chose a few clips and upon experimenting with them found that the backgrounds were an issue; either they panned far too much or didn't move enough that isolating movement in the clip would be redundant. 

In the end I chose my clip from the NBC Hannibal television show (original clip can be found in YouTube video titled "Hannibal Sick Realization") because I've found the show is full of subtle actions that convey a lot of meaning.

The scene takes place in the show's FBI morgue/lab while the lab techs examine a serial killer's latest victim and Will Graham (pictured), the FBI profiler after this killer, is in deep thought in an attempt to gain insight into the killer's actions. In the moment I chose Will is realizing the killer's cannibalistic nature right before the techs uncover evidence to back his theory. Without Will the techs may never have made the connection to cannibalism. Will is an empath, and can understand and empathize with just about anyone, he is used by the FBI because he is incredibly talented at riddling out the behaviour of killers. Before this killer emerged Will taught at the FBI academy because he was deemed to emotionally fragile for field work, I think this shot does a good job of emphasizing the mental toll chasing killers has on Will.

To show how Will was lost in thought I isolated his image and masked it so only the blurred people behind him move. I decided to do this because of the expression "frozen in thought". Then I colourized the layers, making Will greyer to make him look a little more ill and making the background bluer to show the depressing undertones of Will's thoughts.

For the quote I chose to go with my GIF is a line from this scene which pretty much sums up the entire episode and nearly the entire first season, "He's eating them." Will is the one who says it and at this point it's the only thing he can really think of to say. It's one of the first season's big reveals as before this cannibalism was heavily implied but not outrightly stated.

In my HTML assignment I made the background a pop-arty image of a stag because Will sees visions of a stag that represents the killer as he slowly loses his mind. I also attached an audio file of an eerie version of the song Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) because I thought the lyrics really fit, especially the line "some of them want to use you" because throughout the show Will is constantly manipulated by Hannibal Lecter and the FBI.

Weekly Blog Assingment #10

Artistic Inspiration

NaBHaN (deviantart)

http://nabhan.deviantart.com/art/When-you-grow-up-94506386

http://nabhan.deviantart.com/art/Never-Give-Up-374386626

http://nabhan.deviantart.com/art/What-used-to-be-109443647

 

NaBHaN is a digital artist who has a talent for really colourful, cutesy works. NaBHan has a really unique sort of style with accentuated sphere shapes in many of the images. I love the round stylistic look of NaBHaN’s work and the really pretty small details you can usually see in the backgrounds.

Weekly Blog Assignment #9

Tips and Tricks

I found this really neat tutorial online that I thought would help me learn how to use the shortcut buttons on both Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.  The tutorial shows the keyboard but replaces the keys with the various things that the shortcut key leads to. I think the tutorial is helpful because I personally have no idea what most shortcut keys are, really all I know are the transform and undo shortcuts for photoshop.  I hope that the guide will help me learn the shortcuts and through them learn how to use the program easier.

Weekly Blog Assingmnet #8

Wild Card Optional

Music

I love music. It’s a vague thing to say but eh. This is my wildcard and I can do what I want. Music makes me feel things. I’m usually a really distant person, I’m not one to let emotions get the better of me, but music makes me feel things to an extent I just don’t normally. I think it’s this exact reason that music inspires art for me. I love almost every genre of music and each inspires something completely different. Music makes me want to create and I think it’s probably the most powerful inspiration for art that I've ever come across.

Weekly Blog Assignment #3

I chose this particular tutorial because I have always struggled with drawing people, especially the hair. Some people have trouble with the eyes or noses when drawing people but I find the hardest part of drawing a person to be getting the hair just right. I feel like the hair is one of those finishing details that really makes or breaks a picture. With poor quality hair a picture can lose quality, depth, realism and the shape of the face can appear skewered. I thought this tutorial had a really good grasp of the important parts of drawing hair. It doesn't go as much into detail as some other tutorials do and it doesn't always take you through each and every step but it has a range of all the main concepts you need to remember for drawing hair which I find to be most practical. I also really like how the artist goes shows a variety of different hairstyles instead of one repeated over and over.

For some reason the picture wont attach...

Weekly Blog Assignment #7

Personal Inspiration

Recently I spent time putting together new furniture for my room and I was the only one in my family who really seemed to get the instructions and the feel of how everything fit together. I know it doesn’t really sound like an inspirational thing but something about the diagrams and shapes just helped me relax and focus. I’m a person who values structure and organization, thanks to a mild form of OCD, and when I can line things up and sort them in a coherent manner it puts me at ease. In this sense putting the furniture together was something that I enjoyed doing and felt comfortable with and because of this I’ve decided I’m going to experiment with drawing diagrams and using geometric shapes more. I usually use very loose, natural kind of shapes and I think maybe this would make a good change for me and perhaps work as a way of helping myself focus. I like diagrams because they are linear and coherent which I think is something some of my art could use more of as I am much more prone to symbolism and/or indirect meaning and/or no meaning.