Poster Project

My orignal poster designs

Independent Project

For the independent project I chose to work on an update advertising campaign for the charity Vest-A-Dog which helps provide ballistic vests for police and service dogs. The vests have been responsible for saving the lives of many canine officers but most agencies don’t have the money in their budgets to provide these vests. 

Vest-A-Dog Website: www.vestadog.org

While the Vest-A-Dog website is function and fairly well assembled I found it to be a bit boring and hard to navigate. So as part of the rebranding attempt I started work in progress website that contains the same information but is more visually appealing and easier to navigate. 

You can find it here:

http://roolowe7.wix.com/vestadogrebrand

I also used a QR code square that links to the Vest-A-Dog website. [Included as separate image in the attached photos]

[Following write ups are in order of attached images, but titles should help connect them to working files]

Title: A Life of Service

Medium: Photoshop Photo Manipulation

Purpose: Website Ad or Poster as part of advertising set for Vest-A-Dog

Concept: This poster is supposed to represent how service dogs (especially police canines) spend their entire lives protecting their human partners and the community at large. The picture is meant to encourage people to recognize that police dogs are protecting people their entire lives and keeping people safe is their entire life. 

Notes: I spent a lot of my time on this piece correcting the colours and contrast until I was happy with the picture. I found it was a bit dull and the colours weren’t vibrant enough originally. This was probably my least favourite piece and I had a lot of difficulty trying to figure out what to do with the background, my original plan had been to erase the background and substitute it with my own design but I found I couldn't erase the background without a lot of fuzz and leftover pieces that were really hard to try and erase. 

Title: Man’s Best Friend

Medium: Photoshop Photo Manipulation

Purpose: Poster or Website Ad as part of advertising set for Vest-A-Dog

Concept: The concept of this piece is that police dog’s literally “jump through hoops” to impress us. The poster’s focus is that because police dogs spend their time protecting people that the least we could do is to try and help protect them while they do the same for us. The image of the dog jumping through the fire-hoop also exemplifies the danger that police dogs go “through” on a daily basis. 

Notes: I was really pleased with how this one came out, unlike the first image I tried to make the fire and the dog a bit more vibrant but dull the rest of the image a bit. I did this to try and really accent the smoke that was coming off the fire, I think that helped to make the image more dramatic. I also included the QR code in this image so that the poster can be tied to the website and as such increase traffic to the website if the ad is effective.

Title: Police Pup

Medium: Photoshop Photo Manipulation

Purpose: Website Ad or Poster as part of advertising set for Vest-A-Dog

Concept: This image was meant to really showcase police dogs as members of the police force. I wanted to go for a “COPS” feel with this one so I really highlighted the presence of red, white and blue because those are the colours in police siren-lights. I wanted a really dramatic tv-police feeling poster.

Notes: I tried posterizing this image to get rid of the image details and to change it to just a few colours so that I could edit it into red, white, blue and black. I had trouble minimizing the colours as much as I wanted to so I had to erase most of the yellow that was left over by hand.

Title: Save A Life

Medium: Photoshop Photo Manipulation

Purpose: Website Ad as part of advertising set for Vest-A-Dog

Concept: The idea behind this image, like with Police Pup, was to show a dramatic side to police dogs. I also really wanted to show a canine ballistic vest on one of the posters. 

Notes: I tried to make an interesting and easily recognizable background for the image and to show both a canine ballistic vest and a dog wearing one. 

Title: To Serve and Protect

Medium: Photoshop Photo Manipulation

Purpose: Poster or Website Ad as part of advertising set for Vest-A-Dog

Concept: I wanted something that had a little more historic meaning as well as being easily recognizable. So I decided to make the base of this image a picture of Dale of Cawsalta, the first ever RCMP dog.

Notes: To highlight the police aspect I tinted the image blue and changed the vibrancy, which also modernized it because the original was a black and white image, and I added the slogan of “To Protect and Serve” which is a motto most commonly known in connection with law enforcement. I added the QR code to link the poster to the website and I erased the background so that the dog was the focal point. 

Title: VAD

Medium: Photoshop Photo Manipulation

Purpose: Site Logo part of advertising set for Vest-A-Dog

Concept: I wanted a basic minimal logo for the website. I wanted something that was fairly identifiable as a police dog, so German Shepherd was the ideal choice, and I wanted it to be wearing a ballistic vest as that is the charity’s purpose. 

Notes: I decided to use a silhouette for the dog and flat colour for the vest to keep the design as basic as possible. 

Infographic

I chose to explore two possible career paths through two schools for my career infographic.

I intend to pursue a career in criminal justice and so I chose to look at the police foundations program at Seneca and the criminal justice program at Humber. 

My infographic starts with Lakeshore Collegiate and I used the same colour for the “square-arch” Lakeshore logo as the fill for the words through the rest of the infographic to show how things I got from high school can stay with me throughout the rest of my career. 

I chose to look at Humber and Seneca as my two school paths because they are my first choice programs. (Please note: The only image I didn’t do myself was the Seneca logo because it’s just a font in red) I included requirements to enter both programs in the boxes next adjacent to them.  Under the Humber section there are two points that are additional requirements for graduating the program that should be acquired during the duration of the course.

After graduation I chose to look at two major paths I could take my career. One route is to go into private investigation or security and the other is to go into public law enforcement, either through the O.P.P or the R.C.M.P as a base-level officer. I also extended my infographic to show   possible specific paths within the public-criminal-justice stream 

I looked at the K-9 unit and the Homicide division requirements as both fields interest as a possible future position.

I made the background a gradient of blue to white (top to bottom) because law enforcement is often represented by the colour blue (the white just helps add to the ease of reading and the complexity of the background, it’s more interesting than straight blue) and police uniforms in basically every country are blue. I tried to incorporate as much blue as possible for this reason, made easier by the fact that Lakeshore Collegiate’s colour is blue (orange is stupid and I don’t accept it).

Visual Identity Written

My personal brand “Leatherwing Designs” was designed to convey a fun, cartoony kind of vibe while still maintaining some professionalism for a company. My company is intended to be a design company because that’s where my interest and skill set rest. The purpose of my company is intended to be for commercial advertising and marketing design/campaign. I want my company to give the idea of smooth and fun design, complete with pieces in a variety of colours and styles.

For my logo I chose to create a simplistic dragon image. To do this I used fairly smooth cartoony lines and restricted the colour palette to three colours to keep it simple and smooth, I also avoided shading for this reason. I chose to keep the image dimensionally flat-looking to help retain the idea of a comic drawing or illustration. The lines are singular and connected, I wanted to avoid a sketchy look and I wanted all the pieces to be connected because I think that excess lines take away from the professionalism and that when lines don’t connect it appears distant and unfriendly which wasn’t the feeling I wanted my company to exude. My dragon image is anchor-shaped because I find that it draws the eye that way, the entire shape fits into a circle smoothly and each wing (plus the tail) point out and draw the eye along the logo. The anchor shape also makes it easy to incorporate images “above” the dragon in the sense they can be placed behind it’s head but in front of it’s tail to give the impression that something in that space is interacting with the logo instead of just being next to or on top of it.

I designed my stationary by putting a line-only watermark of my logo in the background so that it would be obvious but not obtrusive. There is also company contact information in the top left corner so that is the first thing you see when you read through the paper.

I chose to keep most of my merchandise related to graphic arts. I designed a USB key, a mouse pad and a tablet sleeve which are all things you might use in graphic design and as such are relevant to my company which is why I chose them. I also did a line of clothing (a sweater, a shoe design, a tote bag and a drawstring bag) because fashion design is something I haven’t really gotten to try yet and would really like to. 

Portfolio Presentation

My visual identity/portfolio website can be found here

Discuss your inspiration or influences for one or more of your pieces of artwork from this class. What next? Look at the concepts and also techniques that inspired you and why. Discuss any artistic influences as well as what might be a next project-either based on similar influences, or something different.

One of my biggest influences as an artist is literature. I love reading and I’ve been an avid reader since I was in Grade 2. By the time I reached Grade 5 I was reading at a Grade 11 level. My love of books is definitely something that is prominent in my creativity, books influence the way I talk, what I’m interested in and quite frequently they give me ideas for art projects. 

The idea of conveying stories through art is really intriguing to me and it’s something I really like designing layouts for. 

My traditional art project “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” was a really heavily influenced by my racing at the time. When I started that project I’d just recently read Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and had a bunch of ideas for art with components from the story, especially the good/evil transformation concept. Then when I came across the sketchbook prompt for “Something in a state of change” my first thought was transformation which I connected immediately with Jekyll and Hyde. 

Literature and writing were also a big part of my Anthology of the Apocalypse image which I made to go along with a short story I wrote for my Writer’s Craft class. We weren’t required to, or even asked, to make a cover for our stories but I found that to really take writing to the next level you need to add something visual to the mix. It was a really enjoyable time to put the cover together, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to make all the components myself so instead I photo-manipulated a few pieces to try and convey my theme which I think was actually more creative than having drawn a cover myself from scratch because this way it was really important to consider each component and how it contributed to the piece as a whole. 

I still really love reading and writing, maybe even more than I enjoy art and so I want to continue to combine them in the future. 

One of my next projects that I have planned is a bit large and time consuming but I’m really excited to get started. I plan to redesign covers for some of my favourite books, I have over 20 in mind currently and many of them already have sketches in my notebook.

Which project created this year (or in the last two years) helped you learn the most about yourself as an artist/designer? Why? Explain. 

While I’m drawn to say the Lakeshore Open House poster was the most eye-opening project for me because I worked collaboratively and it was in my preferred field, I can’t actually cite it as the most important project to me when it comes to understand myself as an artist. While the poster was everything I was looking forward to with graphic design in CyberARTs, I already knew that’s what I was excited to do and that it was something I could do. 

Of all the projects we’ve done in the CyberARTs program I think the one that taught me most about myself as an artist was the the Movie Trailer Mashup project. Going into the CyberARTs program I wasn’t shy about admitting that I had absolutely NO animation or video editing skill/experience and I was very adamant about having little to no interest in either as well. While the Drama Promo Video was the bane of my existence for several weeks, the only enjoyable parts being the travel and interviews, and the GIF which was cool but I clearly struggled with the technical aspect of. The video scramble project was really fun and I enjoyed pulling it apart and putting it back together in a different way to change the whole feel. While I had no prior experience with the video editing process my video came out at least as good as the majority of the class. I never thought that I’d be able to finish a video project because of my inexperience and I never expected to enjoy it because of my lack of interest in videography. I love to watch movies put the process of assembling them never appealed to me. However when I was making my Sherlock Holmes video mashup I had a really good time learning about the program and trying out new things to try and make something that was entertaining to watch. 

Visual Identity Failed Attempts

Visual Identity Pieces

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.

Weekly Blog Assignment #6

PERSONAL INSPIRATION

Sometimes the things that inspire us are the things that have always been there but we didn't take heed of previously. This week I noticed the sunset is different in the winter, notably a lot shorter and even a bit more captivating. Standing on my patio the other day I noticed the sky was orange and pink from the sunset and part of the colours reflected in the snow. It’d be cheesy to say that I had some kind of dramatic realization at that moment but I was captivated by the colours and softness of the light. After about 15 minutes I was also interested by the brevity of the scene, the sky got darker and the colours changed in what seemed like a blink of the eye. Sometimes it's the simple things that affect us, little things like how the colours of a sunset blend together can be the inspiration we needed.

I have two quick pictures with my phone of the two different sunset colours. The quality isn't great...I guess it's a you had to be there kind of moment.

I'll add the photos Monday when I get on the computer

Weekly Blog Post 5

My ARTISTIC INSPIRATION this week is Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of the renown Ghibli Studios. Hayao Miyazaki was a film director, animator, screen writer and critically acclaimed manga artist. I decided to make Hayao Miyazaki my artistic inspiration for the week because the other day I was doodling a little creature on some scrap paper and when it was done I realized how similar it was to some of Miyazaki’s creatures. I grew up watching Miyazaki films and they stuck with me just as much as Disney movies or classical films, I thought because Miyazaki had influenced me through his films that he was certainly a suitable choice for my artistic inspiration. Hayao Miyazaki is a worthy artistic inspiration of the week because he was highly accomplished in his field(s) and he was known for a beautiful style which has been credited as inspiration for many of the new generation of animators, artists and directors. Ghibli Studios has often been referred to as “the other Disney” by many young North Americans. Miyazaki continued working well into his senior years, finally declaring retirement for the final time in 2013. Miyazaki was also known for his surprising lack of "evil" or definite villains. Miyazaki’s films tended to place protagonists on difficult situations with problems and people to overcome but there is hardly ever someone who is actually evil, instead the antagonist is usually just someone with a different goal or belief. Miyazaki was an inspiration to thousands of other artists, he was accomplished in his many fields, he was a brilliant artist and he got to see many of his works come to life which is why he is my artistic inspiration this week.

Movie Trailer Parody Assignment

Sherlock Holmes is one of my favourite movies and I chose it because I've seen it a bunch of times and already had a few ideas about how to mix it up. The assignment was to drastically change the theme of the movie and since Sherlock Holmes is an action/comedy film I decided to make it a romance/comedy by playing up the relationship between the main characters and using certain lines I remembered out of context. My main goal was to imply a “bromance” or homosexual relationship between the lead characters. (Originally I had intended to just build on an actual relationship from the film but there wasn't enough clips to pull it off smoothly enough.)

To help change the mood I added a new underlying soundtrack (Falling For You by Colbie Caillat) which was much more suited to a romance than an action film. The song is a love song and I chose it because it had a beat that had similar "lifts" to the original soundtrack, which made it easier to sync up with some of the clips. I chose to avoid sound effects as the ones in the movie were too harsh to fit my new theme and the available substitutes in iMovie were a bit too cheesy for my liking and didn't add anything to the video.

My aim was to change an action movie trailer into a romance movie trailer and I think reviewing the end result the trailer definitely doesn't feel like an action film any longer. The music and the clips help to mimic the feeling of a quirky but loving relationship full of adventures and albeit plenty of bickering. To me the trailer seems to have really changed thematically and despite the fact that most of the clips are from one or two trailers of the movie being portrayed as an action flick they can still convey the idea of a romantic comedy when you mix them up and change the music.

You can view the original trailer here:

Weekly Blog Assignment #4

http://princess-phoenix.deviantart.com/art/Gimp-Animation-Mini-Tutorial-130151649

I chose this tutorial because I am a complete amateur at animation. Aside from fooling around once or twice on an animation app my friend has, I have never animated before. While animating isn't my greatest interest I think it would still be something handy to know how to do at least a little bit.

The program in the tutorial is GIMP, where Photoshop is the main thing employers in digital technology fields are looking for GIMP is a completely free program available for online download and it is compatible with both Mac and PC computers. GIMP is similar to Photoshop in its elements and tools, making it a great way to learn the tools and skills even if Photoshop is unavailable to you.

This particular tutorial appealed to me because it had a lot more images than most of the tutorials I came across. I find that extremely helpful as I'm self-taught with computer and don't know a lot of the technical lingo, the images make it easier to understand what is being discussed.

After reading this tutorial I still don't completely grasp the idea but I think that if I were to get a chance to practice with it then the idea would be a lot better explained than if I were to just try and work it out for myself.

Tips and Tricks