Surrealist Design

This assignment was to make a surreal looking piece of artwork and I believe I did just that. I decided to convey some meaning with this particular creation by pointing out how TV can brainwash or debilitate a child's ability for cognitive function. I did so by hollowing out the eyes of this little girl and removing her mouth completely while giving her a "dead" look. I achieved this style through the use of the sponge tool to make her skin grey and the ellipse tool with some smudging to make her eyes look hollow. Also, around the eyes, I used the burn tool to make it have a rusty bleeding look. Then, I played with the colors and added a rust-textured background overlay to make the scenery look a bit more run-down.

Design Poster

The designer I chose was Vjeko Sumic. He's a Croatian graphic designer that does the majority of his work for environmental and world-wide problems. For example, he creates posters for the wasteful use of water and the inhumane treatment of animals. The design I used for the background was based off of Sumic's "The Rabbit and Chop" which features a construction-paper style textured background with a brushed-over rabbit image which is what I did, except with a fox. Because foxes are awesome.

Concert Poster

For my concert poster, I used the book "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald as inspiration. I used a really classy "Art Deco" theme in order to capture the setting of the 20's. The tower in this picture was hand-created by myself and the background is a live-traced image from the web, as is the little guy down in the corner. I used a specific font that I took from dafont.com in order to give it a more 20's feel and relate a bit more to The Great Gatsby. In the assignment, we had to give an area, date, time, and the people playing. In order to stay relatively close to the setting of Great Gatsby, I used West Egg (Where Gatsby lives) and placed the concert on Long Island which is where the novel is set. The date is July 4th, because it can be assumed that duets by Gatsby and Daisy would be a big enough event for Independence Day.

Japanese Graphic Designer Ag+

This mural was created entirely in a graphic design program such as Illustrator or Photoshop. It depicts each and every important character from each of the many Legend of Zelda games, including the modern versions. A lot of Ag+'s work is video game related, which interests me in general considering that I thoroughly enjoy video games, especially the classics like Legend of Zelda. They seem to also use the length and space of the canvas to apply different colors to individual sections, adding a sense of flow to the art. As we can see here, the image begins at the top with a light background, portraying the good characters, has a red theme for the neutral/side characters, and much more shadow is added to the bottom  for the bad characters.

Emotion Word Design 2

The artwork here has many different elements that make it unique. The "Lazy" word here is made to look like it's leaning against the sides of the frame adding to the sense of laziness. The word "Hungry" gets smaller and smaller, but it gets less opaque and more spread out. This plays on how Hunger gets more intense as time goes by. The assignment was to show our emotion using words, and I feel like I made these two unique through the use of line movement, repetition, and opacity.

My creative process started with typing the word, and creating outlines to convert them to shapes. Then, I proceeded to rearrange the letters in a desirable fashion.  For the Hunger design, I didn't convert the type to a shape, but instead I just rotated and flipped the text.

Emotion Word Design 1

The artwork here is my first set of "Emotion Word" designs, and uses repetition and direction to convey its message. The assignment was to, using lines and typographical technique, illustrate our emotions through words. I made this my own by adding, not only my own emotions, but my own specific style to the artwork through my use of opacity and position to pile words and letters on top  of each other.

First, I started off with the most  basic part of the assignment by writing out my feelings on the sheet. I then decided, because feelings waver and linger, to completely disregard my originally chosen words and use the ones that I felt at that instance: "Bored" and "Tired". At the time, I was so tired that I was slouching and nearly falling out of  my chair, so I made the words "Tired" as if they were falling. Also, I was kind of moderately bored with school and doing the same thing over and over again, so I repeated the word "Bored" using a type writer font because it touched on the subject of education.