Paper Mario Kart

      I'll admit this project seemed daunting at first considering it was the final project and it involved hand-drawing three hundred frames one at a time for countless hours. Luckily I had experience with pen tablets and the software necessary to achieve such a feat, and I had even animated before, but never rotoscoping over existing video. I was and still am eagerly awaiting the arrival of the latest and greatest Mario Kart game, Mario Kart 8, on May 30th. Call me obsessed, and I am when it comes to Nintendo, but I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to do what we've been encouraged to do all year; choose a topic that we're passionate about. Sure 30 seconds of a random track in an upcoming Mario Kart game might not sound interesting, and it does seem a little boring, but the aesthetic I was able to create on the fly for this is really quite eye-catching, and I'm very pleased with the final product.

Magazine Design

       This was just one of those assignments where I knew immediately what I wanted to do. A magazine about how to watch clouds for professional cloud watchers seemed like the perfect blend of outlandish bird-watcher parody and completely believable magazine subject material. People subscribe to crazy and often discouragingly moronic things all the time, so this honestly didn't seem too ridiculous. The ideas for how to fill the cover and back page came surprisingly quickly, and designing the content for the magazine was fun, but designing the look of the magazine turned out to be a bit problematic. For one I wasn't sure about the background because a sky with clouds would be simplistic and extremely ink-intensive. As it turns out I did run out of ink halfway through the second page. I like the simple layout though, it matches the simple concept for the magazine, which would of course be read by simple people who have nothing better to do than stare at clouds all day.

Courtyard Clones

      In hindsight I probably shouldn't have chosen such a bright and sunny day to shoot this kind of thing, but actually if there was less light the shadows would be more prominent and I quite like the effect the sun creates coming through the trees. I knew from the beginning that I wanted my cat involved in the project somehow, but I originally planned for one of my clones to be holding him. In the end we had to set his water bowl out for him to show himself to the camera, and while it is a tad distracting, I really like how he's the center of attention in this picture, because that's how it is in real life as well. This project was really fascinating for me because I wasn't previously familiar with how masking works. I'd used Adobe products quite frequently but steered clear of masks due to their confusing nature. Photoshop makes them a little easier to understand and to use, and it's the only way to do a project like this, so I'm glad I got to learn something from the assignment.

Photo Restoration

      When it was announced we would be undertaking a photo restoration project I approached grandparents on both sides of my family, but to my disappointment one couldn't find any damaged photos and the other had images that were either not damaged that much or completely destroyed, beyond hope of restoration by a professional let alone a college student. Luckily my mother who enjoys taking pictures more than breathing had a box full of old photos, but none of them were damaged. Under different circumstances I would be happy that we take such great care of our images, but the deadline for finding a photo worth restoring was drawing near, and I had nothing to work with. I decided to massacre an old photo that my mother didn't care about, and I had a lot to choose from. Most of them were cats, and this one seemed to have the most variety, so I shredded it and scratched it and accidently took a piece out of the middle which I had to delicately tape back in. That turned out to be a mistake because the tape was the hardest thing to remove in the entire image, and the creases from folding it didn't even show up in the scan. I'm amazed at how good it looks though considering it was brutally disfigured on purpose. Definitely a useful skill to hold on to.

Phone Propaganda

      On the left is an early draft of the elements I decided to use for this assignment, being the phone attacking an unfortunate ear with a butter knife and the text, all of which I arrived at fairly quickly. In the final version on the right some of the changes may be difficult to notice, so I'll walk you through them. The first thing that bothered me about the first version was the kerning in the word "assaulting", as the L and the T seemed way too far apart for some reason. After fixing that and adjusting the kerning between various other letters, I turned my attention to the bold text at the bottom, as it wasn't standing out as much as I would have hoped. All I had to do in the end was swap the fill and the stroke, and make the banner a bit bigger. Finally I changed the knife from line to dot half-tone and angled it down more to fill the space in the middle. The notes were also added later but not before my first image test, so they're in both versions here even though I had trouble getting them to look right. In case you're wondering, they're set to 100% opacity on Color Burn.

Logo Project

      I used my top three ideas from the six preliminary sketches, starting by getting those sketches into illustrator. Cats Cradle was a piece of cake because all I had to do was draw the cat and choose a font. Think Tank took a bit longer because I had to trace over an image of a tank, pick out two fonts, toy with the idea of having an inner circle and realize at the last second that a radial gradient would make it look better, and redo everything after the 3D text crashed illustrator. Space Eye however took the longest merely because I didn't have a clear idea for it to begin with, and it was almost impossible to get enough detail into it without adding color or overcomplicating the image. Overall though I have to say, I'm very pleased with my work.

Piano Calligram

      For this project I had originally intended to try for something video game related, but as most of the images I was coming up with were too two-dimensional, I decided music would be a pretty decent fallback. The beauty of it is that I didn't even have to find this image, it's one that I've used before. This piano is the very same one I placed on the album art for one of my favorite compositions, the name of which is on the lid in the calligram. The rest of the words are either musical terms, descriptions, or composers and pieces I admire.

HTML Canvas Project

      For this assignment I started with the teardrop shape in the middle and worked around it, since it was the first real shape I stumbled upon during class and it looked interesting. Everything else just came from the checklist on the assignment sheet, and a lot of tinkering with the code to clean it up and combine certain elements.

Blog Intro Assignment

      I wasn't looking forward to another four hour tour that ends at 10:00, but I have to say the workflow and exposure to technology kept me awake. I generally don't think very well that late at night; I'm not a morning person either but the later it gets the more my brain goes on emergency life-support. However I enjoyed the casual format to the class and the equally casual format of the instructor and his instructions. We moved quickly but smoothly through the basics, and there was never a dull moment, besides trying to log on to the computers of course.
      But my expectations of the class were exceeded in another way as well. From reading the course description on SpartanWeb I gathered that this was going to be another "Art" class that just happened to use computers to create art. I'm not a particularly artsy person; I enjoy using computers to create stuff but I'm not in it for the art, I'm in it for the technology aspect. Experience with software is more important to me than printing stuff and displaying it in the real world, because the real world is moving towards an era where nothing has to exist in the real world for people to see it. I was impressed though to find that at least half the class will involve technical projects, even if the other half is involved with fleshing out those projects. I'm definitely looking forward to designing, learning, and critiquing in the weeks to come, even if the time slot is a tad inconvenient, especially for a commuter like myself.
      Speaking of myself, a few personal details include a slight obsession with Nintendo and extensive knowledge of films, both of which to my surprise were covered in the first class. I'm also an avid user of YouTube and a big fan of Google. I know everyone uses Google but when I say big fan I mean I don't like Apple and try never to use Apple products. Again, that's unfortunately a big part of the class but I think I can manage, especially once I replace that worthless mouse. Last but not least I am the proud co-owner of a twenty pound cat. Yes he's on a diet. It's just not working.