DMA101 - Adobe Illustrator Tracing, Coloring and Shading Assignment

For this assignment,  I was to take a sketch, trace it in illustrator and do a full color/shading job on it. The original sketch for this comes compliments of a very talented anime artist on DeviantArt.com, and her work can be found here: http://hellsingfan.deviantart.com/

DMA179 Artist Research Assignment - Inspirational Pieces

For this assignment, I was tasked to research the artist Jon Burgerman, and create two pieces of art inspired by Jon's style. Upon looking at his work, I quickly realized that someone with my level of drawing expertise would not be able to come close to the level of detail portrayed within. So, instead of getting my inspiration from the style of drawing itself, I drew inspiration from the emotion that I felt when viewing his work. I found that Jon's artworks made me feel like I was in a surreal world -- lost and confused. Kind of like an acid or a mushroom trip. His characters had features way out of proportion, and wacky legs and arms.

In the first drawing, which I'm going to call "NICE ONE", I drew inspiration from the disproportionate faces in Jon's drawing to create a quirky guy with a huge head and a dis-positioned smile. After sketching out the head, it almost seemed imperative that I made his body an extremely thin stick body, with a comedic "ultra bro thumbs up/fist bump". The humor just seemed to fit so perfectly with the expression on the character's face.

In the second drawing, I drew from the lost/surreal/hallucinogenic feelings I got from his paintings. It's a character with extremely large eyes featuring unnaturally dilated pupils to give the drawing a hallucinogenic effect. The character's limbs are all loopy and wonky because it makes the picture look very "trippy" and surreal... and of course, as with any good trip, there is a color explosion from the center outwards coming from behind the character.

The final pictures are the one on the far right as well as the one in the bottom row, right side. The rest are just sketches/ideas leading up to the final versions.

JON BURGERMAN'S WORK CAN BE VIEWED HERE: http://www.jonburgerman.com/

DMA188 - Device Review - iPhone 4

Reviewing the iPhone 4 was fun because I was actually using an iPhone 4 at the time. I knew about it's retina display, but didn't really know what it did or how much better the screen actually was. I was shocked to find that its native screen resolution was 960x640, much higher than any other phone that it is competing with.

Another interesting thing I learned was that the iPhone 4 had a 1GHz processor built into it. It took a while for me to wrap my head around the fact that my phone had the same processing power as my netbook!

Lastly, the fingerprint resistant coating on the iPhone 4 was a neat addition. It's something I wish apple had implemented into their devices, but never knew that it was already in effect.

DMA101 - Raptors Tracing Assignment

Wow, I can't believe I finished this on time. Here you will find screenshots of my progress and any obstacles I encountered while replicating this logo.

Right from the beginning, I had an issue with the background of the logo completely covering my reference, as you can see in this screenshot:

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/842/scnsht1hideshowlayers.jpg/

In order to work around this without moving the circles (so I wouldn't have to re-align them afterwards), I hid both layers while I was working on the rest. Good thing I put them on separate layers!

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/829/progresscropped1.jpg/ - It's finally starting to take shape!!

While working on the "Toronto" letters at the top, I encountered another problem. Try as I may, I couldn't get the circular O to look clean. I tried over and over again and could only get it this close (which is total crap):

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/21/sloppyoscrnshot.jpg/

So instead of using the pen tool, I used the circle tool (Duh! Why didn't I think of that earlier?!), and resized it to get a very nice, clean O.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/710/fixedoscrnshot.jpg/

After I finished "Toronto", I started working on "Raptors". Upon finishing up, I realized that when I filled them in, Illustrator filled in the shapes I made for the holes in the letters as well!

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/638/letterholesunfinishedcr.jpg/

Using what I learned on my first obstacle, I hid the "Raptors" and "Toronto" layers, and created a layer on top of both. In this layer, I traced out the holes in the letters, and filled them in. When I toggled the other layers back on, I was pleasantly surprised with my result:

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/834/finishedletterholescrop.jpg/

The rest, after this, was smooth sailing. There was a lot of detail to trace, but it was more tedious rather than troublesome. A couple of hours later, and it's finally finished!

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/194/finishedzx.jpg/

DMA179 - Experimenting with Paint in Photoshop

For this assignment, I've used the techniques we were taught in class and applied them to my painting.

COLOR TABLE
The first technique we used was creating a color table. The color table can be seen in the screen cap below:

Using a 12 color setting, I created this color table with the colors from the scan of my painting. I chose to use 12 colors because I wanted the yellow accents to show up in the palette.

CREATING A BRUSH
The second technique we used was creating and defining a brush. For this, I used the same painting as the one above. I chose to use the claw right hand side because I liked the tip of the claw where my brush left a feathery effect. First, I desaturated the image and made my selection around the claw:

Then, I saved my brush as THE MOST AWESOME BRUSH EVER (naturally), and opened up a new document to play around with it. I played around with the brush settings and stamped the claw all over the document and ended up with this:

TEXTURE EFFECTS

The third and final technique we used was a texture effect. By creating a new alpha channel and applying lighting effects on the image, we were able to create a very cool looking "pop up" image that reacts with the lighting effect we placed on it. After playing around with the settings, I ended up with this:

DMA179 - Bunny Assignment

Name: Jack Rabbit (Habit Rabbit)

Back Story:

Jack Rabbit was born and raised on the outskirts of Bunny Town. He was a Bunny School Delinquent and didn't have many friends. In fact, there was only one person he truly considered his friend. Joe Jumpington, a small bunny with a lot of attitude, was the perfect partner in crime for Jack. Jack and Joe spent their younger years involved in a life of crime, violence and gunslinging. Jack was given the nickname "Habit Rabbit", and Joe was given "Smokey Joe" on account of the fact that they both smoked way too many cigarettes. Since Jack lived on the outskirts of town, he was able to practice his gunslinging skills without much trouble, and together with Joe, had started to build a reputation for themselves.

Fast forward 8 years, and both Jack and Joe had become the best and most notorious gunslingers in all of Bunny Town. Catching the eye of the corrupt Bunny Government, the two best friends became top secret assassins for the Bunny Boss. They received training with exclusive technology not released to the public, and their skill surpassed even their own expectations. Their targets included important politicians, and anybody who threatened to take power from the Bunny Boss, ensuring that the he would be re-elected time and time again. The sheer secrecy of this conspiracy meant that Jack and Joe would have to live lives of solitude. They could not contact anybody including each other, with the exception of the Bunny Boss, when they received orders.

One day, Jack gets his biggest assignment yet: A man with a 6 million dollar target on his head. It turns out that one of the Bunny Boss' assassins had become a threat and needed to be killed. He finds the target, and begins the toughest fight of his life. After a six hour battle with bullets flying in every direction, Jack comes out on top. Jack goes to his enemy's body to remove his Government-issued Assasimask (a high-tech mask that was given to all assassins involved in the conspiracy to both conceal identity and improve accuracy.), and stares into the blank face of Joe, his childhood friend. Jack then realizes that if Joe had become a target of the Government, then he himself would not be far down the line. Jack takes off his mask, and leaves it on Joe's body as a message to the Boss, as if to say "catch me if you can."

Jack disappears and isn't seen for years. Currently, he's a contract killer under the name "Habit Rabbit", in memory of his friend Smokey Joe. He is a very mysterious bunny, only known by his nickname and his kill signature: a cigarette butt outed on the forehead of each and every one of his victims.

Testing

This is a test.