Video Game Self Portrait

Today I started my art final. We haven’t exactly been given the assignment yet, but because I know exactly what I want to do (and that it will take me a long while to do it), I put in three hours tonight. Dr. Beidler approved the project on the condition that I make a process log. So here I go.

It’s amazing to take art history and drawing at the same time. Oddly, I enjoy Romantic literature and music, so it shouldn’t have been surprising that when we started the genre today I would feel inspired. My two favorite pieces that we covered so far will definitely influence the layout of this piece.

Thomas Cole: Dream of Arcadia

Caspar David Friedrich: Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog

They look epic enough to be in a game, right?

To do this self portrait, I am using a picture, a wacom tablet, and Photoshop CS5. The tablet plugs into my Mac which allows me to draw straight into my computer. The photo that I’ve decided to work off is from my recent trip to Williamsburg, Virginia:

Posing with Thomas Jefferson

I imported this picture into Photoshop, then started laying out the core features of my and TJ’s body. I think I’m going to make TJ a giant.

Basic form

Layout without background image

I next started to turn this into a line drawing. This was the most challenging part thus far, because I was making up clothes for myself and how they would fit me. I pulled inspiration from my favorite game, Dragon Age: Origins.

Leliana

I zoomed in up to 300% to make sure that everything connected (essential for color, which I will add later) and that there weren’t any extra lines. I mixed the opacity of the original figure drawing and photo to make the final product its own. I removed my glasses because when I imagine myself I don’t see myself wearing them.

Using the figural drawing.

I’m finished with the line drawing of myself as a hero right now… and I’m pretty pleased with how it looks. There is a lot to go with this image though!

I am a hero.

JUST. KIDDING.

Okay, so I took off Ghostbusters. Perhaps a hasty move. FINAL PROJECTS TO BE PRINTED ARE (drumroll please):

Ghostly Advertisements (Who You Gonna Call)

Well the semester is drawing to a close and I have finally finished my lovely ghost project. In the end, I thought it would be fun to make this a project about contrast. I have really nice images that I am turning into advertisements for… get ready… Ghostbusters. Though I feel like my images are classy enough to be used to mockingly advertise “barely there” make-up, or skin whitener for the Asian market, I thought it would be fun to play with the idea of taking something classy, like my lady ghosts, and contrast it with something juvenile (yet fun!) like Ghostbusters. In the end, I ended up rebranding Ghostbusters to appeal to more upperclass members of the ghost-hunting market, who were not previously sought after by Ghostbusters Inc.

 

That being said, here are the final four pictures of my lovely ghost.

 

Another Ghost

I’ve made my second ghost in my series of… however many I feel like making. I’m thinking of aiming around four, but we’ll see if I can stop there.

Here’s the first version of what I came up with:

 

But I like the second version better. The fog is too cliché.

 

And I did pretty much the same thing as before. Here are my original images:

There’s a Ghost in My Forest

As much as I love the idea of drawing my final image, I’ve really come to enjoy seeing what kind of image effects I can do with the computer. I’ve enjoyed making my latest spectre, and I’m pretty sure I could turn it into a series. We’ll have to see what Nell and the class says tomorrow!

So how did I get from these images to there?

 

 

The first thing that I did was open the background scene in photoshop. I duplicated the original layer and set it to color burn, 30%, and outlined my details with high pass at a low opacity. I then added my woman after cutting her out of her original picture. I layered her with blur masks and overlays, and adjusted her to the ghostliness of my content, frequently using the burn and soft brush eraser tool to erase extra hard lines. I then reduced her opacity group to 80%, duplicated the background layer again, stacked that layer on the top, and set its overlay to 26%. After lots of tweaking and an hour of flustering with photoshop, my image was complete!

The Smoke Lady

Sadly, I spent way too much time seeing if I could digitize the person in my picture with smoke. Though the final image was awesome, I couldn’t figure out a good way to put it into my final pictures. Grr….

How did I do this? A strong mix of patience, glowing edges, smoke images, the burn tool, and more patience.

 

Pictures for Fantasy

I went into the woods today and got the pictures that I needed for my project. Unfortunately, I couldn’t secure I high-quality camera before I went, so I did my best to change my camera settings before I went outside. I used a Canon Powershot SD1200 IS (or, in other words, a tiny digital camera). To change my settings, I clicked “FUNCTION SET” then, as scrolling downwards, changed the ISO to 1600, the AWB to CLOUDY, and the picture size to 3648 x2736px. That’s HUGE! These are the pictures that I am most contented with, though they haven’t been photoshopped yet:

 

You Know You’re a Designer When…

(Blatantly stolen from http://youreadesignerwhen.tumblr.com/. More there if you want more!)

Final Individual Prints

After changing a few things, I finalized my project. I chose not to print a calendar on the back because I thought it cheapened my project. I did, however, remove the more graphic pornography (see old November), lined up the text for the months, added dates in front of the overlapping models, and rearranged some quotes so that they didn’t push their boundaries on the models’ figures.

Please note that these images are grainy and a little off-color because I had to convert them to .jpegs to post them on wordpress :(. Without further ado, month by month:

How to Turn a Raster into a Vector Image Using CS5

Step 1: Pick a picture you want to vectorcize! Play with it in photoshop if you want. Remember, this image starts out as a raster.

Original Picture in Photoshop

Step 2: Open Adobe Illustrator and make a blank document the size of your choosing.

Adobe Illustrator New Document

Step 3: Open File, select “Place,” and choose your raster image.

Select Image

Step 4: Once placed, click the arrow to the right of live trace. You have many different options for how you want to vectorcize your image!

Options for Vectorization

Step 5: Once you are content with your selection, click expand to alter the image. Et voila! C’est complete! (In this example, I used Color 6).

Vector Puppy

Cute, huh? 🙂

Final Pup