Map-REVISED

In order to improve this assignment, I made it a bit more visually appealing as well as user friendly.  I changed the font for the road signs so it was not as harsh and I added directions at the top for ease of use.  I also cleaned up some stray lines and added a border to make it look a bit nicer. 

Personal Narrative

For this assignment, I felt that my grandma was a great person to focus on because she is such an incredible person.  I chose the background because it reminded me of the fabric on one of her couches that she spent hours picking out (furniture upholstery is one of her favorite things to obsess over).  Other than that, I think the text really speaks for itself in reiterating how amazing of a woman she is. 

Campbell's Typography Part 2

I used a spoon as the inspiration for this assignment because of its obvious importance when eating a bowl of soup.  I only used two fonts, but was able to vary their style by experimenting with color, thickness and letting. 

Campbells Text 1

This assignment focused on experimenting with fonts and ways to manipulate them, as well as working with grids.  I used font to mimic some of the qualities of the soup (especially "condensed"), and emphasize the aspects of the text that I felt were the most important.

Now is the Time

For this assignment, I used different grids, both natural and physically imposed, to organize the phrase "now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country" in different ways.  In most of them, I emphasized words that I felt were more important to the meaning of the quote, except for one example where I kept all of the words the same size to focus on the shape of the grid.

Typography

For this assignment, I used typography to illustrate Benjamin Franklin's famous kite experiment that discovered the basis for a lot of electrical methods.  I chose this event because I was inspired by the possibility to make the words "lightning: and "electricity" look like the actual phenomenon that they were describing.  I focused on these two words, but put the kite in the background as a subtle nod to the experiment. 

Gradient Assignment

For this assignment, I used a photo of singer Lana Del Ray.  A lot of her music is a bit mystical and mysterious, so I tried to use a color palate that reflected this.

Map Assignment

Sketch Assignment

For our photo sketch assignment, I took a picture from the Garden Bowl in downtown Detroit and changed it so it looked more like a sketch.  I used a light brush tool to darken the lanes to enhance their shine and give them more emphasis. 

Original picture

My sketch

Assignment 3: Expanded Image

For the Expanded Image assignment, I used simple pictures of my kitchen to reconstruct it into a more dynamic image

Illustrator Practice-Watch Assignment

Practice Flowchart

Project Two: Altering Reality

For the Altered Reality assignment, I chose to make myself into Sloane Peterson from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  In this scene in the movie, they are in the Chicago Art Institute doing their best to analyze Georges Seurat's painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.  

Here's the original still from the movie:

And here's my version:

Family Caricature

To practice in Illustrator, I did a caricature of my family.  Even though each person is just a collection of a few shapes, I tried to put a little bit of everyone's personality into the project.  My dad has his signature striped shirt, my mom has her usual red lipstick, my outfit has subtle hints of maize and blue to show off my Michigan pride, and my dog has a crazy expression to match her personality.  

Image Recoloring

For the recoloring assignment, I chose this picture of boaters on the Detroit River from 1955:

In recoloring it, I wasn't trying to make it look like a modern picture.  Instead, I chose a more retro palate to give the picture color but also maintain its vintage feel.  I mostly utilized the soft light feature, but I found color burn worked very well to create the illusion of a sunset in the sky. I also used color burn for the sails to give them a slightly yellowy weathered look. 

Assignment One: Photographic Themes

For Challenge One of this assignment, I chose architecture as my theme and utilized the buildings around the University of Michigan campus as my inspiration.

My first photo is an example of Light and Shadow.  In order to create this picture, I found an outdoor walkway with arches that exposed the sun's light.  It is clearly visible on the right side of the photo, and it can also be seen shining through the arches on the left side. 

The next photo demonstrates Vantage Point.  When I took this photo, I stood at the bottom of the stairs in front of the building and angled my camera up at the building.  While it is not an extremely dramatic angle, I think the point of view from which I took it makes the building look very statuesque and important.

While I was looking for inspiration to fulfill the third requirement of Color and Tone, I was expecting to use a vibrant mural on a building or perhaps a building that was more recently designed and featured a more modern color palate.  Instead, I came across the patina blue color of the lights on the Law Library.  The metal of the lights, as well as the green on the stone underneath where the finish has rubbed onto,  really compliments the old stone facade and I felt that it was an interesting way to demonstrate Color and Tone in a photograph. 

The Law Library also plays a part in my photo representing Deep Space.  While not immediately evident, the lights featured in the previous picture can be seen through the stone tunnel and across the grass lawn of the Law Quad. 

Challenge Two of the assignment required photographing an object in foreign or unusual environments.   I happened to be cleaning behind my couch at my house and saw some coins stuck in a heating grate (featured in the photo below) and it inspired me to continue with the theme with coins as my featured objects.  

After the first picture, I was less than eager to dig through the dusty heating grate to retrieve the coins to take my other pictures, so I turned to my piggy bank instead.  While I was sorting through my loose change, I noticed five different pennies, ranging from the year 1979 to 2012.  I was very intrigued by the fact that while all of the coins are of the same value, they all looked significantly different due to various levels and wear and tear.  These differences in color are featured in my second photo below.

Next, I took the coins outside to photograph them in an unexpected environment.  In the photo below, the coin is almost incorporated into the nature around it and it seems to fit in with its surroundings despite the fact that, other than the occasional untimely drop, coins aren't usually found in outside.

The fourth photo of Challenge Two takes the outdoor theme of the third photo one step further.  It creates a sort of "I Spy" kind of feel, initially only one or two coins are visible, but as you keep looking it is evident that there are actually five pennies in the photo. 

Adjustments

I took this picture over the summer during my time at Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennesee.  It is from Centeroo, the main gathering place of the festival where all of the acts took place and all 90,000 people would meet during the day to enjoy music and relax.  The mushroom fountain was a place for everyone to come and cool off and was the unofficial "exact center" of the festival.  I chose to highlight the fact that it was truly in the middle of everything by editing it in a way that the light from the fountain was the focus of the picture.  To do so, I adjusted the saturation, vibrance, brightness and honestly anything that I felt would contribute to the purpose of my picture.  It was by no means the most scientific or calculated use of Photoshop, but nevertheless it helped me to achieve my purpose.

Original photo

Modified photo with more emphasis on the colors of the fountain