Foundations: Digital Media

This project was one of my favorites because compared to the last two projects, it was actually challenging. We were asked to use a new application called Illustrator to vectorize an image. I vectorized a cartoon character. This basically means, making it less pixelated, in fact non pixelated. The catch to this one was that we had to use as few points as possible when select certain parts of the image. The final image almost looks exactly like the original image. That was the goal.

For this project, we were just being introduced to Dreamweaver. Instead of having the leisure of being able to just drag a shape and place it wherever, we had to do it the hard way. We had to code to create shapes and also code to move them. Specifically, we created triangles and rectangles and moved them wherever we wanted to place them. We also changed the color of them. There really was no creative intentions behind this project for me. It was pretty straight forward.

This project was another photoshop practice for us. This time, we used the brush tool and manipulated the layers making them a Multiply, or Overlay. We chose a black and white photo from a group of photos and colorized everything int the picture. Making sure the opacity and hardness was just right was very important to making this as realistic as possible. 

This project was introducing students to Photoshop which I would argue is the more complicated out of the other applications we've used this semester. It offers wider variety of tools to learn and use. The tool we focused most on this project was the lasso tool. We cut out multiple pictures of solely living things and covered the entire background with them.

This was another face oriented project. Instead of using words to form our face this time, we used the paint brush tool in Illustrator. Carefully choosing our stroke types, opacity and hardness, we recreated everything from our hair to our teeth using entirely paint. The color dropper played a very important role in this process, ensuring that our colors matched very well. The last part of this project was to create, using the paint brush tool again, an interesting background.

This project was the most difficult of the semester without a doubt. It required us to write a letter to ourselves from the future. The words from this letter would be used to make up our entire face, making it look as realistic as possible. To ensure the reality of this picture, we had to use the color dropper, transform tool, and other tools. My choice of font was based on it's fullness and ability to curve well when transformed.