Week 3 creativity

 Week 3 creativity-

For this week of exercise, I thought back to what I used to do for "warmups" back when my high-school art teacher gave us daily sketchbook tasks- these tasks were meant to be creativity exercises. My favorite of the ones assigned was line weight exercises, this is where you take a writing utensil and try putting varying weights into the end. Most of my work is now digital, so I haven't been able to do this much. 

This exercise is incredibly useful to help build muscle memory with your brushes and to help get used to brushes you don't often use.

That being said, I wanted to do one doodle sheet of my usual brush, which is a "Conceptual 4 Brush" from autodesk, and then a brush I hate using (to get more familiar with it), ironically the one i dislike is called "Dream Brush"

Conceptual 4 Brush:

This brush is made up of triangles to appear more square, this allows for more blocky edges, I use this brush as an eraser as well to achieve sharper edges when needed.

Dream Brush: 

The dream brush is a much more flowy pen, it has a lesser opacity, high reaction to pressure, and follows more smoothly, I often dislike this brush cause I'm used to more blocky ones, not flowy ones, so I struggle to find confidence in using these types of brushes, which is why I used it here. 

Design post 3-

 Design post 3-

Earlier in the week while we had a variety of projects and critiques, there was a few instances where rule of thirds and grids were mentioned, as lightroom from Adobe offers a wide variety of these grids to help improve the focus of a photograph. 

While I remember the use of rule of thirds in our digital media portion of the class, I wanted to further explore how to utilize this in my photography, and how they differ despite being the same thing.

While working on my "Exploring Texture" project I found that my phone also has some presets in it to help with rule of thirds, which helped me decide the best way to crop my image.

 Additionally it comes with a straighten tool, which was hard to showcase in just one photo, so hopefully this tilted screenshot helps demonstrate.

The grids, as we discussed in class, can help you align parts of your image that you may not notice are slightly tilted, items like mugs, cans, chairs, ect can be fixed so the minor difference doesn't appear off to the viewer. These grids can also help you with where your subject is placed, like in our digital media class, the poster design could be segmented into thirds, which made the visual easier to break down and process.

Lightroom also offers an automated version to straightening images, which is helpful a good amount of time! But to be used with caution, as the computer may not know which subject of the photo we're trying to appear straight.

Going back and reapplying what I learned about these sets of grids really helped me think more about my subject placement, both before and after shooting an image.

Exploring Texture

 Exploring texture- 

In photography, texture plays a very important role, it's a sense of feeling that the photographer must convey to the viewer. The viewer won't be there to feel that texture, so images with good depth of this style help the viewer remember the feeling of that particular material, which leaves a greater impact for them to remember the photo by. Gives it a more thought provoking style.

For my project, I wasn't exactly sure what kind of texture I wanted to go for, originally I thought about my carpet, wood floors, or even the fur on my pet cats. However after it rained one night, there was a variety of frogs, and toads that came out- which have a great deal of texture to their skin. Through the next few days there was different frogs, so I took a handful off photos of each of them to try and get a good sense of capturing texture- for the first few images there was this tree frog under the outdoor lamps, the background where it sat was also textured, so I wanted to use the stark lighting to try and capture both types of texture, as they were both bumpy.

These images were a little unfocused, as my camera had a difficult time working at night and right after it rained- next time id like to try and capture these images with a little more detail and focus.

The next two frogs I captured were across from eachother, one was in the rocks and dirt, the other on my door mat- both of these animals were on backgrounds with interesting textures, so I went in and captured these as well, below are the final renditions I went with, as the other images were not as good as I wanted them.

I went in and made sure my cropping encased the subjects in rule of thirds, and allowed for the variety of textures to be shown.

My favorite of the bunch was the toad that I edited into black and white, it pushes the idea of the frogs camouflage, and rocky texture to match its surroundings- next time I might go in and add a slight pop of color to make the frog slightly more visible.

Exploring Composition

 When trying to decide what to choose for this project, I was on my way to work, looking around me while in the parking lot to try and figure out just what item I could possibly photograph 30 times. This is when I spotted my NOS can, which is an energy drink I use to start my day, despite working at a coffee shop, ironic I'm aware. So by the end of my day I took it home and started my many different angles and styles of photography. First I started off with 1-8 basic photos of the can, with the camera simply at eye level- which made for a boring take of the subject, so quickly i moved on into experimenting, I used different variations of camera on my phone, angles, areas, and one of my favorite go-to's holding my phone camera upside down, which typically captures better detail and angle.

While going through my many photos, I liked one spot best, the kitchen, it seemed like a natural environment you'd typically find a drink in, the counters made for a colorful but subtle pop and the background was easy to blur- the natural browns and grey made the very pigmented blue/orange pop and really called attention to it. Attached you will see the three I decied were my best, I went in on lightroom and adjusted the colors slightly and the crop of the image to allow for a nicer picture.

Next time id like to make the subject pop a little more, and maybe have a better series of things that lead the viewers eye to the energy drink.

(Small note, the lens correction in lightroom also accounts for phone cameras! I thought this detail was interesting so I would like to point it out to others)

Week 2- Creativity

 

For this week's creativity design, I wanted to go away from finding so much inspiration online and decided that just for this week I'd combine both my creativity exercise and my design learning- recently my dad surprised me to tickets to the Tampa Bay Lightning vs Golden Knights game (the Knights are my team) which was a very fun trip! However I wanted to not only take the time of enjoying this experience but I also wanted to get a deeper glance into the world of sports marketing. Sports marketing is an industry that id love to be apart of, and for those of you who don't know, Tampa has always had a very fun show put into their games. They focus strongly on telling a fictonal story for pre and post of the game, and incorporate the fans and even tesla coils that were custom made for the arena! 

Focusing on the font, style, and fan interactions I wanted to see what about their choices made the game and crowd so energetic- 

The Tampa Bay Lightning have been around since the 90s, and have always been more of an underdog team as they reside in the south, as opposed to more of a colder state like traditional teams are, as of recent this underdog team won 2 Stanley cups back to back and have really rocketed in popularity, looking into their atmosphere and energy it's interesting watching them use these layouts in games to really hype up their fans into supporting them and making for a more patriotic fanbase. This applies to other sports as well, and I highly recommend anyone to go out and see how sports teams market to their fans, it's a whole separate world of design, at least how it felt for me.

While I didn't create anything from this activity, it helped me learn a lot.

Week 1- Creativity

 In one of my previous posts about following ideas for creativity and design I had found a site https://www.inc.com/ayse-birsel/32-easy-exercises-to-boost-your-creativity-everyday.html , which prompted me to attempt realism and with that I drew something out of my comfort zone- this week I wanted to revisit that prompt and what I had created. 

Last time I had struggled with breaking down the shapes of the vehicle and having them translate properly into a style that was a bit more toony but still had elements that resembled realism. When revisiting this, I was able to build off of my last problems and go about the issues a bit differently, which immensely helped me build up shapes and likeness to the vehicle. 

To keep things a little more simple I wanted to draw something that I was more familiar with as opposed to a friends truck, and so for this revised prompt I went with my own vehicle as it's something I use almost every day, and can go without refrence.

This time around there was a lot less challenges and because of that, I was able to focus more on line work, colors, and theme to make the piece pop much more!

Week 1- Photography

 Design 

Throughout our class in the previous month we learned a lot about layouts, framing, fonts, ect. Which really opened up a lot about design for me, every graphic you see in your day has different quality based on the things we learned for design. 

 In this class, digital photography, we have been learning about editing, cropping, and lighting, while most of this is photography based it still helps me add to what I've learned about the illustrative aspects of design. When cropping an image there are a variety of grids that improve the focus and lead of what may be in the photo, grids like rule of thirds, column, and traditional grids that fill the page, allows the editor/photographer find where the image can be straightened or have the focus be more on the subject as opposed to a distracting background element.

So far both segments of what have been taught build off of eachother and really allow me to better my illustrations and photography at the same time as the rules and visuals go hand in hand.

Below is a graphic for rule of thirds and another ratio (golden ratio) that helps improve image/art.