Downtown Photography.

We had some time after the OCADU trip to take some shots.

OCADU Areas of Interest.

Well the trip was certainly interesting. When I graduate I will be definitely looking at OCADU as a possible university. So many interesting things were going on in that building. It was truly a worth while experience. I was surprised that the area of the facility I actually found most interesting was the drawing and painting section, due to the fact I had gone mostly looking forward to the Graphic Design section. Here are 2 of the paintings that stood out to me the most during the visit.

Inverted
By, Nazli Nahidi

This painting initially caught my eye due to the flawless fading of inverted light/dark colours, back to regular. Another thing that caught my attention is the slightly off-putting colour palette. The intensity of the colours on the right side of the face contrasting with the dark inverted purple/black colours on the right make for an interesting experience.

Stuck
By, Elis Tarelli

This painting caught my attention for reasons I feel are obvious. The image of a man contorted in all these strange ways is in my opinion, quite shocking. It's beautifully done. I feel like it shows how an artists mind can get when they're suffering a bad case of creativity block, due to the how "stuck" the figure is. Immobile, not able to create. That's just my take on it though.


-Discord

OCADU Trip

I'm very excited with my upcoming trip to explore OCADU's areas of interest. Since i'm interested in exploring a career in design, it's great to be able to explore somewhere I might be interested in going.

The first and main area I wish to explore would be the Graphic design department. Graphic Design at this moment is the career that interests me the most. I think it'd be great to learn about things covered in the class such as branding, editorial and publication design, interactive communication, motion graphics, and typeface design.

Another area I wanted to explore is the Digital Futures program. It seems like a well rounded program  for someone going into the field of graphic design. It takes into account how things will change over the years, and stresses collaboration with industries and institutions.

The last area I wish to explore is Illustration. Illustration has always interested me. I'd love to learn different areas of illustration taught in this department such as: Merchandise, CDs, websites, etc.

Overall, I'm very excited for the OCADU trip tomorrow.

Kinetic Typography

Today I'll be looking at some kinetic typography to get me prepared for my classes upcoming assignment involving it. After browsing youtube for about half an hour, this was one of my favourites and I thought it displayed the principals of animation quite well.

The entire piece is solid drawing, because of it's 2d "pencil doodle" style. At the 13 second mark during the intro, the Beatles logo drops down causing the little animated character to bounce. The logo then slowly falls backward. I believe this shows the principle of secondary action. At 24 seconds the words form an arc which obviously shows the arc principle of animation. around the 40 second mark it shows the little animated character falling. I think this is an example of anticipation, because you are anticipating where/how he is going to land. At 1 minute and 15 seconds, letters begin to fall around the character showing small amounts of squash and stretch. a few second later cloud shaped words appear in the sky, and more solid words appear forming the ground for the character to walk on. I think this is a great example of staging. At 1:28 the character lands in a canon is launched on the kick of the drum, which is a great example of timing. After he is launched he appears to be floating through space in a very cool rendering of space in this 2d typographic world the animator has created. In my opinion this is a fantastic example of staging and appeal.
Looking through these kinetic typography examples has me excited to try my hand at it.

-Discord

I decided to save my vector rendering of an apple in the .png file format. I did this because it handled gradients better than the other .tiff, and .gif formats, and I didn't believe the colours were complex enough to warrant saving it in .jpeg.

I used the pen tool to create a vector version of  an apple. I used few anchors, and tried to curve the path to fit my apple exactly. I had a lot of trouble getting the yellow colour to work, because of the way the colours faded, so I decided to leave it out. I added some text in photoshop to liven it up a bit.

I am not overly pleased with the final result. I regret choosing an apple, because I wished to challenge myself with something more complex. I know not to do this for the future of my assignments.

Pixel Portrait

This week I made a pixel portrait of myself in Photoshop.  I then saved both files in the .png, and .gif formats.  When I looked at both file formats, they were almost completely identical. There was only one noticeable difference, the colour. The gif is slightly more vibrant. The was trying to really show the levels of colour to give it as much depth as a pixel portrait can have. I tried to showcase the different levels of colour, and used colour to show my more obvious facial features. To make this easier, I used varying sizes of pencil tool, and a soft eraser to help with different levels of colour .
I used the smallest size pencil tools to add fine details, and the larger pencil tool, so save time on areas with no deviating colour. I think I did a good job of showing my nose, and mouth because of the variety of colours showing the depth.

I am very happy with the result of my work.

Gif

Png

The Pen Tool

For this blog post I thought I'd talk a little bit about the pen tool, and how useful it is. When I go around my class it frustrates me to find that everyone seems to be using their brushes for masking. That's fine, but it just seems like everything comes out more accurate when you pen too your mask. Brushing is musch less accurate, and often times comes out more messy hen pen tool'd maks. The pen tool is a tool for making vector lines and curves to make more accurate selections.

I hope my classmates see the usefulness of this tool in years to come, I know I have. Bellow I have embedded a video explaining how to use the pen tool for you newcomers.

-Discord