Famous Artwork

 

Fun fact: we actually did a recreation of this portrait in cinematography where I was the model! I figured it'd be funny to actually Photoshop my face directly onto the painting, so that's why I chose it. This one was definitely more frustrating to figure out because of the angle of the model's face and the lighting. I took a while trying to figure out where to blend it so that it made the most sense. Trying to color match it was really hard too; obviously it's not exact, but I got it as close as I possibly could. For having never done something like this in Photoshop before, I'm pretty satisfied with it!

Announcements

 

Not too shabby for someone who has never photoshopped herself into a background before! The background is a picture of a Scottish castle; I chose it because I've been dying to go to Scotland for years. I was supposed to study abroad in the fall, but Covid-19 canceled the program completely so I wasn't able to go to England like I had wanted. I had really been looking forward to being able to visit my ancestral stomping grounds (which are technically both England and Scotland), but I'll get there eventually! Using the pen tool for this assignment was interesting because it's definitely not the same as the pen tool in Illustrator. It took me a few tries to really get things right, so hopefully the next assignment will go a little smoother! I'm glad to be working in Photoshop like this though.

Recreating Vector Art

 I had so much fun doing this project that I ended up wanting to do more than one poster, as seen above. If you can't tell, I'm a huge Star Wars fan! I came across Captain Rex's helmet first and immediately saved the image to my laptop - Rex is one of my favorite characters from The Clone Wars. I absolutely love and have massive respect for his character, which is saying a lot since there are very few characters that I hold in such high regard! I came across the Hoth image shortly after finding the image of the helmet and couldn't resist saving that one as well. It's just a small recreation of an iconic scene and an iconic vehicle, but it makes a nerd like me very happy🤪the Hoth image definitely took longer to recreate since there were more parts and shapes to it than Rex's helmet. It also had an actual background and required me to create a rectangle over the whole image, then move it to the side and create a gradient mesh to get the colors right. Everything else, except the text, was recreated using the pen and curve tools. I tried to get the font of the text to match as closely to the original as possible. The only difference is that it's a little thicker. 

Gradient Mesh

 

Mangos are one of my favorite fruits, so I thought it'd be fun trying to recreate one! It was definitely challenging to make sure the colors matched as closely as possible, and I ended up having to trace more shapes, especially for the stem, than I thought I would to make it look more authentic. Having never used the gradient mesh before or recreating an image like this, I think it turned out pretty well. Not sure if I'd do it again, but it was a good experience to help me work more with Illustrator's tools.

Business Cards

 

These were my final business card ideas! The only (truly) original logo is the second one: that was the original color scheme. The other cards had their colors modified to better meet the requirements of the assignment. I personally like the first business card the best; if you can't tell, my favorite color is blue! The logos have lost a bit of their integrity since they needed to be sized down, so I'm not a huge fan of that, but overall I enjoyed making these.  

Logo Designs

 These are my logo designs! I found two drawings to work off of and sketched them out in my sketchbook before taking pictures of them to upload into Illustrator (I live off campus and don't have a scanner!) I actually ended up using the curvature tool much more than the pen tool to trace each drawing because it was giving me more of the look that I wanted. After everything was traced, I went back and changed the colors then filled everything in and added my own company name, DreamWriter Studios. The concept is all based off of the fact that I'm a dreamer and love to put my ideas on a page. Dreamcatchers have always been correlated to dreaming, and I happen to be a Pisces, which is the biggest dreamer of all the zodiac signs (hence the fish!) This particular assignment took me about two days to complete between drawing the designs, tracing them, and coloring them. 

Calligram

 This is my calligram project! While watching the tutorial, I immediately thought of the quote "cardinals appear when angels are near" because those are words that I hold close to my heart. My grandmother's favorite bird was a cardinal, so whenever I see them I associate them with her and know that it's her way of saying hi. I was only three when she passed, but I think about her all the time; I used the simple quote "always in my heart" for the heart, and it's in green because she loved the color. The halo is also made up of "cardinals appear when angels are near" as halos are usually associated with angels. It made me very happy using words to create something this meaningful! 

HTML Canvas Project

 

This was my first time ever creating an HTML file through Dreamweaver, so it was definitely a little strange! I decided to stay as basic as I could since coding isn't by any means one of my strengths, but figured I'd at least incorporate a small snippet of my life as I've been around horses since I was a little girl! I couldn't figure out if there was a way to rotate the semicircles to create the hills, so I opted to use a bunch of circles instead and move them accordingly. I would've liked to bring in images of clouds, but it seemed that I could only have one image at a time, and I couldn't quite figure it out. Overall, I had fun doing this since it satisfies the little artist in me!