Final Piece

Evaluation

My work is about the importance of elements in our lives, it is about how much we take for granted, things like water are just an everyday thing for most people and we don't even think about it. My piece is trying to show people how much these basic things actually do, they aren't just mud and clouds, but they actually provide us with a home to live in and water to drink. I originally wasn't going to do all four elements but felt it wasn't ok to do just one because all four of them combined are amazing forces of life. I also didn't cherry pick what the elements were shown to do, i spoke how water can provide hydration and homes for certain creatures but I also mention how water can be cruel and destroy houses and drown people.

In the creation of all of my final work, for the majority of the time I was using photoshop cs6 because it enabled me to easily rearrange words and add colours at my will, but to make the outline I had to use illustrator to take advantage of the fact that you can type on drawn lines, before this I was using the warp tool on Photoshop but it made words almost impossible to read, they were just stretched colours by the end of it.

During the process of making my main idea, I stayed pretty close to the original idea because it did exactly what I wanted, until i had to create the fire symbol, this proved particularly hard because firstly I wanted two separate gradients with my work, and secondly the fire template used was quite hard to follow, this was because at this point I was deleting the templates and just leaving them without outlines, without the outlines they looked almost random. To remedy this i looked out an artist Dylan Roscover, who I have previously mentioned how amazing I think he is and discovered a technique he uses to create very smooth line of text that bends to the contours of peoples faces. Using this technique I was able to create a smooth outline of all of my images.

My original plan was to create 4 moving gif. files unfortunately due to time constraints I was unable to make all four images move. I wanted all the images to move because I thought it would be amazing if the cloud could actually rain as well, getting both elements at once, I am disappointed that I was unable to do this. On the other what did go well was my execution my original idea and method both worked out with flying colours in my opinion, I didn't have to tweak my method to make it accommodate something I didn't expect, most everything went as expected apart from a few hiccups with the fire symbol where I did not think I was going to add to gradients to the same image but using Dylan's technique I was easily able to over come this problem

If I had to redo this work I would have liked to give it some motion, not lots but maybe 12 frames of the flame flickering, or raindrops falling from the cloud, or the leaf floating down the the ground. And if I were to make the images move I would like a nice melodic music in the background, very soothing music that could lull the audience into a peaceful trance. 

My Final Piece And How I Made It.

The Step by Step process of making my final piece

First I created a basic outline that the text should fill, this was done using the pen tool in photoshop

Then I began to fill the template with words that water makes possible, basically words that relate to water

When I finally finished filling out the entire thing I made sure that it looked air tight,
basically this is the point were I made sure that the image was up to the standards
I needed it to be at

Then I was able to remove the template so the text was on its own

After that I applied a simple gradient overlay that I made.

In the final step I took the basic template into illustrator  and traced it with a pen tool,
this enabled me to write along the template with words,
I think this adds a new level of depth to everything and helps define the shape.

My idea

I have chosen to continue with the shapes idea I had earlier, I am going to fill symbols with text that relates to that element. The idea is that I can talk about how important these elements are to everyone, how these elements make so many thing possible good and bad things alike, I want to convey my point to the audience by making certain words bigger than others so that these words catch their eye and hopefully they get the point.

I think the best way of going about this idea is by creating a basic template that I can follow, this will be done to prevent me from wrecking the shape accidentally. What font I use will be very important, I think the best option is to get a faded or scratched font because the words wont make sense if you read them in a line anyways and if they look broken on faded this might add to the effect that these words are used a lot, like the word earth is particularly scratched because it is used so much in our lives

Mock up

A typography experiment

After creating my first mock up pieces i wanted to test and see if they same skills could be extracted onto another subject, like nature

With this image i found that the contrast was far to high and what remains is just lots of colour not making any resemblance to its original form

When I attempted to apply these skills onto a tree I found that the tree was far to complicated of an object to make any sense of, the problem is that the words have lots of gaps between them, butt he tree already has that property with leaves so the effect is essentially doubled leaving you with a blur of words.

Ink and Water

This was my experiment with Ice water and ink, this was an opportunity for me to test ink splashes, Unfortunately due to data corruption all of my edited images were deleted .

Mock Development

The idea

My idea in its most simplest form is to recreate a person with words, 

so firstly I organised a photo shoot. I focused on getting good portrait photos. It was important to me that the models were young because this would later help with the imagery of the youths being the future of the planet 

Out of the photos I took two of them stood out to me as really good

 Now that the images that I want to use have been established the editing process can being.

Starting with standard image adjustments like cropping and making sure the levels look good.

After that I needed to define the light boundaries (separating what is light and what is dark)

I was able to do this by using the "colour range" tool and selecting the mid tones of the image and filling  it with a medium grey colour and the same with the shadows filling with a pure black

Shown here

Now it gets complicated, I had to create a vector mask of my black and white layer, then creating a new separate document I created a "word brush" of sorts, 

With this brush I simply painted over the mask to create the effect you can see above, some parts where hard to see. To fix this using a soft brush, painted over parts like eyes and hair to make them bolder.
I also created a separate brush with a small phase "do you ever stop and think?" written on it and added it into areas that looked particularly sparse, not only did it help fill out the image but it also helped with the theme of this piece (that being the future)

Now all that is left to do is to create a gradient overlay. I simply went into the blending options and created new gradient of colours that I personally think are aesthetically pleasing

Bubbles idea development

So i started to work on the idea I had about the bubble wrap image idea, I managed to acquire some syringes, a decent sized bubble wrap sheet and some blue ink. This process involved in making this in theory wasn't hard but I learned  quickly the faults I had failed to think of, Firstly I failed to consider what size bubbles would be most appropriate, the problem this caused was if the bubble sizes were too big the ink began to diffuse this caused the message to be very faint and hard to see or read, If the bubbles were to small the pressure of having something injected into them was a bit to high and upon removing the syringe the ink would jet out. Secondly I should have considered what ink to use, i was having major problems with the type of ink being used, in my pots (shown below) the dyed water was very consistent until about 20 minutes in when the ink began to rise to the top and the water below it, so when i tried to extract a good amount of coloured water I pulled out only water basically. 

I have decided to not pursue this idea further because it was giving me too much trouble with almost no pay off, as you can see below of what i got done it is hard to read and the bubbles are far to spread apart to even being trying to decipher the text.