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Posts in the ‘Art & Entertainment’ Category

Playing With Halftone Photoshop Effects

One of the assignments in my Photoshop class last week was to create a series of halftone looks by using the regular and color halftone filters in creative ways. I may have gone a bit too abstract on some, but it was interesting playing around with an effect I hadn’t used before.

I used a portrait I created of Evan — I started playing around with it for the Editorial Portrait assignment. And added various halftone masks, layers and effects.

The original portrait I created by compositing Evan, a Goose and a background that I took in Cambridge while punting

A very simple, even halftone pattern with no variation in size in 50% gray -- you can barely see it in this small version, it's just giving the photo its softness

This is sort of an old-timey look, and it was a required matched look for the assignment

Here I deconstructed the color halftone into layers of red, green and blue and applied different opacities and effects like strokes and drop shadows

Then I went even more abstract, again pulling apart the color channels, but also using an alternate color scheme

If I had used a less detailed image, I could have gotten much more dramatic effects or created a more Pop Art feel. I sort of wish I’d gone that way, but this is a learning process… and I do love how these change so dramatically as they increase or decrease in size.

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October 21st, 2009 - Art & Entertainment, Sketches & Projects

class assignment, Evan, Francine's art, halftone effect, photoshop, portraits

‘The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind’ Book Signing

Yesterday, my friend Caroline and I went to a book launch event for The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. She was invited to the event through her job, and asked me to come along with her. I had seen the author — and subject of the book — William Kamkwamba — on the Daily Show earlier in the week, and found his story inspiring, so I was very excited to get to meet him.

William is from Malawi, and starting at a young age, he was fascinated with bicycle dynamos and radios. When a famine hit the country and his parents could no longer afford to send him to high school, he decided to try to continue his education by going to a small library with about 900 books. He didn’t read much English, but he was fascinated with the science books and learned mostly by looking at the diagrams. In one book, he saw a windmill and decided to build one to bring electricity to his home and his village.

He shared how he collected scraps of metal and PVC pipe from a trash yard, and how his family and friends thought he was crazy. But his idea worked — he ultimately created a functioning windmill, built a circuit breaker and light switches, and stored the power the windmill generated in an old car battery.

I took AP physics in high school and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have done any of that.

William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

He and his co-author, journalist Bryan Mealer, shared a lot of stories about the tough times William’s village was having during the famine, and how he gathered together parts with the help of his cousin and another friend. He also then talked about what happened after journalists had discovered what he’d done. He was profiled in many papers and was invited to speak at the TED conference, where he met Tom Rielly who would turn his story into a documentary and help get him into a pan-African high school in South Africa. He’s now helping William pursue college in the U.S. — he’s been looking at Harvey Mudd while he’s been in LA.

William also told some funny stories about his first time on a plane, in a hotel and using a computer — and how he wished he had access to Google back when he was trying to figure out how to build his first windmill. And we heard about the changes in the quality of life in William’s village — he built another windmill to pump water for his mother’s garden, and started a youth soccer team to keep other kids out of trouble. The village also now has its own fresh water source, and William’s parents’ home has a real roof and some better amenities than it had when he was growing up.

I’m really excited to read the book, which I got signed by both William and Bryan. I’m very honored to have met them — and have had a bit of time to actually talk to them. I also met Ben Nabors, who is producing the documentary about William’s story. Check out the Moving Windmills short below to learn more.

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October 16th, 2009 - Art & Entertainment, Events

book, book signing, boy who harnessed the wind, Bryan Mealer, documentary, movie, William Kamkwamba

Creating Composited Portraits in Photoshop

The first big assignment in my Photoshop II class was creating two “editorial portraits” that could be part of one magazine article, somehow related and showed some of the personality of the subject.

When I took photos for the first week of class, I used my friends Guiselle and Kacie as models. I shot the photos in my apartment against a white background. I also took photos of Evan, but for this assignment, I decided that I wanted the fictional article I was putting these photos together for to be a series of profiles of strong women.

Guiselle's Portrait - Click to view a larger version

I decided to use two sort of confrontational photos. In Guiselle’s she’s jumping — actually hurdling — right at you. She ran track in high school and college, and she’s now a lawyer. I felt that her intense look and body language pushed out of the frame, showed a lot of movement, and really showed a strong woman. The background I used was from Highgate Cemetery, and I decided to add the flowers in to add a fanciful element, add more color and visual interest, and soften the photo a bit.

Kacie's Portrait - Click to view a larger version

In Kacie’s photo, I placed her in front of a house, giving a “get off my lawn” sort of stare. Kacie is one of my funniest friends — and she’s actually started doing stand-up comedy. She also loves bizarre props, like Billy Bob teeth, rubber chickens, alligator feet and flamingos. I chose to take a photo of that building because of the skull stickers on the door and the truck in the lawn. And I added in the gas meter, sign, and flamingo to add some more interest and humor to the image, and to help balance it as well.

This was a really fun assignment, and I feel like I was able to capture my friends’ personalities quite well. It was a lot of work to get the photos to look like this, but I’m really happy with how they turned out.

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October 11th, 2009 - Art & Entertainment, Sketches & Projects

class assignment, Francine's art, photoshop, portraits

Creating Custom Photoshop Flower Brushes

I’m taking a the UCLA Extension Photoshop II class, and it’s quite a step up from the Photoshop I class I took last quarter. It’s a lot more photo retouching and compositing, and we started the class by taking photos to use throughout the quarter.

One of this week’s assignments was creating a custom brush (to use instead of one of the default paintbrushes), and using it in a composition.

My set of flower brushes

I ended up creating a few different flower brushes, and I then used them in various colors and sizes, and with different “jitter” settings to paint a funky background. As the background, they looked like they were screen printed, though I added some texture by putting in a stucco wall. I really like how they turned out, especially in combination as a background for Kacie’s photo, and can definitely see using them for future projects.

The flower brushes in use

To create the brushes, I used photos of flowers that I took, and a few that I got from free (and royalty free) stock image site sxc.hu. I masked out the backgrounds, played with the levels and contrast, and made them black and white before defining them as brushes in the Edit menu.

You can download the set of brushes here if you’d like to use them for anything.

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October 11th, 2009 - Art & Entertainment, Sketches & Projects

class assignment, flower brushes, Francine's art, free photoshop brushes, photoshop

Photoshop Final: Reworking the Towards Darkness Poster

For my Photoshop class final, I had to create a movie poster, real or fictional. If it was for a real movie, I had to make sure it was entirely original. The project was supposed to show a range of techniques we learned in the class.

I chose to rework the Towards Darkness poster — the film Evan edited a few years ago. I used images that I got off IMDb and the film’s site, as well as a few other images for textures. I then created a number of different layer masks to remove the images’ backgrounds, used lighting effects to bring out more detail and make the piece feel more coherent, created a custom textured background with layered images and lighting effects, and added text with various text effects to the poster.

I spent a lot of time playing around with the poster, and though I was working with a really limited number of images, I think I captured some of the essence of the film and created an interesting poster.

I really enjoyed learning more about Photoshop. Even though I was already using it daily, I learned many different ways to improve my workflow, create more sophisticated effects and manage my images more efficiently. I’m trying to decide what classes to sign up for this next quarter (starting in a week or so), and Photoshop II is high on the list of what I’d like to take. And if not this quarter, I’ll certainly take it sometime soon.

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September 14th, 2009 - Art & Entertainment, Sketches & Projects

class assignment, Francine's art, Hacia La Oscuridad, photoshop, Towards Darkness

Illustrator Class: My Posterized Murray Poster

Our last Adobe Illustrator class assignment was creating a “posterized” poster — a stylized version of a photo that combines areas with similar tones to create a more graphic effect. We had to achieve the postrized look using the pen and pencil tool, and we could also use the live trace tool. We also had to add a title to the image.

The original photo (scanned in a while back)

I chose a photo of Murray that I took back when he was a puppy, which was always one of my favorite photos of him. I ended up tracing him with the pencil tool, then using live trace for the flowers and grass, though then I duplicated some flowers to fill in the empty areas. I also create a color palette from the original photo, since when I posterized the image in Photoshop and when I did the live trace, the colors got sort of weird, with Murray getting very pink.

The posterized image (click for a closer view)

I decided to enlarge Murray and put the photo in a frame with words around it, similar to how it’s displayed at my parent’s house. I also tested out using some different effects, like drop shadows to give it more depth.

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August 20th, 2009 - Art & Entertainment, Sketches & Projects

class assignment, design, Francine's art, illustration, illustrator, Murray

Learning Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for Real

I use Photoshop just about daily, and have for quite a few years now. I’m familiar with many of the tools, and know how to get a lot of different results, but I’ve always felt like I’m not quite doing everything right — and that if I knew the program better it would help the work I do, so I signed up for a UCLA Extension Photoshop class, and decided to sign up for an Illustrator one, as well.

I’m taking these classes online, which has been an interesting experience — I do miss the camaraderie of the classroom and the real interaction with the teacher, and taking an online class requires a bit more self motivation than just showing up to class once a week since we’re supposed to be checking our class message boards frequently, participating and sharing our work in progress. So far, though, it’s going well, and I feel like I’ve learned a lot.

In the photoshop class, we’ve talked a lot about retouching and correcting photos, which I haven’t done much of before. Now I want to go back to my travel photos from last year and make them even better. We’re also working on creating layer masks, working in nondestructive ways, and creating interesting effects when compositing images.

One project we did was on photo retouching:

Before Retouching

After retouching

For another project, we had to bring together images, as well as use a gradient and creative text styles to create a brochure. I did it for a tour of Oxford, from photos I took there last year.

brochure_oxford

In my Illustrator class, we have been learning to use the shape and pen tools, and about combining shapes and paths. Our first project was creating a chess board and chess pieces — I decided to make mine little penguins.

Penguin Chess Set

Our next assignment was to trace logos with the pen tool and then distort the logos with the various transform tools. Here are some I did for the World Wildlife Federation logo.

WWF-LogoTraces So far, the classes have been going well and I’ve been learning a lot with each assignment and through the great Adobe Classroom in a Book textbooks. I’ll post more of my projects as I complete my assignments.