Friday, October 25, 2013

Name Piece

This week, we did a propaganda poster based on our names. From last year, I remembered that my name often implies royalty. Because of this, I used a crown like I did last year. I was originally going to create my own textures for the background, but that didn't work out well, so I finally caved and used two free paper textures that I found online, one on top of the other. By doing this, I was able to create the intended old, wrinkled poster/paper effect that I had in mind. I used the difference blending mode on the geometric objects in the piece, as well as the sword and the text. I used the cutout filter on the crown, which really came out very well. Perhaps the most difficult part of the piece was making everything perfectly centered, or at least enough so that it looks right. This piece turned out overall to be very polished and finished, and I'm proud of what I acomplished over the course of the 3 days that I worked on this.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Metamorphosis Final Piece

This week, I worked on my submission for the Dali Surrealism contest/show thing. I un-giffed the fish I made last week, and polished it up in order to bring out the idea of metamorphosis. It took copious amounts of effort and lots of frustration of the worst order. I was ready to give up on this incredibly sinister fish. The tail posed a particular problem for me. I had to scrap the tail more times than I could count, but in the end, it was worth the effort.
The overall theme for this year's DalĂ­ show is metamorphosis. In my piece, the metamorphosis is well, meta, meaning it's multileveled and self-referencing. The idea begins with a fish with an eye for its body. Move up to the next level, the fish itself becomes the pupil of the larger eye that fills the foreground of the piece. I also carry on this idea of concentric things with the dots within dots within dots. Even though it is a "flat", vector-based piece, by using the multilayered textures I am able to create a sense of depth and space, helping to accentuate the surreal, dreamlike quality of this piece, as well as the underlying theme of metamorphosis. Overall, I'm really proud of my efforts, and I hope it pays off. This is one of my favorite pieces that I've ever made, and I really hope that it makes it into the show!


Friday, October 11, 2013

HOMECOMING WEEK FOR THE LAST TIME

Man, this week went by fast! Somehow, it's already the end of my last homecoming week, and its bittersweet. On one hand, I love the fact that I'm almost out of high school, but at the same time, I'm going to miss it! This week, in the very little class time we had, I was messing around with shapes, and began work on what may or may not be my next piece.

Friday, October 4, 2013

I keep changing the channel, but all I get is this stupid fish!

This week, I completely reworked the piece I began last week, taking a vector based approach rather than a painting based approach. This piece really seemed to create itself, lots of unexpected occurrences. This really adds to the surreal nature that I attempted to convey in it. I then decided to create a gif out of the piece, and when I did that, it added lots of very cool noise and grainy distortion to the piece, making it seem even more dreamlike and surreal. Overall, I really like this piece, and I'm very happy with the way it evolved from the original idea.