"Fantastical" Self-Portrait

Photo Repair

The assignment for these pictures was to take the original, beat up and torn picture and to make is pretty much as good as new. This was an extremely long an tedious task, however, once a realized what I had to do, it became increasingly simple. In order to get rid of all the small folds, all I had to do was use the spot healing brush which was the most time consuming part because there are so many creases in the original. In order to get rid of the big crease down the middle and on the left side i used a combination of spot healing and the clone tool. The hardest part was getting rid of the tears where there was no picture left over. For this I used the clone tool again and remade the sections piece by piece. Because I had done so many individual parts, the new piece was a little bumpy so I smoothed over the background with the blur tool but tried not to make it blend in with the people in the foreground. 

Surreal Design

The assignment for this piece was to create a surreal image. I focused on using mostly color to make it dream-like. The original image was just a blue sky with grey clouds so I used the lasso tool to outline the sky and I set the hue to -56 and the saturation to +34. I wanted to also create a flying animal that would never seem to fit in the desert in real life. I have always been fascinated by the poison dart frog and butterflies so I combined the two. The wings were from a pair of brown wings of which I only cropped out one. I copy-pasted it, overlapped them an adjusted the size. Afterwards I added a pattern to the layer and changed the scaling so that the wings were no longer brown. Because it was meant to be dream-like,  I did not line up the shadow with the shape of the frog and the wings. Lastly, I took one of my old pictures of a marble and placed it in the sky as if it was a distant, somewhat transparent moon or planet. THE END ^_^  .....(or is it?)

Square Deconstruction

Square Construction

Storm Thorgerson

The assignment for this project was to create a poster in the style of a graphic designer. The poster had to include a background of an image we created ourselves as well as four of their own pieces. We had to include biographical information and and explanation of the style or a certain piece. Storm Thorgerson often uses different types of reflections as well as putting objects in a place you wouldn't expect them. He believes that the awkward appearance of an object highlights its beauty.

In several of his pieces, Storm Thorgerson places objects in desolate areas and because of this I chose to make the background set in the desert. For one of his single covers for The Mars Volta, Thorgerson had the reflection of a mannequin become that of a real man. Because he has a whimsical style, I decided to make my mannequin's reflection be that of a black and white cartoon.

FutterWacken Band Poster

Kick Butts Day Poster

Anger & Harmony

Broken & Love

Allison Carmichael's Graphic Art

To see more of Allison's work, Click Here :D

After what seemed like a hundred years of surfing google for a graphic design artist, I finally stumbled upon one I liked. Allison Carmichael has a very diverse style of art. Her pieces range from professional artworks to ones you just cant help but laugh at. Her style is whimsical but her messages are powerful. What I like about the above image is its air of "cool-ness." Blue is a cool color on the colorwheel and to add to that,  the face appears to be wearing sunglasses. It's kinda like he's say, "yeeeeeee boiiii, imma cool beast!" Just kidding. But seriously, the image provokes my own memories of being outside on a cool summer day by the water. I cannot wait for my summer at the lake and by the ocean. :P

Kurt Cobain Quote

~I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.~

Lady Gaga Logo

The assignment on this project was to create a new logo for a company, band or label. The negative space in this design is the black background. I used it to make Lady Gaga's name stand out in the white and have a contrast to the lightning bolts that lead the image to the focal point. The biggest problem I had with this design, just as with my name, was lining up the images. The lightning bolts were created from a single image that were copy/ pasted several times. They had to be reflected vertically and horizontally and stretched to reach halfway across the image. Unfortunately, by the time I realized the snap stretching would have made it perfect, I had already changed in the image too much. To try and fix this I had to zoom in far and drag the edges piece by piece.

Name Logo

This logo was made to represent me and had to have my name incorporated. The white shapes in this image are negative space. The two parallel lines that appear to run into the distance represent a road because I love to travel. I made the vampire teeth eat my name cause I'm obsessed with vampires :P The hardest part of putting this together was lining everything up as perfect as I could get it.

Color Design

For this assignment, the class had to create designs that used techniques we already learned and incorporate color to create depth and visual interest. My inspiration for this design was classic video games. In this I have Pacman going diagonally across the middle, Tetris as my focal point and different pieces from Mario throughout the image.

Pattern Design

This design uses line elements in background with repeated patterns of geometric and organic shapes. There is a lot of repetition in this piece; every shape was used more than once and there is a change of value for each section it was used. LITTLE MEN!

The assignment was to use lines and fills if they have patterns and create our own pattern swatches.

Gradients Design

This piece had to focus on the use of different gradients to create an image that had depth, a focal point and is well balanced. One of the principles that I focused on was the use of contrast. The background designs jump from black to white, whereas, the center designs are mostly on greyscale. To balance out the design, I centered the focal point and made it so the the outside pieces would reflect across the image.   When working with gradients, the major element you work with is value (lightness and darkness). I also focused on using geometric shapes and used lines to show movement through the image.

The assignment was to make a design using gradient fills without color... This one was impossible for me to plan for because I had no idea what I wanted to do for it. I ended up just playing around with a couple different shapes and gradient fills until I found something I liked. This one was mostly just a trial and error piece. I didn't have anything to base it off of either so I focused on manipulating shapes. The big piece in the middle started out as a rectangle. :P

Line Design

This was my first time using the adobe illustrator program. The entire image had to be done with lines only. I focused on manipulating lines by making them dashed or changing their shape wit the warp tool. In this image, the white pieces are the negative space. The one giant black brush stroke balances out almost evenly with the amount of white in the image. The lines go between the edges and can be followed around the image. The white star and black swirl break up the two chunks of white and black so they don't take over the entire image.