Text Tutorial

Another tutorial that Mr. Sands had us do.

Fairies

After Doodle for Google, we were assigned to take a picture (or 2) and turn someone in it into a fairy. To do this, I took the photo outside (the girls are in my class), then found a tutorial on the Internet for creating sparkles. The sparkles needed 3 layers, and I found that one of them (which added a blueish glow effect) was great for drawing the outline of the wings. The insides of the wings are simply a white paintbrush on new layers set to 33% Opacity. I originally planned to have them make the bushes behind them flower, but I found that the resolution was too low to do that, so I improvised and added the peace sign using the same layer I used to draw the outlines of the wings.

As anyone following this blog has surely figured out by now, Mr. Sands has us answer 6 questions for every major project (and a few of the smaller ones this this one). Here are the answers to the ones not addressed in the paragraph above:

I thought this was fairly successful. The wings turned out great and although I couldn't do what I originally planned, the girls in the photo like the peace sign. If I did this again, I would take a higher-resolution picture so I could do what I planned. The hardest part was drawing the wings. And to make this I learned how to create a brush and about Gaussian Blur.

Doodle for Google

Google has a competition every year for schoolkids (Kindergarten to Grade 12, split up into different age groups) to draw a Google logo. After they judge the entries, the winner's Doodle is displayed on the Google homepage (probably the most visited page on the Internet) for a whole day, May 20 this year, and the finalists are given a trip to New York and sent home with awesome prizes. Mr. Sands entered us into the competition, which means this Doodle (and the ones from all my classmates) will be entered. For more information, just Google (or use Yahoo or Bing if you want to be ironic) "Doodle for Google".

In case you're wondering, the thing that makes the l is supposed to be that part of the Mars Rovers that sticks up and has a bunch of cameras on it. The 2nd o is the Hubble Space Telescope. The e is formed by a planet with rings (the black part is experiencing night-time; i.e. it's not facing the sun). The G is made from the sun with a few sunspots and an asteroid blocking part of it, the 1st o is the Earth, and the g is a comet and 2 asteroids.

Eddie and Liz Animation

Eddie and Liz from Daniel Ghan on Vimeo.

This is why I haven't posted anything for the past week or so. I've been spending my time taking the characters I created then and named Eddie and Liz (Eddie has already appeared in my previous post) and making them have a conversation. First I had to find a girl who had enough time to be the voice of Liz. That was surprisingly hard, so when I got a recording I went ahead and used it. This is why the quality of the sound is not great: there was way too much background noise, and when being Eddie's voice, I made his first question sound like a statement. I would have gotten better sound if I'd had time. Anyway, after that it was a matter of importing everything into Flash and making 12 mouths for different emotions and sounds. For anyone who knows how to use Flash, almost everything I did after importing involved Symbol Swap.

Overall, I thought it turned out fairly well. I wrote a script beforehand, and the girl who helped me did a great job reading her part.

Once again, Mr. Sands has given us 6 questions to answer, so here are the answers to those that I haven't addressed above: if I did this again, I might add more sets of mouths to show more complicated emotions (I only had 2 sets in this animation). Animating the mouths was easily the hardest part, simply because it's so time-consuming. And to complete the project I had to learn the basics of Flash, since this is the 1st time I've ever used the program.

Eye Colour Change

This was another Tutorial. It took me about 2 minutes, which means that next time I post something that turns out horrible I can't say it was because I didn't know how to use Photoshop.

Character

Mr. Sands had us create a character and then show him with 5 different emotions... so here you go!

Reverse

Mr. Sands asked us to make a picture for http://www.illustrationfriday.com/. They have a word every week and ask artists of all levels to submit pictures or drawings related to the word. Their word this week was Reverse. To make this I simply thought of 2 completely random concepts (cassette tape and the sun), found pictures and inverted or messed with the Hue and Luminosity, and added the rewind symbol using a simple Photoshop tool. It doesn't really mean anything, but reverse is written all over it-the invertion of the tape, the rewind symbol, and the fact that I flipped the tape horizontally. The red sun could imply a few billion years in the future, which creates a real clash of concepts. You decide.

Reverse Engineering

Mr. Sands put some pictures on Blackboard and told us to do something similar-reverse engineering. While I didn't do exactly the same thing, I accomplished the same idea and actually made more layers of shadow. Once I got the shadows, the background, and the picture, I simply played around with Hue and Saturation.

Another Tutorial

Another tutorial from Blackboard. This one was more advanced than I was, so I probably didn't get the entire effect the tutorial was designed for. But you still have to admit it looks cool.

Tutorial

Mr. Sands posted a link on Blackboard to a website that showed how to create this. I used the same photo to start with that they did, but only because I'm trying to get to other projects that will hopefully show up on this blog.

Basketball Clones

This is what I did for the clone project-several copies of the same person in the same photo. I shot this at the neighbourhood basketball court, laying the camera on a nearby table (and moving it a little to fix the angle; there's a bit of a ditch there which made it easy to change the angle by moving the table) and taking pictures of my sister in the places you see her, being careful not to move the camera too much (which made it a bit easier to cut and paste the extra people). I then got my sister to do the same for me. I put all the photos into Photoshop and picked out the ones I wanted to use, then copied the people in them and put them in this picture. All of them but one are Photoshopped but one; can you tell which? If you can't (and none of the 3 people I've asked could, so I think this turned out quite well) it means I did a good job. Highlight below for the answer:

The one shooting the ball was already there. I had to copy part of her arm and shoes to put them on top of me and my shadow.

The game plan was supposed to be that my clones were playing against my sister's. They were playing man-on-man defense but my sister's left clone did a pick, leaving my left clone trapped while the one he was guarding, her middle clone, ran a few metres up the court and is now about to shoot (or pass; you decide). My right clone saw what was going on and stepped away from his man (my sister's right clone who is now ready for a pass) and is attempting to block the shot. My middle clone was guarding her left clone and also abandoned his man but was too late to do anything. I didn't quite get the positioning of the clones on the left, so it looks like mine has already recovered, recognized his job as a lost cause, and maybe started guarding hers in the absence of my middle clone.

This is fairly open to other interpretations, but that's what I had in mind when I shot the photos.

Now, Mr. Sands has required us to answer 6 questions about the project. Some of them have been answered above, but I will answer the rest here:

If I had to do this again, I would get a third person to take the pictures. That way I could get the interactions between the pairs of clones (especially the pick) much more synchronized in space. The hardest part was getting the pixels immediately next to the clones to line up with their surroundings (although this wasn't as hard as getting rid of them would have been). And I learned how to make the tabs in Photoshop useful, as well as improving my skills with the program in general (which, if you look at the previous post, is not surprising).