'Twas the Nightmare Before Christmas...

My Recreation

Original

#6 POSTER: Recreate a poster inspired by the examples shown in class and your own research using the automatic tracing tools. 

I cannot even begin to explain how happy I am with how this came out. The Nightmare Before Christmas is one of my favorite movies of all time and Jack Skellington is one of my favorite characters of all time. Naturally, upon being told to recreate a work of art or movie poster, I looked up The Nightmare Before Christmas (also Harry Potter...). This project was done basically in the same way that the strawberry was. I outlined everything over the original picture and then filled in the colors except this time, I did a dumb.
Rather than outlining the trees and filling them in, I outlined the "white space" of the sky and the background. Because of this boo-boo there are small errors here and there that, if you could see my recreation blown up to full scale, you would definitely be able to see. Over all, I am super proud of this though. I love the way the letters came out, I love the bats, and I love the jack o' lanterns. They are actually my favorite part of the whole thing.
If/when I have more time and experience using illustrator, I would like to go back and fix my errors on this project, and actually put the effect on it that made it so fuzzy and grainy. Without that effect, it doesn't look quite right, but close enough for the boo-boos that I made on it. This one is definitely going up on my wall.

Strawberry Fields Forever

#5 GRADIENT MESH: Get a picture of a three-dimensional fruit and then convert this object into vector shapes using gradient meshes.


Which one is the real strawberry? Are you having trouble figuring it out? I'll give you a hint... it's not the one that looks like a cartoon...
This project, to recreate a fruit in Illustator, was not hard, but it was time consuming. It was mainly the seeds that gave me trouble, but there is much more than that going on. If you notice, there are multiple different shades of red in the strawberry that I created. First, there was just the plain gradient of kinda dark red to kinda light red, and then there was the highlights, and of course, the lowlights. I never noticed how much dimension there is to a piece of fruit until now.
The easiest part of all of it was the leaves. They were actually the most fun too because it was really cool to get to see them coming out basically as the originals did, at least by color. The actual easiest but most boring was the seeds... I traced one then just kept copying and pasting it and changing the size, color, and orientation. Not a hard thing to do, but very boring and when there are that many, you just wanna quit and call it a day before you fall asleep and drool on your keyboard.
Overall, this was a really, really cool project. I did not expect my strawberry to look anything like it does and I am super proud of it. If I had more time and more texture packs, I would add in more details to the leaves and even the fruit itself, but I have another project that's even cooler to finish, so I'll be spending my time on that one.

Hire Me!

#4 BUSINESS CARDS: Design 5 business cards with your own logos, one two-sided.


After creating our company logo, it was time to make business cards. I had never designed my own business cards before. I always ordered them, pre-designed, off of websites like vistaprint and just added in my information. This was a trip. I looked online at business card designs and most of them were very simple with a curved line of blue in the background. Because it was my first design and I wanted it to be simple, this was what I started with:

The entire logo was on the entire card, there wasn't a lot of blank space, and it had enough information on it. Name, number, website. It was too plain though. I wanted my second to have a bit more life, be more enticing and fun. This was number two:

Not very different from the first, but added a slogan, shrunk the logo a little and classed up the info. Still, I knew there was more I could do. It still looked much too plain. The white space was bearable, but I had limitless possibilities! Apparently, my possibilities were still quite limited as here is business card number three:

I liked this slogan. I liked the use of black and white. The CurlzMT font still felt very childish and flighty, but it also seemed to fit well at the same time. The contrast was definitely there and was helping with the white space, but I suddenly seemed to remember something about photographer's business cards. They usually had actual photos on them, hence, the design for number four: 

I wanted to try a new slogan again for the front. I like it, but I don't like the design much. I wanted to get away from the white background with black text on it so I switched them. I also thought it might be a cool idea to get the logo itself on black with the text in white because it might look more like teeth and the Cat's smile when that's all there is left of him. Did it work? 

The back then, is where I put all of the real information about the company. Name, number, website, and also the different types of shoots we can do, then a sample of those shoots (note: none of those photos are mine. PLEASE DON'T SUE ME!). The back started to feel like a real photographer's business card, but since the front still wasn't there, I compromised on number five: 

Number five got it all right. I have the logo, the samples, the list of type of photography, and the information. I use all the space, I add more color while keeping the contrast... I hit the nail on the head with this one. Now I just have to replace those other photographers' photos with my own, and I think I have a business card for my fake, but hopefully soon-to-be real, photography business. 

**The black boxes are where my phone number was. This blog is not private in anyway, so I thought I would block it out. Also, that website doesn't lead anywhere. I checked. No one steal it from me so that I can actually use it!

We're All Mad Here

#3 LOGO: Design your own company logo.


So whoa. I am ridiculously proud of this. SO. RIDICULOUSLY. PROUD.

This project started off interestingly. The goal was to create a logo. Easy enough? It seemed that way for most of my classmates. We could either start on the computer or on paper. I chose paper. When I started, I was no where near this finished design. I was writing my initials. A little while back, I decided that if I ever became famous (this is a big aspiration of mine) I would only go by my first and middle names. I would drop the last name altogether and only be known as Alexis Caitlin, so I started with this. I drew many different variations of an "A" and a "C" together. The one I liked the best had the bottom of the "C" as the crossed part of the "A" but I decided that it looked too much like the LA Dodgers logo and I really wanted to make something of my own.

I don't know when the idea of the Cheshire Cat came to me, but once it did, I ran with it. I love Alice in Wonderland and I am obsessed with the Cheshire Cat makeup that many people do for Halloween so first I thought of a makeup line. Then a clothing line. Then, because it is such a wide smile, the photography idea came to me. It hit me like a bus and I ran even further with this. I was still very far away from this design however, as I first wanted the letter to look like teeth. I used the colors of the old cat, but I wanted teeth like the new one. This was getting me nowhere, however, as I am not the best at drawing, and I realized that many other photographer's logos are in cursive. They look elegant and classy, not scary. This led me to the design that I have now.

It took me many tries, but I eventually drew it all out on paper, then scanned it in and traced over it in Illustrator. The color and whiskers came in later, but it looks better than it did in my original design.

Though I gave up on the photography career a long time ago, it is still a hobby of mine and this project reignited my love for it. Even if I couldn't make it a stable career, I would love to keep photography as a side job and use this as my logo and company name.

I Can't Climb the Palm Trees

#2 CALLIGRAM: Create a Calligram in Adobe Illustrator.

This project was too fun and too cool. This is called a calligrame. I had never heard that word before, but when I looked it up I realized that I knew what it was, I just never learned the proper word for it. It was really pretty easy. All we had to do was find a line drawing of something, the simpler the better, retrace it in Illustrator, and then put the text in instead of the lines that were drawn. These had always seemed so much more difficult than it turned out to be. I thought that the people who made them had to just have the picture of what they wanted already in their heads and then turn the words and letters manually to fit what they wanted. Boy, was I wrong!

At first, I did a cat and replaced the lines with a modified version of a poem I had written over winter break. It was cool, but I didn't like the text. 

Since I still had time left in class, I asked a friend what else I should do and she suggested I do the lyrics to the song "Trees" by Twenty One Pilots. So I found a line drawing of a dead tree (it had to be dead because the song is sad and weird) and voila! There's the calligrame that I like better of the two. If you'd like to read the lyrics without needing to turn your head, here they are:

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/twentyonepilots/trees.html

And if you would like to actually listen to the song, here it is:

I'm not a pirate... matey...

#1 CANVAS: Using any text editor, create a landscape or a portrait - it can be totally experimental - using the HTML5 CANVAS. It must contain AT LEAST 10 shapes.


I didn't know how to post the actual HTML in here, so I took a screen shot of it. I have never done anything with HTML before so this was definitely interesting for the first project in this class. At first I just started out messing around with all of the different elements but when I put in the gradient in the background, that was where the ideas all started really flowing and coming together. It helped that the weekend coming up after this project was Gasparilla.
I wish I knew more about how to code HTML because I would have moved the big ship over to the right more, I would have made the background look more like the sea and sky, and the cannon would have actually been facing the smaller ship.
I am fairly happy with how this came out however, because it is a whole composition, not just random elements. I have a lot more respect for web designers now whose job it is to work entirely in HTML and make webpages that look FAR BETTER than what I created here.

Aaaaaaaaaand I am immediately confused.

The only blogging website I have ever really used is tumblr unless you count Facebook or Twitter, so this is very different. It looks like I am writing up a word document right now, and that's what I was actually avoiding doing...
I don't think anyone else in our class is doing this, but I thought it might be fun to actually have a place to keep track of the work I do in this class as I am hoping that I will be proud of it all. Hopefully. We'll see what happens...