WEEK X

We played around with Dreamweaver today. It was a great experience because I had no idea how to use it. Once I got the hang of it making a simple website was no problem. I already made a 3 page website.

Week VIII

Today we presented our projects. There were some amazing projects displayed I was really impressed with a lot of them. I've never used flash before so it was a great experience for me.



I'm looking forward to the web design tutorials now.

Week VII

Today we worked in Flash. Flash is completely new to me, but it wasn't hard to get the basics down. Carmen went over everything 3 times, just to make sure we all got it.

Exercise one was pretty simple. Simply move the china girl.


Exercise two was a tad more complex. Have her move from one point to another.


Exercise three was a bit moe challenging, we had to get the plane from one area to another.And have it move on a set course that we adjusted ourself.


At the last 30 minutes of class we had to work on our future project. I got a lot done, but unfortunately I didn't manage to finish it.

Week VI: Midterm Exam

This week we had our midterm exam. It was pretty easy but the images we had kinda limited what we could do. Needless to say I tried my best and I'm hoping to get a good grade on it.



After the exam we were forced into presenting our magazine covers. I gotta admit some of them were really good. I especially liked the one ladies who did the "Yoga for Kids" magazine. It was amazing. It just missed simple stuff like dates, and the like.

Mine is here:

It took a lot of research... I searched through www.time.com endlessly and used several copies laying around the home.

What I gathered from it all was the covers are pretty simple, my original idea wouldn't have been possible with a simple google search so I did a completely new idea.

Make a magazine as closely to TIME magazines actual layout as possible and to capture a specific mood for the cover star. Willie Nelson.

It turned out alright... I guess. I wasn't happy with the large font saying "After 51 years of music" .
It took a lot of time though, around 2 hours. Measuring the dimensions of the magazine, creating a white outline, creating a black outline, adjusting the image to be directly under the word "TIME" and getting the word "TIME" itself to be correctly proportioned. That's not all, the little squares had to be exactly aligned, font was constantly adjusted. It was a big mess for a while. Especially matching the black outline, and Willie Nelsons ugly mug to be completly in sync with each-other. I swear, that took ages.

However,
my original idea was to use someones forehead and photoshop an eye onto it. With the headline "The Minds eye" Suffice to say, I couldnt get the images I wanted to do that. Oh well.


I suppose that's all for now. I'll leave you with a simple animation of my midterm project. CLICK IT TO SEE THE ANIMATION GOODNESS

Week V: Indesign

Indesign... though not completely new to me. Was pretty well... new to me. I learned a lot.

Our first "exercise" was to make a snowman and robot. I spent a lot of time on the snowman, but I was pretty strapped for time so I neglected the robot a bit. Okay... a lot.



Next we had to reproduce a magazine ad as quickly as possible. I did my best... though it's not exact.



Our project this week is to make a magazine cover. Hopefully it turns out well.

Last weeks project we had to design a logo. There wasn't any mention of it in earlier blogs so I'll post that up here as well:

(Week IV) Illustrator: The pen tool

Today we played around with the pen tool. We basically did color the dot thing with it. Tracing the outlines of a very simple drawing. Here's what we did:


After doing the above we had to do a prettier more colorful version. Which is here:


I had fun.

Week 3

Well... suffice to say I missed class this week. And despite the fact that my project won't be graded this time I did one anyways. Simply because it'll ruin the flow of the blogs if I skipped a week. Now wouldn't it?



Here's a quick over-view of how I did it.
1. Get a random eye picture from google.
2. make a copy of the image with ctrl+v (apple+v for macs)
3. make the copied layer grey by pressing ctrl+u and pulling the saturation bar all the way to the left. Never adjust the background layer.
4. make a copy of the layer again. (ctrl+v)
5. Adjust the curves of your image (ctrl+m) curves adjest the brightness and darkness of your image by making darker colors brighter and brighter colors darker.
6. When you're happy with what you've done go to filter>other>high pass. Click okay if it's at 10.0
7. At this point your image should be very grey and probably not something very appealing to the eyes. If so you're doing good.

Next you have to blend this layer with your grey eye image. To do this look for the dialog box that says "Normal" under your layer window. It's right next to opacity.
Click on it and change it from "Normal" to "Vivid light"

Doing all of this will make your image very crisp. Useful if your image was very blurry to begin with.

All the above work was just making your image pretty. Now comes the easy part. Making the pupil a different color.

Changing the pupils color:
1. Make a circle around the eye, make sure you make the circle the same color you want the pupil to be in the end. Try to match it up with eye as much as possible. The better you do it the less work you have to do. If you can't match it perfectly, make it larger than the pupil rather than smaller.

2. Once your circle is in place you'll notice it covers up your entire image. If it's bigger than the pupil trim it with your eraser. You won't have to guess if you lower the opacity of the circle.

3. Once done, go under the layers dialog box in your layer window and change it from "Normal" to "Color"

That should do it.

Oh, and if you want use the same image I did here it is: