27th September 2016: Photoshop Tutorial in PC Lab (‘u’)
The session today started off with a quick tutorial by Shirley on pen tool, path, masking, half-tones, etc!

Before this, I’ve never used the pen tool, path and converted my images to smart objects. I abused the polygonal lasso tool and the transform tool to make images, and I end up having to lasso the same areas over and over again. (;u;)

I feel this this session has taught me alot about retaining my image information and quality – I’m super stoked!

Screenshot of my first practice with the pen tool and paths/masking.

I tried it out on a few more objects as well like skulls, and proceeded to try out the different filters on them – half-tone, posterize, threshold, etc.

On another note, I’ve also learned something pretty incredible.

I’m pretty sure that I still can’t tell the difference between these three even if they were shown to me right now. I’ll have to go take another look at them. To people who can see the difference: YOU ARE INCREDIBLE.

ALSO I WOULD REALLY LIKE TO THANK JOYCE FOR BEING INCREDIBLY PATIENT AND SUPER COOL DURING THE SESSION.

THANK YOU JOYCE!!!

1st October 2016: Drafts for Consultation

I dedicated my Saturday completely to working on the four drafts for Sunday’s consultation!

The prototype for the first draft turned out absolutely terrifying.

Abandoned working file for “No music!”
this is terrifyingggg noooooo :'(

I felt like by trying to make too much sense and trying to forcibly use a quote that I already set my heart on, I wound up spending hours on something that didn’t work at all.

I previously had quotes (from Rise of the Guardians, How to Train Your Dragon and Mad Max) from different movies, but I changed them to look for quotes that I could interpret better, instead of something that was a little bit too open-ended, such as “No Music!”.

I was trying to work out posterize as well, and it retained some greys – not good!

So I tried working the other way instead – finding objects that I liked, and finding quotes and looking at how to arranging the elements instead. I quickly wound up with 4 designs!

1. Crow

Draft that was sent in on Sunday.

From a blurry image of someone’s crow artwork!
Thank you so much for the beautiful work >—>(c’:)

The first one, I worked on it from a tattoo of a crow I liked – then I found a movie quote pertaining to crows, and remembered an old movie that had a really nice quote about them: “People once believed that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead.”

I chose to interpret:
-people as ‘hands’
-souls as ‘eyes’
-picket fences as ‘mortality’ or ‘burden’
-a circular door as a ‘portal’ or ‘border’
-an image of a crow made of other different animals as the ‘crow’ and the meaning of human/animal ‘actions’

2. Milky Way

I worked on a quote from Alpha and Omega right after this one: “I’ll see you on Mars, right after I eat the Milky Way”.

It’s pretty hard to break down this one in my head since I started running away with my gut/instincts with this one, but it went along the lines of:

-mouth and the solar system in mouth, as quite literally “eat the Milky Way”
-fork and knife pictogram and lace as the idea of feasting, or eating
-hands as the idea of “meeting”

For this one, I only had a couple of minor decisions – like the conscious decision to give the mouth fangs instead of normal teeth so that it looks more aggressive, and also I didn’t give in to temptation do this ridiculous thing and end up overusing/abusing the fork and knife pictogram:

…well things could have turned out much south aaahahahaha-

3. Baskin Robbins

I SHOULD HAVE DONE “BASKING ROBINS”.

I really should have…!

But anyway, this design wound up kinda circular as well. I showed it to my dad and he said it looked like some kind of design with political agenda. (thanks dad)

This one was based on the quote “Baskin-Robbins always finds out”.

I wanted to make a nod to Baskin Robbins by placing a cherry on top of the robin’s head as a hat. I also made the robin look extremely judgmental to give off the feeling of being far superior – along with a halo and light rays, and also that the robin is constantly watching everything you do.

The little humans and vectors are to show a ‘checkpoint’ – the feeling like you can run, but you can never hide from the robin.

4. Burn Bacon!

I had a ton of fun with this one! I was exploring how satanic I could push it.

I’m kinda terrified of googling for satanic magic circles and will probably never print this.

I found a great quality engraving image of a pig, and decided to get some image of yarn pins and combine it with the magic circle element to imply the “curse”. I kinda wound up combining two magic circles to create the image of having something intricate behind the pig as well – it was strangely empty and it wasn’t complimenting the pork well previously. 🙁

Also to show burn, I had used fire pictograms!

2nd October 2016: Sunday Consultation – Compilation of first drafts

Baskin-Robbins always finds out – Dale, Ant-Man, 2015

Here’s another curse for you – may all your bacon burn – Calcifer, Howl’s Moving Castle, 2004

People once believed that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead – Sarah, The Crow, 1994

I’ll see you on Mars, right after I eat the Milky Way – Kate, Alpha and Omega, 2010