Chaper 7 - Hierarchical

I tried to make a good heirarchical type with a phrase, but it was a little difficult to find a phrase. Earth Week ended up giving me an idea. In retrospect, I should have gotten my daughter's help to find a darker green for the phrase text between "dirt", but the idea is there at least.

Project 5c

This took me a bit longer than expected because I did a bit by hand and I had to work around their fickleness.

I know the assignment called for blocks of letters, but as soon as I read it, this image popped into my mind and I had to do it this way. I think it turned out well, except i wish I could have done better on the spice vial. My hand drawings are not what they used to be, and I couldn't seem to make GIMP do what I wanted, so I settled for this. The rest worked fairly well. I changed around the letters of "LIFE" to make it more interesting and have them fit into a woodsy, lifey theme. The butterfly and gecko are stickers I bought for my son for his schoolwork. I turned the "e" in hopes of implying a flower. The spice vial is an "as-is" thing, because I wanted that clear, but the handwritten label was reminiscent of old spice jars before people bought them at the store. I chose different typesets, colors, and case for the letters, rotated, and moved them to imply the sprinkling of the word 'variety" from the spice vial as if seasoning the "life" in the bowl. I think the "T" and "Y" colors may be a little too light, but I needed variety and felt that yellow and that other color worked at the time.

All in all, I'm fairly pleased with it, though I can see room for improvement. As always. :)

Project 5a: Contrast Studies

This first image I did as just a basic difference contrast. Some angled lines all going in one direction and then one going in the opposite direction draws your attention to the odd line out.

In this set I took my original premise and elaborated on it. I inverted the colors so the white lines stand out against a black background and then made the oppositely angled line red to make it stand out even more. I like the effect. I thought about making the others blue, but I thought this worked fine.

This was just something that popped in my mind as I read the directions for the assignment. This demonstrates the multiplication rule for positive and negative numbers. I expressed the contrast of posittive and negative with red and green. And I further elaborated by expressing the positive result of two negative by using a green minus in the middle of the cross, instead of making the plus sign all red as in the other "pure" positives. In retrospect, it may be even more efffective if I made that plus sign all green, to represent the two negatives making a positive.

Project 5b: Proportion Study

I tried to find enough pictures of seasons and such to do this project, but that became too stressful and time consuming, so I looked at it again and decided to take a different tack. The point of this, from my interpretation, was to get people to look at things in a certain order or pattern, using scale, color, and so on. I decided to use pictures of my youngest daughter, since i have many good ones, and I put them into a page. I put her name in large, fancy letters to draw attention and let people know what the point of this page is, and then placced the ,larger, busier image at the top all the way across to pull the eye upward. Then I used a smaller picture with bright colors to draw the viewer to the right, and a cute, but more muted tone image below it. The introductory words beside her name are less important, but including them gives a polished feel to it, for me.

Midterm images

My first image:


And my second image:

Season collage

I took a long time on this assignment, although my results may not seem so. I looked through many, many of my pictures to find some appropriate to any season, but most of my pictures are of my kids and events, not seasonal. I couldn't find enough of any one definite "season-specific" picture set that would work. Finally, I just took a load of pictures out and about and around my house and tinkered with them. The background of this collage is actually a portion of the tall tree picture I cropped slightly to include in the pictures. I included the snow-covered car because, let's face it, that is the epitomy of winter in Alaska. The shot of my kids' treehouse with the garage behind it was also a must - reminding us that even in the frigid months children still need to play. Finally, I included a couple shots of the bare trees, slumbering under the snow, waiting for Spring to come. The background, as I said, is cropped from one of the internal pictures. The pictures float in a wintry sky, framed by bare branches to emphasize the subject matter.

Shots - color, perspective, and shadow

These are both the exact same picture of my younest daughter. There isn't alot of bright color to this, but perspective is still affected by those colors that are around her. In the uncropped shot, it seems as if we are very far away and also at a very sharp angle above her, due in part to the large amount of dull colors closing in on her. In the cropped version, we are still above her, but the angle doesn't seem so great - it feels as if we are more on a level with her. It is much more personal since she does not have the overshadowing dark and neutral colors surrounding her. Also, the side of the wall is very bright and distracting in the uncropped photo, drawing out attention from the main subject - my daughter playing in the dirt.

I really like the way the colors pop out in this picture. The bright hues stand out against the dark green of the couch. Just about every color is present and bright, yet the contrast adds festivity to the image. The scattering of the items was an accident, but the placement makes a very vivid and mobile image to draw the eye to each element. There is even a kind of symmetry to it with the majority of the bag and items in the center and opposing items to the left and right sides.

This merry-go-round horse head is cropped from a larger picture. I noticed that the sun's position caused the neck on the left to be bright and a slight shadow is present on the right and back side of the face. Both these elements encourage focus on the face of the horse, as do the bright color of the harness and darkly painted eyes. The shadows also emphasize the detail of the carved facial muscles, along with some shading in the paint.