Poject 3a

I chose to do ladybugs. I first found several pictues on the internet from various angles, like the color one here, then changed them to grayscale.
I then did several tracings of different angles on some tracing paper. This was rather difficult for me for two reasons. First, due to my MS and compression of my spinal cord my hands are weak and difficult to control, especially when I use them for longer than fifteen minutes at a time. Also, I am legally blind, and it is difficult to see around my central blind spot to trace. I tried putting it on my CCTV reader to see my work larger, but it was impossible to see the image through the tracing paper sufficiently with the bright light of the reader shining on it. Ultimately, I enlarged the grayscale images and did my best. Here's the result. I stopped when my hands wouldn't work well enough anymore. That image is to the right of the photos above.
Finally I started reducing the images. I actually made a circular ladybug with head and leg details first, but it didn't look right to me. I made and oblong, which was more realistic, but I felt it was not simplified enough. Finally, I decided a circular shape was the way to go. I didn't include legs because they aren't major recognition factors for a ladybug. Also, in many photos the legs weren't visible at all. I shortened the thorax and head down to a black half-circle. This kept some pleasing symmetry, and again, in many pictures the thorax and head were barely visible under the shell. I did keep the white "v" at the edge of the shell where the head came out. I felt this gave a bit of simple detail that made the image just a touch more realistic and pleasing to the eye. I also noted in the pictures that ladybut spots can be many or few (even nonexistent in some cases) but they are always symmetrical. I chose a medium number of dots and did my best to make them symmetrical. I made two final versions: one with antennae and one without. The antennae were not visible on most photographs, but I think the reduced image is better with antennae than without.

A side note: the best part of this assignment was that as I was working on my ladybug drawings, my son ( age five ) and daughter (age three) both decided to make their own ladybug drawings. I think theirs may even be better than mine. :)

Project 2a - the right one

Ha, ha! I finally figured out some of the stuff on Gimp, and thanks to Ann's post I discovered that I just have to save it as a JPEG file to successfully upload it here. I have to flatten it first, but then it will save as JPEG. Woot!

Stodgy is self explanatory - proper, square letters that are difficult to change and a little puffed up.

Crush was a different tack - I thought of a crush like a crush on a person, valenine's day, etc.

Ornate was a bit fancy, but more elegant and extreme in its decoration.

And sludge is just kind of grimy and sloppy with splatters around it and trailing off without neat ends.

The picture is for sludge, mostly because I don't have enough mastery over Gimp yet to do what I want with the others, and I didn't have time, due to my doing the wrong assignment, to work on something by hand. But I think it turned out okay.

ARGH!

So I go through every typeface I have. I give thoughtful reasons for my choices. I fight with the stupid blog, computer, and everything else to get my image up. AND IT WAS THE WRONG ASSIGNMENT.

Maybe I'm wrong, but "a" should refer to the first of the Projects at the end of the chapter, right? I looked back at the assignment list after viewing other students' assignment posts and found the titles of mine and the assigned one didn't match. NOW I have to figure out how to do this and post AGAIN.

Grrr.

Project 2a

Yet again, the scans and computer documents would not upload. This is rather frustrating. So I made the fonts super big and took a photo of them printed off. My explanations of my choices are as follows:


stoic
I chose Mekanik LET for this word. To me, the word “stoic” brings images of stiffness, lack of emotion, consistency, and uniformity. This font elicits this with its slightly narrow and seemingly tall letters. Also, the unchanging width of the line strokes shows uniformity and steadiness of emotion.
organic
The word “organic” conjures images of nature and natural things, especially fruits and vegetables. Simplicity and comforting curves in this Century Gothic font remind us of how we first learned to write our letters, without extra flourishes to distract from the purity of the word. It easily can be imagined to hold a tomato or turnip in its circular letters like the “o” and “g”, which would be quite useful when using it for graphics centered on gardening and natural foods. This is why I chose this font. Another one I found applicable, due to its simplicity and familiar all caps format, was Copperplate Gothic Bold: organic.


fancy
When I first started looking at fonts for this word, I was thinking of a cursive, italicized font. There are MANY cursive italicized fonts that fit the bill, but as I considered what the word means, I realized that fancy did not necessarily mean elegance, which most of those fonts also imply. Fancy brings images of curlicues, finery, and the like. The Gigi font I found is a perfect example of the prettiness we think of as fancy, but without the distracting addition of elegance from a more formal cursive font. There was a curlicue type font that was more a print type, but I felt that this cursive curlicue fit the word better.

old-world
Sometimes the common types are the best. For this, I chose Monotype Corsiva because its curves and calligraphic elegance elicit the old-style feel of the hand-written tomes of old.

casual
I chose Comic Sans MS for “casual”. It is different from normal fonts used for communication but still very readable and easy on the eyes. Its softer, less formal curves and rounded ends give me the impression of my favorite worn-in jeans – the ultimate in casual and comfort.