Monday, February 12, 2007

Assignment 4

A real challenge again, but the process was very rewarding. I was mulling about a good story board for almost a week before I began (So as always this is rather 11th hour work), I finally fixed an a piece of poetry I wrote quite some years back. I gave it the title "Do you want to take a picture", stole the title actually from a song (artist slipped my mind).

Mentioned all that because I thought it was rather ironic I'm doing a photo-story thingy with that same work. In any case I won't say too much, right now it's still rather raw. I'm going to retake the last few shots with a withering red rose again and I'm finding some way to put in text IN the picture itself.

I'm mulling how to "engrave words" onto the rock itself. The rest I figure I'll make words flow along the stalk/rock or "grow" from the grass. All that is testing my photoshop skills. Which I'm leaving to lab on Friday.

Flashy Cars

So it's been awhile since the last update. Work's been going on but I haven't got to logging them down.

Assn 3 (pictures later) turned out to be quite a disaster. Started out with the Roman Centurion helmet (see left): The plan was to draw a side profile silhouette of the helmet, all the while slowly removing the ornate details.

I'll put in the process pictures later, but what I ended up with was a really ugly drawing of a helmet. A couple of things were attempted to salvage the situation:
  1. Removing the "Mohawk"
    1. This resulted in a really plain looking helmet. (which was still ugly)
  2. Removing the helmet proper
    1. Which resulted in a red Indian like thing.
From 2208 Assn 3


Neither of it worked, until I had a little brain wave. I'm going to attempt to trace it:
Roman Centurion Helmet > Romans > Fighting with Greeks > Greek Spartan Hoplite > Hoplite Helmet
Ok this is where it gets really tricky, for some reason I got fixated with the front profile of the Spartan Hoplite Helmet. (I think watching Troy had something to do with this) So my mind jumped from Hoplite Helmet to my final symbol which is based on negative space.

So at first glance it looks like some strange plant (or something phallic) but it actually makes use of the paper to frame a Spartan Hoplite Helmet


From 2208 Assn 3
Now the problem with all that? I can't really trace my thoughts on this project. Which was harder than I had expected. Design wise maybe I'll never really be with the best of them with drawing and photoshop skills, but still I think I need to get my mind around this design thing.

That mulling aside, what I'm going to do is that I'm going to take a picture of a fully armed Spartan Hoplite (So I have more details to distill) and hopefully I'll have an iconic design ready soon. The symbolic will stay I guess, unfortunately I really do like it alot. So i'll break the rules this once (again).

Looking further ahead, I did mention I was going to redo assn 1. What I'm going to do is replace the tao gei with Hoplites in various battle formations. It's going to be rather complicated to draw, but we'll see how it goes.


Friday, February 2, 2007

LAB

you know you figure they could teach you stuff in the labs sooner. labs always make me feel like i was painting with a chisel just a couple of days earlier.