landscape collage

The strongest technical aspect of my landscape collage was my masking tool.  I worked really hard to make sure that each layer would blend into each other so nothing would look too choppy.  In my first piece the contrast between the mountains and the sky was too intense so I went back and tried to soften the mask between layers and i was impressed how the appearance became more realistic. The technical aspect I need to improve on is how to use the contrast and brightness tool.  I did manage to change the brightness and contrast but I struggled on how to adjust individual layers.  

The easiest part of this assignment was selecting and combining layers. It was a lot easier than I though to find landscapes that match the same color shade and blend well with each other.  I was afraid that I would struggle to make the different layers try to look realistic but it was't that difficult.  The hardest part of this assignment was trying to proportion each layer so that there would be equal distribution of the foreground, middle ground and background.  I was concerned that my layers were so large that i couldn't fit anything else in the image without seeming out of place.

I accomplished the objective of this project by choosing three places and settings that I personally love to create one realistic landscape collage.  I chose the sky from an assortment of different sunsets because I am much more a night person and love sunsets.  My two layers below the sky were spanish mountains and the Lisbon mountains.  When I was in Spain and Portugal in April these were some of the most beautiful sights I saw on my journey.  What I would change about my work is that in the next project I would select thinner layers so I can have more than three different layers to work with and incorporate in one landscape collage. 

personal identity

          The strongest technical aspect of my work is color balancing and overlapping my art.  It took a long time to accurately balance the color schemes so that no color would be repeating or touching that shared the same value.  My overlapping was also a key feature because I needed to have a visually pleasing relationship between the background and the inside additions.  The technical aspect that I can improve on is the size differences in images.  I find it hard to sometimes made different images different shapes and sizes.  I like to have consistency in my work but I need to learn how to change my point of view on having different sized objects.

          The easy part of the art activity was adding new items to my collage.  In photoshop there are different techniques in adding pictures to a layer.  You only need to select a large sized photo so that it will have the best resolution for expanding and shrinking the image.  For removing background from an image there is a fairly simple technique of taking the selected figure and adding a background color to it.  From there then you have to just use the magic wand tool and choose the color and click delete.  The last step is simply to just deselect the object. The hardest part of the activity was close cropping the cleats of my collage.  It took me a full period to zoom in and use the polygon lasso to remove all the grass that was in the entire background of the background photo.  The work was pretty tedious so that it was frustrating to complete.  However, once it was all removed I could fill the center of the collage with all of my own personalities.  

      In this project I demonstrated the objective of reflecting my personal identity by basing my entire project on my favorite sport soccer.  I managed to incorporate all different elements of the sport to show what were the things I associate with the sport of soccer.  If I could do this activity again I would have picked a whole different theme. The soccer theme was hard to follow through with because I thought it would have more to it than it really offered.  I like the idea of having vaguer theme that would have functioned like an umbrella.  I should have picked an idea like Fall or Winter where multiple different contacts could have fit under. 

Typography -Brianna Chamberlain

The strongest technical aspect of my work is my symmetry. I worked really hard in order to balance each side of my project so that each letter would have a twin so that if you cut the image in half it would be the same picture.  The technical aspect that I could use improvement on is radial symmetry. The letter B was hard enough to follow normal symmetry with so trying to have the symmetry function like a circle seemed nearly impossible to me.  I need to work on radial symmetry so in the future I can balance my work better. 

The easy part of this activity was including different color values and changing opacities. I think that I have mastered the art of dispersing different values to different places on the work to balance out the color pallet. It is important to have both the negative space and different colors to spice up and make the work more pleasing to the eye.  The difficult part of this activity was learning the different tools and making sure that the art was actually symmetrical.  I could easily transform the shapes but placing them correctly aligned was difficult. 

The objective of this assignment was to include symmetry and layers.  I demonstrated the objective by duplicating all of my layers so that their shapes and sizes would all be symmetrical.  We learned how to use the transformation tools to flip shapes so they could reflect each other too. I made my B's all have different values and sizes too.  If I could do this activity again I would probably not chose this font or the letter b because it was really hard to accurately follow radial symmetry.