Blog #5

Blog Assignment #5
The purpose of this blog assignment is for you to conduct a self-evaluation
survey of your work in the class. For each of the following questions, I would like
you to provide visual examples and an argument that demonstrates your
progress/growth in the class. Be persuasive in your writing and be precise when
choosing your examples (examples can come from Quizzes to projects).
1. What is the most significant accomplishment in looking at your Midterm or
Final? You can talk about technique in Photoshop, investigating your Big
Idea, creating a meaningful artwork, etc.






A: My accomplishment here in my idea is the technique retouching the picture especially to make color effect and light and shadow effect and also to combine them in a complete work. Another progress here might be the understanding to the word "dream". I did a lot of work researching and deep the idea I was inspired and express them onto the work.

2. Choose a project in the class and discuss your most challenging learning
experience in Photoshop. Focus on a technique or concept from
Photoshop that was difficult at first, but that you mastered by the end of
the quarter.

A: Retouching was difficult for me at the beginning that things I put onto the background look super strange and unnatural. There seems to be serious color and light & shadow effect problem. After studying the tutorals and practising a lot, I find it easy right now.



3. Compare two projects from the quarter to compare and contrast how you
achieved making meaning in the work. Try to showcase in your examples
an improved capacity to making visual images that mean something as
opposed to being a showcase of technique.

A: The first work looks great but I think the contrast is still not obvious. Also the midterm has the big idea dream, but the dream here means things I want to do. For the final, in contrast, the work is more formal in the contrast work and the meaning here is more obvious.

Blog #4 Rough draft of idea for the final

The big idea for my work here is the dream and reality contrast. Referring to the inspiration from the movie "Inception", some people love the beauty of dream and cannot come back to the reality. As time past, they cannot even differ the reality and dream either walk out of the nightmare of dream. My work here is mean to make such an contrast between them and make them hard to differ. As what I did in the midterm, I will use the color contrast still. Also, I will seperate the two part and make it up-side-down to make the effect of losing gravity. In order to play with the color effect, I will go through several tutorial from worth 1000 to help.

Blog#3 Inspiration for the final project

This blog required me to find two artist for contrast but for my work, I just find one origin of inspiration and to make the contrast effect by myself. My big idea is the dream and my inspiration comes from the movie "Inception", a great movie talking about amazing ideas of dreams.
Here are some pictures harvested:

Most important idea here is dream or reality?
Therefore, in my work, I want to contrast dream and reality, and make the distinction unclear to find out.

Photoshop tutorials----playing with colors(blog #2)

After reviewing several tutorials, I combined several skill that can help a lot to make some dramastic effects on photos. Many of them are playing with the mask layers and color balance.
Here are some screenshots:

This is the original picture, I want to add more dramatic effect to make it look more sad. So I used the Image>Adjustment>curves to make it darker.

 Now that I used the Blur tool to stress the main theme by making contrast on clearness. I pressed Q and used the Brush tool to draw the area I want to stress, and pressed Q again. Now the area marked are selected, I went to the Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur (Skill from Make Up:http://www.worth1000.com/tutorials/3)

Then I used skill from Selective negative with mask layer and did some effects playing with the color. This one is combining the selective negative using the mask layer(http://www.worth1000.com/tutorials/162271/how-to-do-a-selective-negative-or-color-image-using-a-mask-layer) and the re-lighting subject(http://www.worth1000.com/tutorials/163028/lighting) basicly using the merge of layers and Blur tool. It's that easy out of imagination!

Now the audience for sure can feel some "soul" of theme from the dramatic effect of the picture without the word statement. I think it's pretty nice and useful.

Amazing art from Makoto Shinkai

                                  5cm/sec---the speed of falling cherry blosson petals
During the time I fasinated cartoon, I was totally captured by works from Makoto Shinkai. All the pictures were came from daily photograph, and edited by photoshop with excellent professional drawing skill. Makota perfectly turned these art works into cartoon movies. It's more alive than movie, more fascinating than cartoons.
These pictures are screenshots from his famous work, 5 centimeter per second. 5cm/second is defined as the speed for cherry blosson petals to fall onto the ground. Cherry blosson is known as the symbol of love, innocence, teenage years, or lovely stuffs. Referring to the Good Old Time, dennotation of cherry blosson always gives connotation of beautiful memories in fairy tales.


In this work, the denotation of sunlight is obvious with connotation of hope in the future. Two teenagers standing in the center of the enitre picture, in our point of view, are referring to teenagers like them among the audience. The audience can easily read the connotation of a sparkling future and therefore encouraged.




Reference:
http://baike.baidu.com/view/752770.htm