Final Project

Posted on December 13, 2015 by djowens

For my project I attempted to create a Mucha-like rendering of a pun I thought of a while ago. The pun is based off the band, Pink Floyd, and the boxer, Floyd Mayweather. Although I liked the idea a lot, I could not seem to create the image that was in my mind. I always planned for the drawing to be monochromatic so the pun would be relevant, but I had a lot of issues creating an image I liked with the limited color range. This is the end result of my struggle with Photoshop.

My original plan for tackling this piece was doing a drawing and scanning it into Photoshop to improve the drawing. I chose to do a Mucha like drawing because I enjoy his line work and use of patterns. I thought it would be good to challenge myself to do this since I usually stay away from decorative patterns because I enjoy rendering realistic objects.

After doing many sketches and coming up with a composition I liked, I began working on the drawing. Since I am taking a few other studio classes, I have been doing a lot of drawings lately and been working in traditional mediums. I think this is the reason that when I started doing this project, I decided to only use the computer. I told myself it would be good to challenge myself with Photoshop since I plan on using it more after this class. I normally use a program called SketchBook Pro that I prefer because it is simpler and more intuitive for me. However, it doe not have enough feature or versatility to be helpful with photo manipulation.

I used a few different large images from the Internet to piece together a collage that resembled the sketch I did earlier. I wanted to enlarge the images to create a composition closer to my original sketch but I was afraid that the image would become pixelated. I had to use the magic wand tool a lot to cut out certain things I did not want. I used the rectangle tool to create a box for the letters and applied a lot of different filters to the image.

The thing I had the most trouble with was figuring out how to make Floyd Mayweather pink without just doing a drawing of him and scanning it in. I spent hours on YouTube looking for tutorials on how to make a monochromatic photo but all of them were for gray scale images. None of them showed colored photos and the ones that did, were not very good. I ended up taking the image to Illustrator and using the tracing option to limit the colors of the original photo to about 10. Then I began to mess around with the paint bucket and coloring in the image to make it pink. This took forever and was not very rewarding because the image looked really harsh in comparison to Mucha’s work. To mediate this, I messed around with filters. I used the skills we learned from Lesson 9. I still was not happy with the harsh changes in color so I went back to the original photo of Mayweather, manipulated it to be more blurred, changed the hue to make it pink, and layered that over my image at a low opacity to soften the piece. Although it helped, I wish I could have created something that was closer to Mucha’s style. I will probably stick to traditional methods until I get more comfortable with Photoshop.

As far as the colors go, I wish it were not vital for the pun for me to change the color pallet. I would have liked to use a larger range of colors so I could draw more attention to Mayweather. Right now, I feel like the decorative pattern and similar colors push him out of focus. A funny thing I notice when I uploaded the image was that I accidently changed the background color to pink. When I was working on the image the background looked like a really light shade of pink since there was so much pink around it. However, I know that the color is white since on this post it blends into the screen. I thought this was worth mentioning since it related to the color contrast exercise we did. One good thing that came out of this drawing is that I learned a little more about Illustrator and also came up with another idea. It is going to be ‘Monochrome’ Lewinsky. Eventually I’ll grow up and stop liking puns so much but I don’t think it will be anytime soon.

Project Proposal-Devante Owens

Posted on November 23, 2015 by djowens

For my final project I would like to create a design that I can translate into a screen print for my printmaking class. I am more comfortable with traditional methods of painting so I am going to do a digital image. The image has to work as a silkscreen and I plan on using a lot of flat colors. Unfortunately the more colors I use, the longer making a print will take so I want to keep it limited to less than five. This is one reason I decided to revisit the monochromatic color scheme and rework the acrylic painting I did earlier for the exercise. I want to do something that relies on lines and looks more graphic. My plan is to mimic the style of Mucha and his poster art. The entire piece would be in different shades of pink and use this variety to imply dimension.

The focus of the drawing will be Floyd Mayweather, the famous boxer. I am aiming for a vertical composition like many of the influential French posters of the early 1900s. There will be a mixture of the highly decorative elements of Mucha’s work and the grungy font of the Pink Floyd logo. I think this contrast will add some interest to the piece and I’m hoping that the pun translates well. I am a little worried about working with the decorative patterns because it is definitely something I am not comfortable with.

These are the sketches I have come up with so far for the design. I am going to have to look up more of Mucha’s work and really study the design before I get any sketches that are really worth working up.

Portfolio Section 2-Devante Owens

Posted on November 16, 2015 by djowens

Photoshop Lesson 7

Color Relationships Photoshop Lesson 8

Color Uses

Photoshop Lesson 9

Color Contrast

Color and Composition

Project 3

Color and Composition-Devante Owens

Posted on November 16, 2015 by djowens

In a lot of the work that I do, I tend to use the Rule of Space without even realizing it. One criticism I get often is that I need to crop down drawing because there is too much empty space. For this exercise, I tried to use the Rule of Space in each to practice creating a composition that used space without making the piece feel empty. I chose to create a diagonal composition for the first piece to emphasize the distance between background and foreground. I used the watercolor filter again but did not like the brush stroke so just kept the filter. It is supposed to demonstrate the Rule of Third. I also added a cool photo filter over the entire image to give it a blue tint. I think this helped make the blue tape fit in better but still stand out because of its placement and color.In this image, I used the rule of space and tried to make it look like the blue roll was rolling away from the other tape. I used the magic wand and color range to isolate the blue and red in the picture so that everything else would be black and white. This was supposed to be the Rule of Odds in addition to the Rule of Space. There are only three colored items in the piece but in total there are 10 so I’m not sure if it still counts. I tried to have a horizontal composition for this piece but gave it a slight slant to go with the idea of rolling.

Project 3-Devante Owens

Posted on November 15, 2015 by djowens

These are all the images I took or the project. Even though it took a really long time, I actually liked this assignment and thought it was fun thinking of design in an applicable scenario. I’ve always been a fan of more simple designs and do not like flashy ads and packaging. I decided to made a box for a projector gaming console called “Viro”, short for environment. I did a few different sketches of what the box would look like so I could choose the most interesting shape. In the end, I went for the triangular prism because it was the most versatile and mimicked the imagined shape of the product. I thought this was important because not only does the box stand out on a shelf full of rectangles but it also alludes to the product. This hinting at the product is also why I drew the projector eye and triangles. I used cool colors on both the eye and triangles to add some harmony between the two. I chose to have the triangles radiate out from the word Viro to hint at projection. One idea I toyed with was putting little scene from video games within some of the triangles to add more interest but I didn’t want to clash with the limited color pallet.

Since this is a gaming console/projector, the price range on it is rather high. It is also a product that would not be purchased on a whim by someone who knows nothing about video games. For these reasons, I thought that adding a bunch of text would clutter the design and be extra since the people interested in Viro should already know what it is. My favorite thing about the design is that it can sit many different ways because of the minimal design. Since there is not a large description box on the side, There is not a clear idea of what side is up and what side is down. It can sit on many different sides and have an interesting profile.

Color Contrast-Devante Owens

Posted on November 5, 2015 by djowens

I didn’t realize this was supposed to be paint on paper until after I had made these. I’ll probably just redo it this weekend if I have time but I wanted to post what I did so it wasn’t a complete waste of time. I used the texturize tool in photoshop to add some interest to the pieces since they are just flat colors. The original colors were completely different. I ended up messing around with the brightness and contrast to get the two different pieces. The cool thing I like about these is that they kinda just look like someone took really bad pictures of an abstract painting. The light one looks like the person used flash and the dark one looks like they took a picture with the lights off.

PhotoshopLesson9-Devante

Posted on November 5, 2015 by djowens

This is a famous print by Mucha that I decided to mess around with for the exercise. His art already has a lot of lines in it so I was a bit torn between actually doing the pencil lines like the video said. I ended up just adding the pencil lines anyway. I liked the way it turned out and am definitely going to mess around with this technique in the future.

Color Uses-Devante Owens

Posted on November 1, 2015 by djowens

This was the first version of the Bezold pattern exercise. I ended up using construction paper and cutting out shapes to paste on. With this piece, I chose pink as the background color since I used red. This made the image look more continuous and order. I’d say that there is pretty low energy with this color combination. Nothing really stands out tremendously. With this version of the Bezold exercise, I used a very bright orange as the background. While orange is close to red on the color wheel, this orange is pretty saturated and compliments the blue. The colors pop a lot more and it is kind of harsh to look at. The orange and black also make me think of Halloween. The white pops a lot more since the background is not a light color like pink which contains a lot of white. Colors_0002 (1) This is a photo I messed with of a drawing I did over the summer. I looked up a video on doing the splashes of color and had fun experimenting. The original drawing has much more color in the rest of the body and the border is an eerie green. I enjoyed playing with expressive colors because it forced me to think about how I wanted to switch the focus with color use. Before I altered the photo, there was a much smoother path for your eyes to follow because color ran up and down the piece. Now that it is broken up, your eyes have to jump across the piece. For the color discord piece I altered a photo I took of conceptual artwork I did in a class. When I originally did the piece, I aimed to create harmony while using both primary and secondary colors. All of the shapes and lines were pulled from a system I used relying on rolling dice. Since the design is random, I emphasized the lines to draw the eye around over the many different colors so they would not seem as misplaced. With this exercise, I tried doing the exact opposite and create discord. I took a photo and used the fill tool to fill in areas of color. I upped the saturation and messed with the tolerance of the fill bucket to get a textured look. I even went back and filled in some areas with white to add more contrast and disorder to the color scheme. I don’t think it is pretty, but I enjoyed trying to create discord out of a piece that I originally wanted to be harmonious. ColorDiscord

Photoshop Lesson 8-Devante Owens

Posted on October 30, 2015 by djowens

This is the pattern I made for the lesson. I’ve never made a pattern in photoshop so this was a cool assignment. I will probably mess around with doing this with hand draw shapes and creating designs from that instead of using the custom shape tool. I did not really run into any problems with this lesson.

Color Relationships-Devante Owens

Posted on October 26, 2015 by djowens

I’ve always admired Van Gogh but I rarely try to replicate his painting style. I’m personally more comfortable with more realistic depictions but I love the movement and atmosphere that his pieces create. One issue I had with this painting was being patient and letting the paint dry. I accidently picked up the paper when the red wasn’t completely dry so it ran a bit. I tried to cover it up but the paint was not opaque enough. This painting was fun to do but not very easy to get the desired colors. I tried to only use primary color and let them mix with the dots. In the end, I like the way it came out. Unfortunately, my scanner broke and my camera was dead so I couldn’t get very good copies of these two pieces online. Hopefully I can get some batteries soon or fix my scanner so the next set will look better.

Color and Design

Author Archives: djowens