Corners, from the House of My Mind Project, is one of my greatest successes from this year. Depicting a sidewalk with roses, and covered in all sort of patters, it demonstrates my style as well as what I have learned this year in photoshop. First of all, I really like the color scheme, pink, green, and gray. The shifting of patterns from an animal print, to industrial pavement, to flower petals and bushes, it shows a transition from nature to manmade objects, and back to nature again. Also, especially in comparison to one of my other images from House of My Mind, this image shows how I progressed in my learning throughout the year. Moreover, the composition of the background image has a diagonal line because I think the tilt gives the final product image a certain organic sense and original feeling. In this project (HOMM), I believe I developed a lot as an artist through learning about photoshop. Not only did I learn and adapt and use new skills, but also just using the program, and practice with the different techniques, affects, and manipulations allowed me to become a better digital artist.
The Forest or the Tree, my Future Tense book, is also a favorite. I think it also demonstrates fairly well what I have learned in photoshop, because I did in fact spend a lot of time working on each individual image. The cover/binding of the book is an old cigar box. Keeping the content and themes of the images in mind, I selected this cover because it draws out some of the neutral and earthy colors in the images. Lastly, I think I particularly succeeded in maintaining interesting light sources for each of the images, even if it is not sunny, the light is intriguing and attractive. Also, I think I had to develop a certain theme in my mind before I started taking photos, and this helped me become a more prepared photographer and artist. Having a theme to start out with, and sticking to that theme allowed me to craft a series of images that were very cohesive, yet unique in their own ways.
I think and I know that my least successful work was the first image I made for House of My Mind. Reasons; the idea, conception, execution, and final product, although they had potential, were just not up to my level and standards. The photoshopping, scanning, and drawing on the image distinctly show my incapability to use the tools, for I had just learned how to do all those things. However, I think it is interesting to compare a piece like this with the other images of this project. For example, the topographical map of Mt. Tam shows my improvement in drawing directly on the image; and the Corners and Tile image show my improvements in photoshop skills.
I consider my greatest strengths to be my ability to take a group of images, that on their own would not be too appealing, and craft them all together to form an intriguing final product. I think the projects House of My Mind and Future Tense give support to this notion because some of the images I used were fairly unoriginal, but I do believe that the manner in which I manipulated, altered, and photoshopped them improved the quality of the individual images and made for a very interesting final product.
I believe I put significant effort into this class. Of course, their were days, (we all have them), in which my effort was lacking, but most of the time I came to class eager to start and with a plan already set up in my mind. I will admit that sometimes, I had an artist's block, and would spend class time trying to figure out a way to get around this, but for me, that was part of my own individual process. I 'gave it my all' especially on the digital projects, for these projects seemed to capture my interest with all that we were learning. It's not that I didn't like the darkroom projects (I really enjoyed the Transforming Materials project), it's just that sometimes I felt I could have put a little more effort into taking my time with some of the dark room prints, instead of rushing and getting more prints, but lower quality.
I consider my greatest strengths to be my ability to take a group of images, that on their own would not be too appealing, and craft them all together to form an intriguing final product. I think the projects House of My Mind and Future Tense give support to this notion because some of the images I used were fairly unoriginal, but I do believe that the manner in which I manipulated, altered, and photoshopped them improved the quality of the individual images and made for a very interesting final product.
I believe I put significant effort into this class. Of course, their were days, (we all have them), in which my effort was lacking, but most of the time I came to class eager to start and with a plan already set up in my mind. I will admit that sometimes, I had an artist's block, and would spend class time trying to figure out a way to get around this, but for me, that was part of my own individual process. I 'gave it my all' especially on the digital projects, for these projects seemed to capture my interest with all that we were learning. It's not that I didn't like the darkroom projects (I really enjoyed the Transforming Materials project), it's just that sometimes I felt I could have put a little more effort into taking my time with some of the dark room prints, instead of rushing and getting more prints, but lower quality.
I am really interested in design, so I think the skills that I have learned in photoshop and aperture, as well as general photography tips, will really help me. Not necessarily individual how-to's, but a general notion of how to use a camera and general knowledge of photo editing programs that will help in the future when I (hopefully) delve further into that area.
Especially with the darkroom projects, I was forced (and this is a good thing for me), to develop a greater patience for the things that cannot go any faster. For darkroom images, as I said earlier, sometimes I would try to get a larger number of lower quality prints than get a smaller number of high quality prints. However, I believe I learned from my mistakes because I expanded my patience and attention span. This allowed me to learn so much more. Furthermore, I learned so many skills about digital manipulation that will certainly help me in future projects of design and photography out of school. Even though I will not be taking an art next year, I still wish to continuously broaden my knowledge of the arts, starting from the base of information that I have learned these past few years!
