ChasingLilly.net

Our latest project for art class is a photo scavenger hunt. I’ve spent the last week photographing and brainstorming ideas, and I’m finally done! Below you will see the slideshow of all the pictures. We were assigned 15 things to take pictures of, and see if you can guess what they are. If you can get it right, then I’ve done my job correctly! Of course… if you want to be lame a cheat the answers are below the slideshow.

The categories (in order) were:
1. Animal
2. Vegetable
3. Mineral
4. Pride
5. Greed
6. Envy
7. Wrath
8. Gluttony
9. Lust (somehow this one got deleted along with Joy, though I was able to upload Joy again)
10. Sloth
11. Joy
12. Fear
13. Creation
14. Light
15. Man vs. Nature

I’d like to thank my roommate Soo Min for being my most-used model in the pictures.

Some of those might have been a little bit tricky to guess. I spent a lot of time on this project, mainly in photoshop. I photoshopped each image quite a bit, actually, so go head on over to my flickr set and start squinting, maybe you’ll see something new you didn’t before! Now that I’m done with it, I’ll admit I spent a lot of time on nine of the pictures. As in, I thought them through, planned them out completely, etc. A few of the others I just find the needed time and/or place to correctly take them like I wanted. For example, I wanted envy to be taken during a class from an over-the-shoulder POV with the teacher walking away in the blurry background. But I just couldn’t find the time. And I did spend a lot of time on this project. Ah well. I’m pretty happy with it, and a few of them are pretty funny/cute (meaning the dog in the first one).

Happy Trails,
Sam.



PS – No, seriously, thanks Soo Min, for being a Wrathful, Gluttonous, Fearful thing of Envy
PPS – No pun intended by the use of “PS” for that mention, btw. At least not directly…

This first project in my art class this semester is a sharpie symbol drawing. Now what is that? Basically, we have to create a composition, then draw the entire picture on a big piece of paper using 20,000 iterations of only one small symbol. No actual lines or shading, all has to be done with the sharpie symbols. It’s basically one of those dot drawing but with symbols but takes even longer… yeahh you get the point.

Earlier in the semester, one of our assignments was to write down 100 things we wanted to do before we die. For this assignment we were supposed to draw something inspired by the list. Anyways I made up a few mock-compositions just to see which one I (and the teacher, more importantly) liked the most. Don’t worry, I won’t scar you by showing you them. Long story short he really liked a little funny composition I had drawn of a made-up space battle from Star Trek. Yeah, I mean it’s a “made-up” battle in regards to the actual ones that happened within the series.
So I went to work, first deciding to take it a step further and create a mock-up design of what I wanted it to eventually look like in Photoshop.

epic space battle mashed-up from probably 10 different pictures around the webz

My ulterior motives for this were that in Photoshop, you can use the graphic pen filter to turn your picture into a b&w image shaded only by little black marks, which is exactly what I’ll have to do on the eventual sheet of paper. This was super helpful in getting the shading right.

Eventual output after more editing, color correction, and graphic pen filter

As you can see, the above image isn’t perfect, but it’s helpful. It’s also been suggested that I take out the beam of light coming from the city. I think I will probably end up doing that. While the beam looks cool in color, it looks more like the printer skipped a line when in black and white. Well I’ll post more about the project as I finish it. It’s due next Tuesday, and so far I’ve only started with the symbols. My symbol, btw, is the swishy Starfleet logo from Star Trek B-] The one, below, that is…

Happy Trails,
Sam.

PS — Maybe a list of 100 things to do before I die would be a good blog project…?? That was a rhetorical statement, of COURSE it is!
PPS — I’ve been hesitant to make a new theme for the blog, but now the LOST finale has come, I feel like it might be time to explore some other obsessions. Maybe… Star Trek? Fringe? I dunno… disc golf? We’ll see, we’ll see.

I’ve been sick as of late, and (in my free time from watching Arrested Development) have renewed my love for digital design. So I’ve been spending a lot more time in Photoshop and After Effects designing stuff for really any reason at all. I’m still working on effects for our National Treasure spoof.

I’ve started making some pretty cool outer space graphics for our epic travel to the moon in the trailer. That’s right, we go to the moon searching for the next National Treasure. Right now I’m making a street-level zoom-out into space and some clips going towards the moon. All in After Effects, which can be a little hard as AE isn’t a 3D program. However, it’s far better than the alternative for me, which would involve animating in Blender or my not-working 3ds Max. I think I would rather jump off a cliff than bother with the terrible virtual cameras there. Though I should probably learn… Ah well, it’s forcing me to be more creative in AE, which is also helpful. I’ll add some vids of what I’m doing with that soon.

I’m also working on a graduation “gift” thingy in Photoshop. I’ll post it when it’s done as well. However at the moment every attempt I’ve made has failed. When there’s new info, I’ll update. Well those are my thoughts for today, hopefully next time I write I won’t be sick and at 2:14 AM.

Happy Trails and Namaste,

Sam.