Blog #5: Mini-art madness!

I decided to put all my blog posts into one, with a lot of help from Windows Live Movie Maker. The first video that I have embedded is the exercise from page 193. The pictures are all taken from my trip to DC and the Inner Harbor of Maryland with my husband, and it helped me keep a "theme". I added two extra pictures because some of them only had a few focal points.

Video for cropped pictures:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHDVfvWI5a4

For all the pictures I showed the original, the color edits I did, and then I showed the various crops. The first picture is obviously of the White House, and I wanted to crop the image to eliminate the dead space above and below the main image. The third crop was the most interesting to me, changing the focal point completely: to the lamppost and the police officers. The second picture (WWII Memorial) offered various focal points that I chose to exploit: the people taking the picture, the tall structure in the background, and the boy walking across the front. The third and fourth pictures were some of my favorites of the set, and though the crops did not "change the picture" so to say, moving the focal point did allow me to see the picture in a different angle. The fifth picture of the Korean Memorial was originally very muted, but I saturated the background greenery in order to make the statues seem more black and white, and eerie. It was hard to make the picture look extremely different, but I liked the different focal points. The last crop of the sixth picture allows for a completely perspective of the original image, and while it is not my favorite crop, I like the movement of the water splashing off the left edge of the fountain. The last two images are from the Inner Harbor and I tried to really exploit as many corners and possibly focal points of the images.

My two choice mini-art projects were: the border variation exercise (pg.197), and the theme exercise (pg. 303).

Video for borders exercise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOCIptSZpv4

I used Power Point, my new favorite program!, in order to manipulate one of my favorite images, Salvador Dali's "The Rose". Originally I cropped the image to a 400x400px size, which eliminated a lot of the white space of the original picture, but I wanted something with a defined focal point. I decided it was easiest to present the various borders using Windows Movie Maker ... Power Point was a limiting program, but in a pinch it does allow you create very professional looking borders. You can save the slides as jpeg, gif, png, or other picture files, which is very convenient.

The hardest and the most exciting, yes exciting, mini-art project this blog was the theme exercise. I do admit I had my mother to bounce ideas off of, and it allowed for me to really come up with two drastically different designs. I worked on these the longest and the hardest, and they are definitely my favorite of all the designs that I created for this blog. I used GIMP to create these images. I copies, cropped, resized, and added text to elicit as much emotion as possible ... I used a 7x9" template, which is an average book cover size.

The first image's message: Flirtatious and dangerous. To me the most flirtatious pose is a subtle, suggestive lean, especially as a silhouette. My goal was to juxtapose flirtatious with bully through the use of various fonts. My goal was to make the design simplistic yet suggestive. I also wanted to keep the colors simple. Red would have been too suggestive, and forward, but the pink was subtle enough to be considered 'flirtatious'. And I wanted to keep the silhouette in the lettering as well, even though it's a strong focal point, I countered it slightly with the author name (one of my favorite literary characters, Louisa May Alcott's Jo March).

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The second image's message: Political. It is a completely different perspective on who "the bully" is. We assume that the bully is someone picking on a more demure person, perhaps a man and a woman ... but many people in NJ have labeled the Governor as a bully, and I decided to spin this as a more political ad. In terms of design, I tried to unify it through the color in Christie's tie, as well as to balance the negative space to the left of his head with a tag line. I used the font to follow the outline of his head and balance the strong directionality of Christie's face, eyes, and arm.

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