mayasdigitalprocess

[mayasdigitalprocess]

Screen Recording and Youtube

https://youtu.be/mo95dTbb8V0

In digitising my artworks and posting them across social media, there wasn't much for me to screen record as far as creating works from scratch. I did have to edit and touch up a lot of the artworks I scanned to upload to Instagram or Redbubble. My previous digital works only needed, at most, to be re-saved with higher resolution or to re-size the background.

[mayasdigitalprocess]

Redbubble

Uploading to red bubble has been a fun and simple experience for the most part. The format and system took a bit to understand but afterwards it has worked great. I found that simple and circular images looked the most effective on the items. I also learned that uploading a higher resolution image allowed you to control the size of the images on the items better.

Now spreading to different platforms I looked more at how people promoted themselves across multiple platforms. I noticed unifying headers which I used on my professional facebook page and on Redbubble, I link my other platforms in my bios and have been very liberal in my hashtags. I have also noticed that I receive more engagement when I promote on my personal accounts and interact with other art accounts. Liking, commenting and following other people influence people to respond in return.

[mayasdigitalprocess]

Developing instagram

I have decided to continue with the fresh, clean and “chill’ aesthetics that I had posted from my previous assessment. Coincidentally most of my work from last semester followed the blue, green and white colour scheme any way. I have been using the app Preview to plan out my feed and it has been very helpful. I have learnt to upload photos in collections or stories if they don't suit the feed. This doesn't restrict what I can post while maintaining a colour story.

I have also made my instagram a professional account. This requires the account to have an email and facebook page attached to it, so I used the opportunity to create accounts for the @beckywthechillfeed. I am yet to dive into posting on the facebook page and promoting my other platforms, but I did make a header for the page (view below). After spending a few hours scrolling through and testing fonts, I think I had fallen on one that embodies my aesthetic.

[mayasdigitalprocess]

Scans and recording art

One of the biggest challenges in posting art to my instagram has been the process of scanning and editing images to be suitable for the format. In class I was only able to scan up to A4 sizes, so for my larger images I had to get them scanned at Officeworks. This experience was not ideal as the lady that was assisting me didn't know much about scanning at different resolutions and she ended up cutting off some of the image from some of the works. I am good at sorting resolutions to work on images on photoshop but I need to learn more about uploading to different media.

[mayasdigitalprocess]

PLANNING MY FEED

Prior to posting my photos I put them all on to the same document to mock up the insta grid and decide what order I wanted them in and if the images and the colours looked good together. 

[mayasdigitalprocess]

LINE DRAWING ON PHONE

The poor quality of my phone made drawing with a Wacom bluetooth pen very difficult but after practicing a bit I manages to put this image together and I am quite happy with the simplicity of it.

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PERSPECTIVE AND DISTORTION EFFECTS

I wanted recreate a nightmare I had where an infinite tiles room filled with water with no way out. I made the tiles out of lines and rectangles but was very fidgety and difficult. I would like to make this an animation where you can see the water on top moving and rippling or where the water is rising.

[mayasdigitalprocess]

DRAWING TABLET AND REPEATING PATTERNS

Upon looking at photos of plants I came across the Whipple Way and fell involve with the colours and pattern of the leaf. So I created a repeated pattern with the leaf and put a trace of the leaf (drawn with a drawing tablet) over the top. The tablet was fun and I hope I get to experiment more with it.

[mayasdigitalprocess]

PAPER CUT OUT EFFECT 

I followed a tutorial to learn how to create this paper cut out effect. I. was then inspired to apply it to this leaf but I think it looks more effective when there is less detail.

This taught me how to locate other shapes of the same colour in an image and to put a drop shadow on shapes.

TUTORIAL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVcHQUqW3nQ

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MORE SUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT AT SUCCULENT

Instead of fully recreating the succulent I decided to image trace it and edit it. I experimented with the effects on the image of the succulent to make it look more painterly and reduce the colours used. I also experimented with the size and colour of the line drawing and whether it would over lap the image or not. It will be difficult to pick a background colour as most of them look good with the succulent. I will use the other images to influence my choice so they can all match on my instagram feed.

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FAIL ATTEMPT AT SUCCULENT 

I had attempted to mimic the pattern of the leaves of a succulent with the shapes in illustrator. This was laborious and time-consuming, it was frustrated to spend so much time on something that didn't look very good. I didn't mind the pattern created by the first attempt but I didn't like how the original colours looked (I just eye-dropped them from the inspiration photo but didn't look great), when I tried to change the colours the gradient changed from each individual leaf to the whole pattern. I wasn't sure how to quickly change it so I moved onto the second attempt. I like the colours of the second attempt but I struggled to make it seamless.

[mayasdigitalprocess]

ILLUSTRATOR EFFECTS, OPACITY AND PHOTOSHOP CUTOUTS 

I was inspired upon seeing this photo of my dog as she loves to act regal and divine, I thought I would make an image that made her look it as well. First I went to photoshop to cut out the image, then I created all the shapes of the clouds and the circles. I experimented with the layers by making the circles and clouds transparent and adding gradients soothes look more floaty. I then edited the photo of my dog to look more painterly to suit the image, also adding a glow around her to make her look divine. 

I was thinking it would be cute to animate the clouds moving but I will see if there is time after completing the 9 images. 

[mayasdigitalprocess]

DRAWING, SHADOWS AND COLOUR SCHEMES

I have really enjoyed learning about how to draw with the shapes on illustrator and doing so has sparked many ideas. I started with following this potted plants design tutorial on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTV2n7fT4fk

This tutorial inspired me to create theses hanging plants drawings. After creating the plants I began experimenting with the background and environment I would put them in. I discovered the perspective tool which allows you to easily make the shapes of walls and floors in different angles. I was going to position it as a conventionally shaped room but thought it looked too boring and mixed it up a bit. You can also see the progression of the shadows as I discovered layering them, changing opacities, and gradients.

For the scenic view in the window I sourced the image from the twitter account ‘Soft Landscapes’: https://twitter.com/softlandscapes?lang=en. I edited it to fit the space and toned the image down to not attract so much attention as the image began to look too busy. 

[mayasdigitalprocess]

IMAGE TRACING AND COLOUR EXPERIMENTS

I am loving the painterly look of image tracing and tried to apply random swatch fills to the image but struggled to figure it out so I just experimented with the colour schemes in the illustrator library. I also experimented with selecting random shapes to see how they would look which resulted in a bit of an abstract expressionist looking image. I will continue to see what I can do with these images

[mayasdigitalprocess]

ATTEMPT AT THE HOPE POSTER TUTORIAL 

I learnt a-lot about image tracing, editing photos, erasing and using layers through this tutorial. Unfortunately my outcome wasn't exactly what I was aiming for and I realised that the photo was difficult to work with as not all of the defining features of this face is made with the darkest colours, like the original is. Because of this the other layers go from defining shadows to trying to build structure. I had to go off the path of the tutorial to fix it. I have learnt that it is probably best to watch or skim the tutorial before following it.