jaysartblog201-blog

[jaysartblog201-blog]

Week One

Welcome to Jay’s blog :) 

This blog was designed to dive into the process of creating the basic principles of digital production. Documenting my failures and hopefully my successes and achievements.

Week one was an introductory lesson in touching base with platforms such as adobe photoshop and adobe illustrator and our first exercise was to create the Barack Obama ‘hope poster’ by Shepard Fairey.

The beginning of this process was extremely difficult as this was my first time ever using photoshop and illustrator, even though i was following a Youtube tutorial, navigating my way around was time consuming and took up the majority of the week. To start i grabbed a photo off the internet and put it into photoshop, I then traced and cut out the face to remove the background and tweaked the levels of black and white to increase the contrast, this was by far the easiest step and the least time consuming. I then placed the psd into illustrator where i added an effect, removed the white components and placed the black outline onto the template. It was then a matter of rubbing out the template layers to reveal different colours and end up with the final product.

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Week Two

The majority of my first lesson this week was trying to figure out a concept/theme for my assessment, which is to create 9 instagram posts of original digital content.

Thinking of a concept out of thin air was slightly terrifying and not and not having an influential/restrictive teacher caused some serious procrastination but i eventually came up with an idea. My concept is to take three of my favourite artists and show the progression of the ‘internet’ aesthetic throughout three photos and repeat that three times to get nine works. I chose Picasso, Kahlo and Monet, each artist is black and white and this is to symbolize their old and and dated artworks and practices. My progress throughout the rest of this week was taking each artists photo off the internet, removing the background and turning it black and white, i then played around with the contrast, replication of layers, filters and colourful backgrounds. 

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Week Three

This week I had a slight change in idea about my concept. I decided to take a more free approach In the way I designed my works, I decided that I didn’t like the ‘internet’ aesthetics and I wanted to make 9 works that to me look nice and pretty. This week I focused mainly on the research for the second half of my assignment, choosing three digital artist who have inspired me and my new concept. My process this week was taking the photos of old and famous artists all throughout the 1900’s period, turning them black and white, playing around with adding blocks of colour and shading, filters, layering of images and heaps more.

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week four

Week four was basically finishing up my designs, and doing more research to finish of this first assessment. I ended up doing two posts of the same artists three times and one on a separate artists. I didn’t end up going with my original concept for many reasons, but mainly because it was too difficult to replicate such an intense and complicated style when I don’t even know the basic tools of using photoshop and illustrator. Even though I have little experience with digital media I think my designs are unique and fun with cool artists, bright colours and textures and I am happy with how they turned out.

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Bram Vanhaeren

reference artist

Bram Vanhaeren is a 24 year old digital artist based in Antwerp Belgium, he is a sports enthusiast and works with different brands as a creative practitioner in order to improve customers online experience through his artworks. This contemporary artist was selected as one of the most creative under 25 globally by Adobe in 2014 and specialises in colourful, portrait style of illustrations. Bram’s style ranges from simple digital art, illustrations and typography to mixed media artwork. 

Some of my favourite works includes the ‘contenders illustrations’. Bram had previously showcased his own colourful interpretation of the original ‘the contenders’ and the company Deadline Hollywood, approached him to create a new series of his own colourful imagination for the Emmy’s. Bram has elevate these portraits using vibrant, powerful colours, whilst still keeping them black and white to highlight the stark contrast. Bram states “I have added a colourful punch to it. I simply love to play around with my own materials and come up with sweet combinations of black and white and fresh colours”.

Another example of Bram’s work is a collection of works called ‘myth. he explore the mystical stories from Greek Myths, inspired by illustrations found on vases and like the previous works, the five illustrations are layers of flat block coloured shaped on top of each other. Mainly making up of deep purple, bright yellow and orange, the juxtaposition of these colours highlight the intensity of bright colours and the style of his aesthetic 

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Evgeny Parfenov

reference artist 

Evengy Parfenov is a freelance illustrator from Moscow, Russia. He specialises in portrait illustration, fullof block colours and bold lines that complement each other to create some amazing compositions. Parfenov’s ambition from a young age was to become a scientist and as a student worked part time at a newspaper, where he fell in love with design and digital media. This passion lead to many years of being an art director and finally in 2006 becoming a freelance artists.

When first starting out he often followed the story to be commissioned, but over time he had gained individuality after his first gig with Eskmo publisher’s and from then on magazine assignments started flowing and his career began to flourish. The illustrations that i was drawn to the most were the ones of Connor McGregor and Benedict Cumberbatch. With McGregor, the emphasis of his brush strokes and use of vibrant and powerful colours to add dimension and shadow was an excellent stylistic choice that is symbolic of McGregor’s commanding and powerful character. Were as in Benedict’s, the more muted skin tones , cool blues, browns and blacks represent him ad more of a sophisticated British spy. Evgeny Parfenov was able to capture the expressions and personalities of each celebrity without it looking like he was overdoing it and staying true to each subject.

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JR Schmidt

reference artist

JR Schmidt is a 23-year-old senior motion designer and a 3-D artist at a company called Firstborn which is a digital ad agency in New York City. A motion designer to him is “the application animation to any design: 2-D, 3-D, interface, broadcast, character or otherwise”. At first he started out as a traditional artist, focusing on drawing, painting and sculpture but when he went to college he took a chance to major in new media and design, being heavily influenced by video games and 3D software. This decision was extremely beneficial to his career as it exposed him to a wide variety of new technologies in addition to film and animation

Schmidt says “I started out with legos, and moved to pixels and polygons” he is known for his polygon style hasn’t veered far from his lego phase with a lego reconstruction of New York City. These days he is trying to merge the styles of realism and ‘pixar’ together by attempting to flatten out his work. His artworks are inspired from varying things such as maps, legos, nostalgia and video games, drawing inspiration specifically from pixel artists such as eBoy and this is evident through Schmidt’s intricate and complicated illustrations.