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Week 9 Tutorial (part 2) - Final logos + extra

So the first image is the final options for the logos. Note that one does not include any writing so can be used as an icon. 

My preference for practicality is the first as the name can clearly be read and it is very distinctive. The camera is nice and relevant but so many photographers use cameras in their logo. The two angles that are incorporated into the face also represent the framing of a picture in photography so they still achieve relevance. Whilst I think the third logo, where a script of the name is used as part of the face, is the more creative, the writing is small and difficult to read. 

Just so Bree could have the logo’s to use, I also re-did them using colour, which is outside the brief, but an extension to the work. This was fun, as you tell by the many, many designs I played with.

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Week 9 Tutorial - Logo for a friend

So this is the first batch of rough logo’s I came up with for the beautiful Bree and her photography business ‘Briography’. 

As you can see I started along the lines of making a letter ‘b’ out of a camera, then doing the lettering within a camera with the O as the lens. But these just seemed too generic and not Bree at all. 

Bree has a very distinctive style, in both her appearance and work. She reflects it through-out her life. So I decided to play off her appearance and specifically her eyebrows - which are very distinctive and lovely and like the few who can pull it off, a trait that is uniquely her - similarly to the eyebrows of Cara Delevingne or the beauty mark of Cindy Crawford. It was a way to immediately recognise it as her logo from the millions of other photographers out there. However, I needed a rethink and fast as my initial design could have been mistaken for Groucho Marx (you really do need to walk away and come back with fresh eyes0. The horror. So I added hair. Phew. And I also narrowed it down to my favourites for more refinement. The final options are in the following post.

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Week 8 Tutorial - 4 Icon’s

How wonderful is Kyle Tezak’s work! Is it sad to say that icons speak to me? Well, I don’t know my skills in this area but I do appreciate the creativeness it takes for something that is very basic to still be creative and beautiful. It is a skill I sould love to develop. As anyone who knows me can tell you, cutting things down to as simple as possible is something I struggle with. I just seem to blah, blah, blah my way through everything. 

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Week 7 (part 2) Appropropriation 

This is my version of appropriation for the walkman to the ‘Let’s Get Physical’. This was just a quick whip up. But I am still singing that damn song.

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Week 7 Tutorial - Let’s Get Physical  - old music technology (scoff at old) 

Was this project designed for me? As a child of the 80′s, with stating kindergarten 1980 and growing up in the 80′s I did have the cassette walkman which was so cutting edge, followed by the CD walkman which scratched your CD’s every time you jumped. Leg warmers were very in fashion, with Olivia Newton-John and those high leotards being iconic gym-wear (a fad I was lucky enough to avoid, shame I didn’t miss out on the bad hair too).

Combining the walkman with a  'Let’s get Physical’ theme (yes I am singing that song on repeat in my head - damn you Carl) and the cool walkman just seems made for me. 

Appropriation assignment - fun.

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Week 6 Tutorial - Wandering Eye Ad

This was certainly not the first, second or third style of logoS I did. I had a person blindfolded that I had just started with the slogan - Out to Lunch, but then heard of Carl’s example of a man with an eye-patch which was fairly similar so went for something different. My favourite is certainly the yellow one with the man with the wandering eye but I do love the egg on its back on the first one..

It is the bold colours that I love the most. This style is new for me and I love it..

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Week 3 Tutorial - Number Plates

These are my two examples of the number-plates given in the tutorial. The biggest issues I had when doing this was spacing. When used even-spaced, rectangular guides, because of the shape differences between the letters and the numbers, I found the letters looked much more condensed than the numbers. So to look better, I adjusted this. But this would not be normal. there would normally be more gap both sides of the 1. For the Mars number-plate, even though the colour orange is normally representative of this, I chose green for aliens instead to go with the UFO. 

The outback NSW number-plate also has the NSW flower on it, rather than another more identifiable flower like the Sturt Desert Pea (as it was the SA flower). The font was a more cowboy style of font, in a bit of a “taking the mickey” out of country NSW comparing to American cowboys. The 4 is a very distinctive cowboy style. 

This activity taught me tools I have never used before - the scissors tool, the use of shapes for guides (rather than just lines), locking guides and scaling shapes without scaling the stroke thickness (which I discovered after readjusting and resizing too many times because I am simply too persistent to think to google a solution - Scott to the rescue, Thank God!). 

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Final Calendar Part 2

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Final Calendar Part 1

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And Here We Are

The summary of the finished product.

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Cover

The cover was to make more of a feature out of the geometric lines. The lines from the elephant image underneath continue over the white triangular sections of the cover to give it continuity. The main feature of this image was to be the date hence I determined the animal to just be a small geometric section of the image. 

The title ‘Vulnerable Lines’ is a reference to the vulnerable, threatened or endangered status given to the general species of animal represented. They are all animals whose existence has been put under threat due to actions of humans. Fish are threatened due to over-fishing. Similarly sharks suffer from over-fishing and shark fin collection. Penguins are greatly affected by climate change. Frogs are similarly affected as well as a loss of habitat and pollution and so on and so on. 

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Epic Fails and the Second Bite

OK. So not my proudest moments but definitely part of the journey. The image that I spent the most time on was the one one I did not use. The bat was just terrible. Everything about it was terrible. The colours were awful. There was too much detail for the style I was using and not enough to look good in any other style. Just woeful hence in the end I dropped it, though I tried and tried to make it better before I gave up. The other example is the whale shark. it started off just terrible. The back was OK but when the dots got finer and more detailed at the front, I just made a mess of it. They were too small to show so I just tried to show shadings. But the colour looked terrible too. So I tired just fixing the colour and it looked much better in all blue tones. But I still was not happy so I kept the tail and fins (just tweaked them to be more pointy, and turned the slow majestic whale shark into a fierce predator. Not redoing this image from scratch and developing it into something else is actually one of the things I am most proud of. 

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Turtles for March

So this is probably my favourite picture and was the quickest to do. Most pictures took me around 4-6 hours to colourise and paint. This one was faster as the actual finish painting colours were almost the same as those I was able to colourise the turtle to. And these colours were not vastly different from the original, just extracted the colour more. this is not how I did most of the images as the range of colours were not in the original images. The only major alteration to the original image was painting on a front foot 

Note: Tumblr does weird things to the colours in the image. The actual print is much more subtle.

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Development of January

So this is the first time I have tried to paint digitally. It can be seen through the other pages of the calendar, I definitely got better after this first one. I did really want to challenge myself and try a skill I that I knew I would have to develop. I used the lines to bring emphasis to a feature. I then extend a series of lines from a single point of the feature and then add an ones for balance to the image. Whilst the graph background was not white, it is light enough to be written upon and shaded areas rather than vertical lines is used to divide the dates.

As was advised in feedback from the presentation, the font was replaced with a more geometric style.

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Calendar Mock-Up 5 and Final

This is my favourite mock-up and has cherry picked some of my favourite elements and hopefully combined them in a complimentary style. I love the idea of digital painting with various amounts of defined and smudged details. But my favourite element is the geometric lines. It introduces both conflict and balance, an angular conflict the curvature of nature but balance to the overall image, a point of interest in the negative space.

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Dig Out Those Photos

So I have decided to go for a new style which uses photos that I convert into art and then add lines to conflict against the curves of nature. Finally, an advantage to being in my mid forties. I have many, many animal snaps from my travels, both around Australia and the small amount of international travel I have done. And having kids, there have been plenty of trips to zoos and wildlife parks so the biggest issue will be digging out all those all old photos that cover twenty-odd years. They include photos from swimming with whale sharks, manta rays, reef sharks and many other wonderful creatures on Ningaloo Reef as well as trekking with elephants in Cambodia. Some were more set-up photos such as small fish and jellyfish taken in aquariums. I did use an adobe stock photo for inspiration for the art of the orangutan and the penguin. Also the shark is an alteration to one of my whale shark photos that I digitally painted a great white sharks head on (no I have not gone diving with Great Whites, I like my life too much). 

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Calendar Mockups 3 & 4

These partly completed mockups and their inspirations and I whilst I saw potential, and I especially liked the bottom one, I had an issue regarding originality. Whilst I had come up with the idea before I saw the centre, bottom picture, once I had seen it, the similarity between the images made me feel like I could not use this style any longer. Which is a shame as I truly loved it. The third mock-up started with a happy accident (though I am yet to put any of the line drawings on it. The green is actually an abstract of the elephant image. It come about when I put a photo of the elephant over the background and had changed the layer method. Whilst I did not use this image, it inspired me for the next step of colourising images. This was a mix of using different layer methods as well as colour adjusmtent layers.