These fifteen weeks have been great, I feel like I haven’t done my part though. I started off well with my digital story making posts on Photoshopping, but after a few, I could not think of what to do a tutorial on. I only had limited knowledge about Photoshop and I think it showed in my lack of posts at the end. Also, my other courses decided to bombard me with work at the end of the semester for some reason which did not help my blog. I feel bad that I slacked off in the end because I got behind on the assignments and they kept coming, then I did less work on my Photoshopping. I feel like I did not do the class the justice it deserves, but being less formally structured than all the others somehow it got put on the back burner. At the end when I was about caught up on assignments, my computer decided to format itself and start anew…great. If I were to make suggestions on this class I would say that you should hold people to their digital stories more, and make them post at least once a week. I think if I knew that my grade would drop every post I did not do, I would make more of an effort to do them. I’m not saying that my grade won’t drop because I did not do some posts, but you did not express it as much. I would also suggest that the syllabus be longer and more detailed. I would also suggest a few less assignments or at least let them choose let’s say 8 or 10 out of the 12 you will assign. That way people will be able to take one off when they may have a lot of work in their other classes.

Regrets

I feel like I did my part in this class, but only just getting by. I did not go beyond what I had to do with my blog. It may be because blogging isn’t my thing or because I ran out of ideas. Either way looking back I should have done more and put more time into my blog. I also regret that my computer formatted itself because it made me look like I was slacking more on my blog than I really was.  I feel like I did not show you how on point of a student I can be and I will be looking to sign up for some of the other classes you teach in the future.

Season 1 Trailer

In season 2, a church group starts to train a group called “soldiers of the Sun”, in which they are going to try to use to kill off vampires. The most powerful vampire alive allows them to capture him to see what they wish to do, knowing he can escape at anytime. After puting an end to the group he decides that there is no reason for him to go on living, 2,000 years was enough. He stays on the roof of a building past sunrise and burns. There is also another powerful being that is introduced, a maenad. There isn’t a very clear explanation of what that is but vampires cannot hurt her. I don’t want to give away too many details but they eventually get rid of her.

Season 2 Trailer

Another reason why I like this show is for its amazing cliff hangers at the end of every episode. It leaves you wondering for a week “what the hell?”. In season 3 the fight between the humans and vampires gets really heated when one of the oldest and strongest vampires kills a news anchor on national television. This starts a huge uprise from the humans thinking that if one vampire is that crazy, then they all are. We also gain more insight into what Sookie is and that she may even have the power to stop the strongest vampire. Werewolves are also introduced into the story in season 3, and they are even used to do vampires bidding as long as they are given V. Vampire blood, called V, is a drug in the show that helps you heal and makes you stronger for a certain amount of time, so the werewolves trade their services for V.

Season 3 Trailer

Season 4 airs this summer and I can’t wait.

Mash-up

Instrumental link – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hujcN8ZJCF8

Original Nas “It ain’t hard to tell”- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI-DRbf_AZk

1. Make 1 copy of you picture layer after opening it by going to Layer > Duplicate Layer.

2. Next you will want to change to blending mode for the top layer to Color Dodge.

3. Next you want to hit Ctrl + I to invert the colors of the photo.

4. Next go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.

5.  Now mess around with the radius bar and get the number that looks good for you. 2.2 is what I selected.

6.  Now you will need to make a adjustment layer for Hue/Saturation. As shown below.

7. Now make the Saturation equal to 0 and check the box that says Colorize.

8. Now you are done and your picture should look like it was hand drawn. Here are my results.

Helpful criticism is always accepted. Just let me know what you think.

1. Open Adobe Photoshop and open the picture you want to work with.

2. Double-click on the Background layer in the layers tab and then click “Ok”

Now where it said “Background” it should now say “Layer 0″

3. Now click on “Layer 0″, make sure its highlighted and go to Layer –> Duplicate Layer

4. Make sure you click on the “Layer 0 copy”.

5. Now go to Layer –> Layer Mask –> Reveal All

6. Click back on “Layer 0″ and go to Image –> Adjustments –> Channel Mixer, and check the Monocrome box

7. Now click on “Layer 0 copy”

8. Now use the eraser and erase everything in the picture that you do not want to be in color. You can adjust the size of the eraser brush as shown below

Hint: you can click the eyeball next to a layer on the bottom right box to make that layer become invisible if that will help you.

Final

I wanted to do this because I have seen friends on Facebook do the same and I thought it was really cool. If anyone has any questions on any of the steps let me know. Also, if anyone tries this I would like to see it in a comment on this post if that is possible. Thanks in advance for any feedback you have.

This is the beach picture I used.

This is the picture we took with the car.

This is what I finished with. Let me know what you guys think.

I would have layered my voice on top of his but if you knew me or have heard my voice you would know I would only make the story less interesting.

Made from a simple picture of crumbled ball of paper.

Once upon a time, in a forest around Fredericksburg, a vicious cat patrolled the trees. A dog walked unknowingly into the forest and was frightened, taking cover under a blanket. Petrified of the cat, he did the only thing he could think of. He produced his handle of Burnett’s that he carried with him everywhere and proceeded to get drunk with the cat. After a few shots apiece, they then became good friends.

The foliage I took a picture was the plant in my fish tank

to here

I also spent a lot of time tweeking the timing to try to make it flow the best way possible

then to here

to here

to here

Finding background images

Thinking of certain ideas

Movie Poster

When I first Googled Jeff Biaj I saw jeffbiaj.com and I thought to myself “there is no way this is his” so I skipped over it and i came to find out that it was in fact his website. Jeff Baij is a graphic designer who works with videos and pictures to make animations out of them. When I was trying to find out any messages behind his work I was unable to find any. Most of his work is just something random that he has altered digitally. The thing I think he does well is to show that anything can be art if you want it to be.  Some of his art including most of the GIF images and Boardroom Greetings is just a video in which he has sliced each frame and pasted them across the screen. As far as finding any background information on him, I wasn’t able to find anything it all, except for the bare minimum he put on his website.  Jeff also has another website called IRL Money where he says “You give me money, I give you art.” and you can actually hire him to work for u for a couple hours.

Personally, I cannot tell if I like Jeff’s art. I like it and dislike it for its simplicity. He does what he wants to do any really doesn’t care at all what anyone thinks about it. One of his works I did like though was The Floating Island which is below. I like how simple it is and how he made in in a super low resolution and everything is very boxy.

http://jeffbaij.com/work/thefloatingisland.html

Robin Rhode is an artist who works in materials like charcoal chalk and paint, and started out creating work from his own drawings of objects he would interact with. He later picked up photography and starting working with digital animations. His works mainly shed light on social concerns in a more playful manner.  Websites say that he uses practices of street culture in his work and it really shows from his “He got game” piece to “Juggla”. I liked Robin Rhode’s work a lot, because I think he shows some issues he may have with the world, in a fun way. I also like that he did work with BMW and made a commercial for them. In this commercial he rode around a huge canvas in the new car and meanwhile paint was being sprayed on the wheels so everywhere he went, he left a tire mark of paint and I just thought that was a really clever way to sell a car.

Pipilotti Rist is a feminist artist who seems to focus more on woman empowering art and girly things. I found her pieces where she projects flowers and those type of things on the walls all around the walls interesting. She also has pillows in the middle of the room so you can look at the art. The video called Im Not The Girl Who Misses Much is very disturbing to be. I do still consider it art, while I don’t want to look at it at all. She may have wanted that though in a way. I still think it looks like something from The Ring movie though.

Cory Arcangel is an artist who works more on the technical parts of technology. His work is concerned with the relationship between technology and culture, and with media appropriation. He also works on Nintendo game cartridge hacks and reworking obsolete computer systems from the 1970′s and 80′s. One example of his work is called Super Mario Clouds in which he edited a Mario game and took out everything in it so only the clouds are left. When you turn on the game all you see are the clouds in their exact same place as in the game float across the screen.

I like Cory’s work because he really works making someone’s work simpler and in that he shows how something so simple as clouds floating across the screen can be considered art. I also love to play video games so that was another plus for him.

Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual artist who works in black and white and adds a message to each photo. The message she rights does not so much have something to do with the things in the photo, it is more of her way of getting her message out there. She uses these words in public spaces. In her early work she used her own text to put on the buildings but she has since then started using others, including quoting great authors. She makes sure she uses texts from different contexts though but her work mostly talks about violence, oppression, sexuality, feminism, power, war and death. In her work she brings to light something that may have been thought in silence at first.

I didn’t like Jenny Holzer’s work as much as the other artists we have researched because I didn’t feel as though I wanted to keep looking at her art. I did not necessarily like the use of black and what and some of the words in the art was difficult to read because it was obscured. I realize what she is trying to do with the lack and white and sending a message it just wasn’t particularly catching to me. I think the messages she sends are great and they need to be shown but for me it just wasn’t nice to look at.

Mark Klett is an interesting artist. He uses multiple pictures to make a panoramic view of a scene. Instead of using a panoramic camera to take the photo, he was more original and came up with the idea to put multiple pictures together.  There is one of his works called People on the edge where he took multiple pictures of people standing on the edge of a canyon and pieced them together. The thing that really struck me about these photos and the whole work as a whole is that he lined the pictures up so it actually looks like they could be a panoramic photo.

I really likes Klett’s use of color and shifting of the images. In his work with making a panoramic out of multiple pictures he actually left a little white space between the photos which actually makes the art what it is. In others works of his I saw that he used smaller color photos and fit them into a large gray scale photo of a different place. I could really tell the time that went into his work and he really shows the beauty of everything when he lays it out in that way.

Arthur Liou

Arthur Liou’s project entitled “Cedar Key” he used a cheap camera to really capture the picture in an original way. He wanted his photos to be messy so that they weren’t altered in any way and also there was some ambiguity as to what the photo was of.  He also used the cheaper camera so he had less control over the picture taken which is a really original way of thinking about it.  Arthur also did a lot of work on a film called “Blood Work” in which he took a video of his daughter with leukemia and copied her many times in the video so it looked like a stream of blood flowing when it was only a bunch of copies of his daughter crawling.

The interesting thing with Liou’s work is that he can take something close to him and make it into art. Doing the work on “Blood Work” seemed to sort of be his way of putting it out there that his daughter had leukemia and also his way of dealing with it. He needed to put it into a physical form for all to see so it would stop eating him up inside. I liked the effect of making the blood stream with the animation of his daughter crawling too, I thought that was really clever.

Jeffrey Wolin

Jeffrey Wolin is an interesting photographer who focuses more on historical events and showing people that were involved in those events. In his work entitled “Inconvenient Stories: Vietnam War Veterans” he shows different veterans affected by the events of the Vietnam War and really does great work. In another work of his called “Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust” he shows people that went through the Holocaust. Doing artwork on the Holocaust is a really risky thing because if you do it wrong it can be received in the wrong way but I think he did a great job.

Jeffrey Wolin was an interesting artist to me. He does work on topics that are risky. If you say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing it could go bad. At the same time these events need to be talked about and put into a more solid form. He also helps these people get through their traumatic events by helping them get it all out. He is really an inspirational artists that focuses more on the history of the country and some of the major events that caused tragedy in our world.

John Gitelson is and artist who works in artist’s books, video, photography and web based art. The ideas for his art seem to come from the environment around him and how it affects him, or how he affects it. One example of his art is the Garbage Can Project, in which he turned the interaction the people had and objects had with the garbage cart outside his apartment into a video. Everyday he would video tape the cart and the next day he would go over that video and take notes on objects put into the cart, or people’s interactions with the cart. He got his idea when the garbage cart outside his apartment kept being stolen and decided to turn that story into art. He also did the Car Project in which he took pictures of cars in front of buildings and digitally altered them to make it look like the car was completely covered in fliers. He also altered the background to make it look like the car was part in front of a club, or restaurant. He got the idea for this project when he would part his car across the street from a club (he lived across the street) and every morning he would go to his car only to find it bombarded with fliers.

In my opinion his art is really likable. He takes things from his everyday life and turns them into art. He does not go out to look for ideas, he is just weary of his surroundings, and the ideas come to him. The garbage can project was not the best idea in my opinion because of the amount of time it must have taken to watch the video from the previous day and then edit out the parts where no one is interacting with the cart, and on top of that, taking notes on items in the cart.

Ian Whitmore

Ian Whitmore seems to take pictures of layouts he finds interesting. He uses angles well in his photography and takes good pictures. In some of his pictures I cannot tell whether they were digitally altered or not but they are still digital art in their own right being taken with a camera. Some example of his work are his Nowhere portfolio, in which he has pictures of areas he has been. Each picture seems to have a plant as the focal point, or slightly offset to one side. In his Channels portfolio he shows the owner(I presume) of a room displayed on a screan on some sort inside the picture of the room. The screens he uses to show the owners are TVs, Projectors, and even Computer screens.

I personally was not very fond of Ian Whitmore’s art because of the fact the nothing really struck me when i looked at them. When I look at art I usually look for something that stands out in the picture, like the cars did in John Gitelson’s Car Project, but these pictures seemed kind of plain.  I also think Whitmore’s art is more difficult to get a message from. With Gitelson’s project like the Car Project, you immediately know its about the outrageous number of fliers and how they are instant trash 90% of the time.

Matt Siber

Matt Siber is a photographer who digitally alters his photos, usually either adding or taking something away. I especially liked his project called Untitled in which he took a picture, then next to it put a white space equal in size to the picture with outlines of objects in the picture made up of only text from the picture. It may sounds confusing when explained but once you see it makes sense and to me, is a really interesting idea. Another project he did is called Floating Logos in which he took logos from various restaurants and gas station and removed the poles holding them up making it look like they are floating.

I liked Matt Siber’s work a lot. I found it very interesting and I actually looked through it more thoroughly than the others. How he made the signs seem as though they are floating while keeping the background looking real is amazing to me. I hope that in this class we will learn interesting and cool stuff like this.