Carl Petersson ART130A
When I saw my first Pixar movie I have been hooked. Seeing what is possible to create on a computer made me dreaming about becoming a computer animator and that dream have not gone away yet. That is the reason to why I took this introduction to design course. I was not sure if I wanted to go with computer science or computer graphics as a major so when I got the chance this semester to take an introduction course to both these majors I took it.
I was a bit nervous before my first class because I have never been very artistic as a person so I did not know how well I would perform in this class. But that was not going to stop me so at the first day of class I showed up prepared and ready to go. As expected my first feeling was that this was not for me. Professor Ries talked about the projects we had ahead of us and there were none of the animation that I looked forward to. But then Professor Ries told me something that made me come back to this class although it was not what I expected. She said that it is good for an unexperienced designer to start working with a pen and paper before going to work on a computer so that you get the feel for the design in a better way than if you would just jump in to the animation part straight away.
Hearing this was good for two reasons. The first one is that I decided to give design and art a chance by staying in the class. The other reason is that it ended up showing me that the computer graphic way is not for me. This class have been tough ether you liked it or not but I have never during this time felt excited to put down extra time on my work. I did what was needed of me to get the best possible grade but other than that I never went to work on a project if I had some time over. This is not what I want to spend my time doing but I am still happy I took the class because otherwise I never would have find this out.
Dot/Line Illustrations
My thoughts about the dot line project was that it was going to be easy, but I soon found out that I was very wrong. I first saw it as just putting dots and lines on piece of paper and make it look in some way artistic.
But adding the part where we needed to show emotions without making illustrations and being able to describe our work with words like negative spaces made this project a struggle for me. This can be shown in my early drafts with are very far from my final project.
But when I finally got to my final draft I was very satisfied with myself because I could now see that even I can create things that even artistic people would call art.
Final Illustrations
Hand Lettering
The hand lettering project I thought was actually kind of fun. It brought out the creative side of me and throughout my work I found new ways in which I could illustrate my work. Ones get a different perspective of a letter when seeing it outside our digital world that we live in now.
Final Illustrations
Object Illustrations
The next project started of really bad for me. Hearing and taking in instructions in another language than your own made me put time my already limited time on stuff that was no where near the things we had to do.
This was also the first project where we got to work with Photoshop and seeing the things ones can modify in this program made me interested in taking a class to learn more about it. Professor Ries showed me one class something simple like how to get ink that you did not want to have on your picture to disappear and just watching that got me blown away.
When I finally got on the right track thinks started to turn out well except for the collage iterations. I ended up mocking myself because in the beginning all of my tigers looked like cats so I took picture of a cat and transformed it to a tiger. Although it was not exactly what the project expected of me I was very satisfied with my end result.
Final Illustrations
“How To-” Collage
I ran in to a problem as soon as I started working on the “How to-“ project because I could not figure out what the project was going to be about. Every idea that I got had either to many steps that made the text to long or it did not have enough steps. But because of a very popular movie at this time that had a very catchy song I finally figured out what my project was going to be about.
Since building a snowman is considered something young kids are doing I wanted to make my illustrations and layout simple and easy to understand. The thing I had to work most on was to make it the way I wanted it without making it look to simple. In the end I was satisfied by my final result because I think I managed to put work in to something that looks like it is very easy to do.
Final Collage How to 1. Take a look outside. If there is snow on the ground you know it’s time to go. 3. When you can’t make it bigger, start rollIng it in the snow so that it increases in size. 5. now you have to repeaT THIs process to make the second and third ball. but remember to reduce THe sIze for each one that you make. 7. we now have the foundation for our snowman. FInd some rocks and a carroT that you can use as eyes, nose and mouth.
build a s
nowman
2. start off by making a round ball as big as you possibly can with your hands. 4. when the ball is big enough to be THe base of our snowman, place it at a good spot where everyone can see it. 6. place the second largest snowball on your first and then place the smallest one on top of that.
8. IF you wanT To, look for other accessories but make sure you only take stuff from your mother. The feeling of happiness when you built a snowman will beat the feeling of anger when she finds out that you took her stuff.
Designer Presentations
Picking a designer for our next project was not hard. Since I have always been fascinated about electronics and Apple in general my pic of Phil Ive came very natural to me. And since this is one of my big interest finding facts and remembering what to talk about was not hard.
The thing that made me nerves was the presentation itself. I do not have any problem standing in front of people and talk but adding that I was now doing it in a language that I was not that comfortable with made me a bit sweaty the night before. But as always there is only one solution if you want to get comfortable with something and that is to practice, practice and again practice. So after many hours of rehearsing my presentation I ended up doing pretty well if I get to say so myself.
Final Presentation
Children’s Book
The first thing that happened to me when we started the children’s book project was that I had to change my partners with another student in my class. I did not realize it then but that trade was going to be very good for me. The two girls that I ended working with gave me there story very quick which made the work much more easier for me because I could start of creating my ideas right away.
The project also made me nerves because now I had to represent something that other people had created and as I mentioned before drawing is not my strongest side. But I decided to make my lack of skills in art into a children’s book with very simple illustrations. I showed Dora the explorer for the girls that I worked with and they liked that idea which was a relief for me. And if I might have picked this idea because of my lack of skills I ended up actually liking the way my illustrations ended up because I have always liked the “less is more� way of thinking. So when I finally got my book done I could look at it and think to my self that I actually did a good job.
Final draft