I made some progress on some more Russian assignments–I drew this watercolor-style painting in Photoshop, which Tate is using in a cafe scene, and I finished the other angles for another waitress character.
Then I worked on a logo design for the NWAV 49 conference, with some color variations:
These four designs were sent to Dr. Johns (in their original, noncolor-corrected versions), who approved them! In order: back wall monitor, desk skirt/front monitor, Canvas home page banner, Canvas dashboard thumbnail picture. The only last request was that I swap out some of the pictures so there are fewer duplicate images, especially in the last two designs for Canvas. Once I do that, these should be ready to go!
These are some characters I’ve been working on. When we get an assignment, usually only the front and side views are done and what I have to do is draw and color the other angles of the character using the specs I’ve been given. Sometimes (like with the hairstyle for the first character) we draw objects freestyle, and other times, for the sake of efficiency and continuity, we can reuse object designs from other characters (the hair for the professor was copy-and-pasted from another character, I just changed the fill color so it wouldn’t be completely identical). It’s been really fun working on these designs, even though there was a bit of a learning curve to using the program at first!
This week we decided on a final version of the digital display for ARH301. This is the one which ending up looking best on the screen, which has an extremely blue tint for some reason. It took a lot of experimenting with color balance, brightness, contrast, etc, to get a version that doesn’t look muddied out or overly blue, but I think we got it to work eventually. Because other STA’s are going to be working on more digital displays for other classes, I’m going to try to post screenshots of my layer organization and/or share my .psd file so that others can see what my process was (and so that we can be consistent across all our designs)
I thought I should explain a little bit about the set-up; the picture-in-picture lectures look like this (the video lecture is embedded in the Powerpoint):
So far the challenge has been adjusting the display colors so that there is a blue tint, but not one so saturated that it is overpowering. The screen itself has a tint that we are correcting for. I’m working on adjusting the individual brightness/contrast of each panel because I realized that some of the pictures were more prominent than others and I wanted to equalize them. Here are some variations that I’ve been working on with different overlays, color adjustments, and vibrance/saturation levels.
Here are some pictures of my progress on the Russian illustration. I’m not really happy with my line work, the thickness of some lines is off, and I’m not finished with the coloring yet. I’m going to draw a camera for Grigorij to hold, and some flowers for Polina and Oleg to hold.
Last week some screen tests were done with the art history graphic for Professor Johns to see what it will look like during her lectures. There are two monitors in the space, one behind the desk (which will show in the picture-in-picture video/powerpoint lecture) and another down below and in front of the desk. We agreed that the graphic would look best on the desk monitor because on the back one it would be too distracting during her powerpoint lectures.
I made some adjustments to the design so it would work for the new screen. The main issue was that all the text needed to be moved as far up as possible so it could still be read in case the bottom of the screen got cut off, and also there was a red cast on the screen so I created a color balance layer on top of everything to slightly tint it cyan. The images I enlarged in a more uniform grid pattern, with equally spaced margins. The negative space below Starry Night and Venus will be filled in with images soon.
For the back monitor we decided that something not too busy would be best, and Suloni and I discussed options including a grid, triptych or multi-panelled image, and large graphic letters spelling ART. Professor Johns will send us a list of artwork she uses on her exams for use in the display (also, I’m downloading the pictures from UT’s Digital Archive Services, DASe, and they are unaffected by copyright laws because they being used only for educational purposes and not outside of an educational setting); in the meantime I made a grid design and an eight-panel design as clipping masks so that I can easily add the images later.
The two other views of Waitress 2, completed. Today I’ll begin a tutorial on symbol creation and make some phone symbols.
My first Russian illustration assignment, which I’ve sketched out. The scene is Oleg and Polina picking flowers in a field while Grigory takes their photograph. It looks a little pixelated because it was a drawing that I scanned in and then had to change the line color to this mauveish-rose color from the original black, but I don’t think it matters because the line work is going on a new layer on top of this.
