Winter Break GOV Project

I hope y’all had a lovely winter break! Over winter break, I created animated graphics for two government classes – 360F (Global Governance) and 371U (Politics and Film.)

 

GOV 360F – Global Governance

The concept behind this one was to create a globe which then transitioned into a moving building. In a sense, we were going for a news-intro style introductory video. The first draft looked like this (disregard the 30 second length):

While the basic idea was there, the glow was too strong, and it was lacking the text needed to transition the video into the powerpoint. In the second version, I resolved most of these issues:

We ultimately decided that the glow was a bit too much, so I cut it out in the final version. Additionally, the concepts of the globe felt a bit too abstract compared to very realistic photo of the building. To counteract this, Maddy and I came up with a plan to add features to connect the two concepts better:

— Add images behind the globe that move around and give some color to that part

— Color in the globe greyscale so that it fits in more with the building’s design

Ultimately, we decided not to include the glow at all, as it detracts a bit from the focus of the animation. With this decision made, the video was complete!

 

GOV 371U – Politics and Film

Gov 371U was a bit faster of a process than for 360F, as the assets had already been pre-made. What I mainly did was compile the glowing and non-glowing versions of the film image over each other in after effects, which creates an old glowing sign look.

For the first draft, we felt that the glowing signs were a bit too far apart, and that there was not enough of a pause between when the red and yellow lights come on. I was able to fix this in draft 2:

Besides adding length between when the red and yellow lights turn on, I also added length to the beginning part, before any of the lights turn on. A trick I used when making this was applying a “fade-in” effect to some of the lights, while not doing it for others. This helped create a balance where the lights turn on more properly in some parts, and more like an “accidental-shut-off-shut-on” in other parts.

After doing this, the assignment was complete! Now, I am moving on to working on some of the powerpoints for these courses.

Training: Color Theory

GOAL: Understand the purpose of colors and how they relate to others, as well as their societal and cultural meanings and how they may vary.

Step 1:

The first step of this training was  to devise a color wheel. I decided to create a color wheel within an eye, which I created within adobe illustrator. It was a bit tricky at first to create such an organic shape with the curved pen tool, but with a bit of practice and tweaking I was able to make the shape work. Instead of relying on the adobe illustrator pen strokes, I used the pen shapes and created thin shapes that would look like stroke lines but be more organic and fluid.

I started out with an eye that looked like this:

 

However, I felt that it looked a bit cartoonish for my taste, like something out of a coloring book. I decided to try and change the lines to a white color, and it worked much better!

I decided to also play around with shapes so that the shapes did not align quite as perfectly – this created a more playful and colorful aesthetic. I also removed the shadow that was under the eyelid, as I felt like the shading was contributing to the coloring book feel. The color wheel works such that the colors get darker as you go down, starting with tint, then going to a medium/default color, then a grey tone, and then finally a dark shade. I went with this route rather than starting with the default color as I felt visually it made more sense to show a hierarchy of lightness.

 

Step 2:

The second step of this training was to create a representation of value (a greyscale going from light to dark or vice versa) to go with this initial color wheel. I chose this as I felt it would complement the first eye, considering that eyes go in pairs (…generally).

I created a new eye and then began a value ring

I particularly like how this one came out, and am surprised I was able to make it in illustrator. If you look at it for long enough, the rings look as if they are moving.

Step 3:

The next step to this training was to create a color palette for three different “clients,” based off of what we learned in the KB about color and meaning. The clients were a civil war course, branding yourself, and a modern Latinx studies course.

I started with these colors:

For the Civil War Course, the colors worked well, but would work even better with some sepia browns to represent the warmth of old films and papers. I kept my own color palette the same as it fit my vision well, but I decided to entirely change the Latinx Studies one. Abriella suggested I go for traditional colors rather than using the colors of one flag, as they’d appear more vibrant and relevant to a larger population. Thus, I edited the civil war course palette to look like this:

And used traditional colors for the Latinx Studies course that looked like this:

All together, they looked like this:

After finishing this, I was done with the training!

To more thoroughly explain why I chose the colors I did, I wrote this check for understanding:

Civil War Main Color: Dark Brown

• Brown is associated with professionalism, age or antiquity, continuity, and traditional masculinity. It felt like a fitting color to represent the Civil War: a historical event that dealt with soldiers and antiquated male ideals.
• I did not want to use either blue or red as those colors are associated with war “sides” more. Brown seemed to be the most neutral and professional of the colors.
• The color scheme is complementary with the blue and red, and then the rest of the colors are neutral or low in saturation. This yields a slightly last dramatic form of complementary color scheme, but still has the impact of the blue and red.
• In this case, I focused mostly on changing the hues. I made slight alterations to the tint, but maintained mostly medium-toned colors for this color palette.

• Amongst many things, purple represents imagination and creativity. These are qualities I appreciate, and I consider myself to be an imaginative person, so I felt it is a suitable color (amongst being my favorite color.) I wanted to focus on these aspects rather than the “royal” or “noble” ones, so I went with a lighter purple as it appears more whimsical and a bit less regal.
• I was torn between purple and teal, but decided to make purple the primary color as the symbolism for it was more accurate.
• This color scheme ended up being very analogous. I imagine these are the types of colors one would see in a forest at night.
• In this one the focus was primary on tint/shades with slight hue alterations, since the colors are close to each other and there is not a huge variety of hues.

• Looking through various traditional colors, this one was the one that stuck out to me the most. Green often represents freshness, energy, and ingenuity. I felt as if it was a fitting color for the primary color palette, and also fit the general tone of the class and social justice.
• I picked this color over magenta as I felt the meanings behind green were more significant overall.
• The color scheme is tetradic with various hues around the color wheel. Some colors like red and orange and magenta and red are closer to each other than others, such as magenta and blue or red and green. This allows for some analogous colors and some that are complementary.
• In this one the focus was on hue and not on tint or shade, and there is very little variation in the tint or shade beyond the main green color.

 

Pixel Art Training

Goal: With the live paint tool in Adobe Illustrator, create pixel art based off of a reference image

For the Pixel Art Training, I had to first take an image and create a color palette based off of the image using the eye-dropper tool in Illustrator. I chose this lovely image of my cat, Travis.

I made a few extra palette groups to keep track of the colors that I ended up changing once I realized that the colors I chose were not perfect.

Once I did the palette, I created a 120×120 grid in illustrator (because I hate myself), and used the Live Painting tool to paint pixel-like dots over the image I was referencing.

After this, I used the live painting tool and pixeled him in! I chose to crop the image a bit to make it more visually interesting, as his feet looked a bit odd in the pixelated version.

This is the final result!

• What I learned from this training:

  • How to use the live paint tool
  • Successful ways to color pick that convey more complicated shades with less colors
  • Less is often more
  • Sometimes you want to abstract features more to make it look MORE like the thing you’re imitating (his eyes don’t have any color besides black and a bit of green because the green color makes it more cluttered in the pixelated version)
  • How to change out colors in the swatch tool

Training: Photo IDs

Assignment: Take sets of example photos and edit them to fit the LAITS quality guidelines

The important thing for these images is for them to be:

• Neutral colored (not too warm or too cold)
• Good, flat lighting
• Medium or slightly-heightened contrast (higher contrast can appear more professional and attractive)
• Framed in a visually understandable and appealing manner

There are three photo sets: easy, medium, and hard.

I…accidentally did all four for easy. I will showcase here the two that came out the best.

 

Easy:

Original

Edited: Higher contrast, cropped for LAITS

Original

Edited: Cropped, lighting slightly fixed

Medium:

Original

Edited: Fixed cool tone, higher contrast, edited exposure slightly to reduce blending between shirt and hair, cropped

Original

Edited: Fixed warm sepia tone, contrast, cropped, increased exposure as image was too dark

Difficult:

Original

Edited: exposure, color, contrast, + used blur and brush tools to lower severity of highlights until her skin looked more even, used multiply layers, cropped

This was certainly the most difficult of all of them, but was quite fun to do.

Original

Edited: exposure, lighting, contrast, air-brushed his face to have the lighting more even

This is the non-cropped version. I wanted to share this to show how the door is over-exposed now, but his face is not. If this were in a real ID, you wouldn’t see anything past the first pillar to his left, and the image would work much better over-exposed than under-exposed.

General What-I-Learned:

• The best colors and contrast levels to use for LAITS photos
• LAITS cropping and sizing guidelines
• How to artificially light or darken areas of the face to get a more even lighting
• Blurring out background elements for the sake of the face standing out more
• How to use the curves and levels tool to alter gamma and exposure
• What mid-tones need to be toned down for the sake of having a more neutral color palette in the image.

 

Assignment: Create and Learn more Shapes and Patterns

Step 1: Create three shapes

These shapes had to fit three styles – free and lazy, direct and authoritative, and energetic and fun.

After this, I was tasked with creating various patterns and shapes within adobe illustrator with a set color pattern. I had already known about the basic pattern tool, but was able to play around with it to create something more energetic and exciting.

 

This ultimately came off very 90s – but in a good way.

What I Learned:

• Patterns are more interesting if there is variety – in shape, in color, even in rotation
• The pathfinder tool is extremely useful for merging or separating two separate objects or images
• You can make many, many shapes with the pen curve tool! I love this tool!
• Sticking with one color palette is…tricky, but very fun and rewarding. I enjoyed working within constraints on this one.
• Lining up shapes is great, but if you purposely misalign it can make for an interesting pattern (see: top left.)

Training: Principles and Elements of Design

Goal of training: to understand the basic elements and principles that make up visual art and design

Elements: line, shape, form, size, space, color, value, texture

Principles: Repetition, rhythm, movement, balance, proportion, negative space, contrast, emphasis, variety, unity, hierarchy

Step 1: Finding Images

My first step in this process was to find images that suited each principle. I primarily found images on https://www.behance.net/, although I also found some on https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/. I recall that the first concept I found was for the principle of movement. I was looking through Behance and saw this image:

I was immediately struck by the movement of this image, and how everything in the image gives the illusion of flying through the wind. The girl herself’s hair and dress flow to the side, and the background and shapes only add to this. In fact, as an animator, finding an image for movement was probably one of the easier ones to do. In terms of the most difficult, I found the more abstract concepts such as size and space to take the longest. It’s hard to find a representation of such vague terms unless one is looking at quite abstract art. Fortunately, I was able to find examples that fit, although most images I came across were comprised of several different concepts, and I had to focus on the one that seemed the most prominent.

Size was tricky for me, because almost everything has some sort of size. I picked this particular image because of the variety of different sizes that are found in each type of bottle shape. This could also work for variety, but the variations are primarily in size and width, so I felt another example would be more fitting for variety.

Step 2: Outlining

The second step was to outline each drawing. I did this in Procreate and focused on outlining the features that were most important to each concept.

For movement, I outline every shape to convey the basic form and their tendency towards shifting to the right.

For value, I did the opposite. Instead of outlining the form, I shaded out the basic values used to illustrate this portrait.

For color, I outlined the colors used and how they shifted into other colors going from cool to warm to cool again.

Step 3: Powerpoint

For my final step, I created a powerpoint with slides that analyzed why I chose each image and their relationship to the principle or element I used them to exemplify. Below are a few of the slides that I created:

The rest of the slides can be found on:

https://utexas.box.com/s/eb1ti43rnx56q89n1ip8ou0a7ylvjlis

After doing this, I had the powerpoint reviewed by Abriella, and then the training was complete!

What I learned:

• Different concepts require different styles of outlining in order to convey the most important features
• Almost every image combines at least 2-3 of the principles and elements. The less abstract the art, the more principles and elements they employ.
• Space and negative space are not always the same concept. Size and Hierarchy are related, but are not the same and may be used for different reasons.
• Contrast is most commonly shown with color variation, although size and shape are also used.