STA Blog

Melissa Lam

Melissa Lam

Week of 7/10

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Week of 7/10

I continued animations for RUS412k with this silly-looking bird! I wanted to make it look like the bird was a bit clumsy and struggling to get off the ground. I really like animating (and I really like birds) so this was an ideal assignment for me (thanks Tate)!

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I also started the RUS412 illustrations, after a very thorough and easy-to-understand explanation by Kathy 🙂 My assignment was to make the hedgehog character Oleg sleeping on a bed while dreaming about giving a lecture at a university. I referenced an image from the Moscow State University for the lecture hall. So far, I’ve only completed the first sketch and am waiting for approval! Also I wish there was a character info sheet for each character in this project stating things like their age, relationship to each other, jobs, hobbies, etc. As a new STA working on this project, I always wonder if I’m interpreting the characters’ personalities wrong.

Lastly, I finished my Cascade site and continued working on the “This is Democracy” podcast design. I came up with a bunch of new drafts following feedback from Suloni, Heather, and Marla.

Unfortunately, the chromatic aberration effect on the title that I really liked was a no-go. After working on a few more touch-ups such as making the wigs look more like “wigs” by putting the real hair below and tracing over the Capitol building with the lawn to make it match the drawing style of the frontal view version, I came up with this:

I’m not sure if there’s too many things going on though. I also added a darker drop shadow to make the characters more puppet-like, and I feel like with the addition of the scroll in the bg it matches the original quote “we are characters in this living book of democracy” more, since it looks sort of similar to a pop-up storybook.

 

Week of 7/2

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This week was more bearable after the hectic workload of last week finally wrapped up a little.

For the RGT, I made a simple campus map base for the main page:

I first took the colored map into Illustrator, then removed all the numbered labels and made all the objects a solid color. Then, I used Photoshop and changed the color of the objects to white, and just added a black choked outer glow and a drop shadow for the outlines. The style is supposed to be similar to the hand icon I did before, i.e. an engraving. I think the map will look a lot more complete after we add the etching marks on specific buildings and stops.

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I also continued my work on the Russian Animations object creations with my Awake Girl and a notification bell:

Awake Girl’s looking cute! Not much to say on her other than the fact that it definitely gets easier the more you do. The pigtails are always the hardest part since the Kyle Legacy brush has a hard time drawing curves that look aesthetically pleasing 🙁 Meanwhile, the bell was especially fun for me since I finally got to do a little animation. I had some experience with motion/classic tweens from before, but it was mostly for rotations and position. I’m glad I got the opacity part figured out without much hassle! I look forward to animating more!

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For Russian illustration, I did this work for Kathy. It felt kind of rushed because I was doing it at the end of my week (since I only work 3 days) so I was frantically picking colors the last part of my shift. I don’t usually cell-shade when I color, so it was a bit of a challenge to create interesting textures with a solid brush. I also didn’t know if we were allowed to add effects like sparkles and sun rays (though in truth I was also just running out of time, #procrastination). I liked how my piece turned out overall though, especially the birds!

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I was also asked to do more edits on my “This is Democracy” design and incorporate a more “historical” look and feel by adding things like the parchment texture, a quill, and the relief of a neoclassical building. I also touched up the wigs a little, but I’m not sure how much more “realistic” they can be if I want to maintain the simplistic and minimalistic look. One thing I’m struggling with by adding all those images in the background is making the two puppet characters stand out just as much as they did in the other drafts. Compared to the older version, the new one has a darker but more “historical” mood, which may or may not be a bad thing? Anyways, I’ll keep working on it!

     

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Finally, I also did more Cascade work. I added contact info, staff pages, the sidebar video, some external links, and the magic trick. Most of the Cascade site is done now, I just need to fix a few details:

Week of 6/25

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Last week and this week I’m super busy, I have like 5 projects going on at a time!

For the Racial Geography Tour, I went over my drafts with Jac and Suloni but it was decided later that they wouldn’t need them anymore :’) So all I’ve done for it so far this week is edit some hand symbols:

Later this week I will be working on a campus map for the site.

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I also went over my “This is Democracy” design with Suloni to revise it and potentially prep it for my portfolio. I’m still messing around with it, but I’m trying to make the font more legible for the quote and make the wigs look more like wigs.

     

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I worked on screen displays for the Texas Archaeology online course. I’ll probably think of something new to put on the vertical display so I didn’t include it here.

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Finally, I worked on the character creation portion of the animations for RUS412. My assignment was to make an “Awake Girl” character, this peppy college student who loves mornings (definitely not same). I referenced Penny Proud and Snow White, as shown in the pic below. Since I already had some prior experience with Animate, the hardest part for me was just figuring out the way Tate organizes things. I hope everyone else has an easy time figuring out symbols! They can get complicated for sure.

Week of 6/18

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Project: Racial Geography Tour (ongoing)

Staff Guidance: Suloni, Jac

Description: For most of last week, I just worked on more drafts for the Racial Geography Tour. I’ll be discussing them soon with Suloni and Jac to see what worked and didn’t work.

The first variation was just to try to overlay the two images because the way the photos were taken were so similar. I tried to include the man standing with his hands on his hips and as much of the old architecture in the background as possible. This time I did a solid red sky as well, and I also tried to lighten the tree background in the “present-day” image to make the statue and the people stand out more.

I then did some variations playing with the museum display design where I gave the image a description card, and another one with the dates spray painted on. I like the spray paint one since the color of the text matches that of the “Black Lives Matter” spray.

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I also worked on my Cascade site a little when I had the time.

I’ve added the identities (COLA and STA icons), the main banner image/headers, and several events involving birds and picnics. It’s a very relaxing site.

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Finally, I also did some drafts for the “This Is Democracy” podcast for Dr. Suri. I wanted to maintain a minimalistic and simple design that could be recognized even if the icon for the podcast was very small. Here’s one of the drafts: If I’m making a second draft, I will definitely refine the figures and make their shapes neater.

Overall, I’ve been pretty busy this week!

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Project: Racial Geography Tour (ongoing)

Staff Guidance: Suloni, Jac (thanks!!)

Description: My task was to create a split image of the past and present Jefferson Davis statues to be used as a potential splash/cover image for the Racial Geo site.

I started by importing the two photos and resizing them and cropping them so the two statues seemed about the same size compared to each other.

I then created layer masks to hide the parts of each image that I didn’t want, and drew out a tear with super-textured brushes to make it look like a paper tear. I like how it turned out looking like there’s a shadow! I also touched up the images to make the statue itself stand out more as a subject. For example, in the picture from 1933 I did a kind of vignette effect and darkened the edges. For the 2017 picture, I made the colors a little brighter/saturated to contrast it with the other desaturated pic and also added a bit of a “spotlight” on each statue to make them the center of focus.

I had to experiment with making a “red sky” for the “old” version, and after painstakingly outlining the sky with the magic wand tool it turned out kind of ugly, so I ended up just drawing in a reddish background using the specific hue of red specified. I also tried using both horizontal and vertical dates, but the horizontal ones ended up looking better. This project was a lot of trial and error!

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2018/06/11/23069-2/

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I did my first COLA ID edits today along with the Photoshop color correction training, since they go hand in hand. This ID in particular was the hardest to manipulate because it had so much shadow and light contrast and the color was too orange.

Compared to messing with that, the color correction training was went very smoothly!

I’m going to try to finish the other trainings if possible within the next few weeks.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2018/06/07/23062-2/