New Cascade Advances

This past week I had time to go back and improve my Cascade site once again. I worked with the body, sidebar and unit information parts of it. I added body content including links to the LAITS page and my own personal website. I also added sidebar content; a funny video of a grandma, some links and some colorful buttons. Finally I went in and filled in the unit information including the contact info, my supervisor and stuff like that. I think it looks pretty good now and it has a lot of fun stuff in it. This also gave me an opportunity to get more familiar with Cascade in order to teach professors in the future. Hopefully I get time to add even more stuff to make it more complete. Pictures of what it looks like are below.

Update on ARH301 display

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.

Update on Russian animation/illustration

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.

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)!

GIF

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.

Theater Set Design

This week I’ve been focusing on the set graphic design for TD301, and it includes this marquee piece. I wanted to recreate the very exciting, sparkling colors of a marquee while still retaining the clarity of words, so I only chose two main colors. The alternating red and gold creates a strong contrast even with the dotted lights on, and I am very pleased with how it turned out.

I played around with a few different fonts to emphasize the initials in the center of the marquee, and I think I will stick with the last one because the letters are thicker. However, I do like how the pink neon lights of the second one looks overall with the gold and red, so I might come back and edit it a bit more after I work more on the center stage.

I finished another character creation assignment. This time I had to create trash bags and edit the character so that they would be holding the bag.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2018/07/06/23511-2/

I created another character for the Russia 412 Project. The assignment was to create the front 3/4 and side views of the Cafe Owner who closes up shop and leaves with some other characters at the end of the day. Tate gave me a character from Aqua Teen Hunger Force as a reference which was pretty funny. I made the character balding with light brown hair with a tank top, jeans, chest hair, and a gold chain. Here’s how it turned out in the end:

I also continued to work on Cascade re-documentation. I’ve managed to get through the majority of the “How to Use Cascade” tab. Here’s an example of one of the pages:

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2018/07/05/23501-2/