Self Portrait - Andy Warhol Style

Description of Assignment: For this self portrait, we were to choose a style of art and base our composition off of that. We had to either find or take a picture of ourselves where we were creatively posed, indicative or our personality, and appropriate for the style we choose. We weren't allowed to use Photoshop at all to enhance our portraits.

My Design Solution: I chose to do Pop Art and base it completely off of Andy Warhol. I basically used two of his photos to draw my shapes, styles, and colors from. This was probably my favorite assignment because I like to have pretty tight restrictions on what we can and cannot do and having an artist to go directly off of was to my benefit. I am happy with the way the colors worked out and the hair with the shadows. I based the shadows in my hair off of the shadows in my photo. The lighting in my picture made it so I didn't have that many shadowed areas in my hair. I specifically used bright blue eyeshadow because that is a famous Andy Warhol effect. If I were to enhance this, I would probably add a little more detail to my face around my nose and eyes.

Literary Illustration

Description of Assignment: The point of this assignment was to create an illustration to go along with a passage in a book. It was to relate to the passage and also compliment it in the book. We did not have one specific style we were to use, such as distortion, abstraction, realism, or simplification. However, the style was to be relevant and appropriate to fit the mood of the piece and the book.

My Design Solution: I chose to do realism as my style because I feel that is what I am best at as of right now. I did a selection for the book titled Wednesday Letters. The main theme of the book is how a husband and wife write letters to each other every Wednesday that they were married. The letters then, after they passed away, are read by their children and the stories of their lives are told. If I were to redo this piece, I would change the color of the nail polish on the hand, add more detail to the book the notebook is resting on, and possibly add some writing to the notebook. I was happy to see how my hand turned out with the fingers and the shading of the skin.

Sheer Infusion Photorealism Project

Description of Assignment: We were to choose an item from a list given to us to draw on Adobe Illustrator. The goal of the assignment was to not be able to tell which one was the photo of the actual object and the one we drew ourselves. We were to mostly use the pen, gradient mesh, and blend tools. First, we had to take a photo to base our drawing off of. Following that, we placed that photo file into the program and used it as our template for shapes and colors both.

My Design Solution: I mostly used the pen and gradient mesh tools. First, I drew all the shapes as accurately as I could. I kept a smaller version of my original picture to draw the colors out of it with the eyedropper tool. I taught myself as I went to use the gradient mesh tools and used the eyedropper tool on each and every mesh point to get my colors as close to real as I could. If I could improve this project, I would not have chosen to put my bottle on a towel. I feel as though the towel really took away the composition of my piece because of the texture.

Clucks & Moos Website Homepage Design

Description of Assignment: For this assignment, we were to design a homepage of an educational website particularly aimed for children ages 3-7. We were given the title Clucks & Moos by our professor and the site was to be all about animals. The only things we needed to include was the title of the site and the different names of the pages we could navigate to.

My Design Solution: I like a simple style. I feel as though my design is easy to read and easy to understand how to navigate to and from different pages of the website. My vision for the site is that when you click on the animal head, it would do some type of motion and then direct you to the page the text above says. At first, I had a scaled-down version of the barn and animals in the lower left-hand corner. My purpose for that was for when one was on a different page, that would always be there to navigate where you wanted to go next. I figured, then, that it wasn't really necessary to have on the home page. I also purposefully chose more subtle colors, rather than the normal bright reds, blues, and greens most things designed for children have. Again, like I said, this is a simple concept designed to be easily understood by young children.