Famous Painting with Squares

ONE [BOX] SECOND BEFORE AWAKENING FROM A [BOX] DREAM CAUSED BY THE FLIGHT OF A [BOX] BEE AROUND A [BOX] POMEGRANATE

The assignment was to choose a famous painting (by a famous artist, I suppose) that we thought had a dynamic composition, take the painting in Adobe Illustrator, and redo the entire composition with nothing but the rectangle tool and only three colors of our choice plus black and white.  I knew immediately what painting I wanted to do since it was perfect for the assignment--One Second Before Awakening From a Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate.  It really only has three colors, it has a dynamic composition, and it was done by my favorite artist Salvador Dali.  (I even named my pet lizard after him).

So after hours of converting the tigers, the woman, the elephant, the fish, and the landscape into squares this is what I got.  It was relatively easy until I got down to the nitty gritty stuff like the tiger stripes, but that was worth it because they actually kind of look like tigers.  Aside from the being square and all.  Seriously, rectangles and squares are the most boring shapes in all of geometry.  

And now, before I conclude this post, because I cannot restrain myself, I will make a list of all the horrible puns I can associate with this project:

"I had to think outside the box for this project"

"The fish is eating three square meals a day"

"The tiger is blocking my view of the sky"

"This project required me to do some boxing"

"The woman's hair is (rec)tangled"

"The tigers are square dancing with the woman"

"Look at that fish square in the eye"

"Someone should knock that tiger's block off"

"The fish is wishing he had cube steak for dinner instead"

"The elephant is the tallest guy on the block"

Project: Design a Poster

This assignment was to design a poster for a mock lecture series about contemporary design.  We were not allowed to use images, just text, lines, colors, and shapes.  We were also supposed to avoid letting our poster look like a memo and use the grid.  So I used rectangles, but I added a bit more fun to what is otherwise the most boring shape in geometry and gave one box some little twirlies, another some inverted spikes, and the overall color scheme of the boxes a gradient.  At first the purple and yellow was a different purple and orange, but that looked too much like Halloween colors, so I changed it to what you see now.

The gray, black, and white project with the alternating colors, letters, and letter-sizes has had its colors redone!  This time I just took the original file and replaced the colors on everything...and by using my three favorite colors, I have created what is probably the most eye-killing color combination you can have without using neon orange and pink...and at least with the orange, I was sorely tempted.  Notice that some of the letters appear fuzzy even when they aren't.  And best of all, if you stare at it long enough, you can be as blind as me!

This assignment was particularly difficult for me because I am NOT good with patterns.  We had to divide the artboard into 9 squares, use 3 letters in 3 sizes, and alternate between gray, black, and white.  For me, this meant a lot of backtracking was involved.  The letters I chose are part of my name, but obviously not my initials.

With the pen tool we took this image and reduced it to shapes and flat colors.

Here is my bracelet that I scanned and turned yellow with the overlay function (the beads were blue to begin with so they came out green).  

Chapter 4--The Grid

This is the exercise for Chapter Four, which taught us how to use the grid system in Adobe Illustrator.  This project was a little frustrating to me.

This is the exercise with symmetry and negative space that we did for chapter 3.

For this project we made a digital collage out of images that we found on the internet and manipulated/put together in Adobe Photoshop.  The assignment called for two collages that relate to each other in some way.My idea came from a painting I did a few years back where a butterfly's wings were the image of a night sky.  The first collage is basically a digital version of that--and layer by layer I copied and pasted images of deep-space (mostly from NASA, I suppose) into the sections of a butterfly's wing.  The image I used had the butterfly perching on a flower, so I found an image of planet Earth as seen from space and pasted that over the flower and did some erasing to reveal the butterfly's legs.  And at some point during my internet searches, I found an image of the moon over the water that I simply had to use for the background, so I pasted that in behind the butterfly, than erased the original background for the butterfly. The background was green and left a green outline around the butterfly, so I used the brush tool at low opacity to give the butterfly an eerie green glow.
The second one was inspired by part of the background image in the upper right hand corner, which I found while searching for images of deep-space for the butterfly in the first collage.  It is an image of a nebula (a cloud of space-junk) that is shaped, in my opinion, like a bird spreading its wings, so at low opacity I placed a bird over the nebula in the image, which I put in the top right hand corner.  Because the bird was a seagull, I decided to make the main part of the image the ocean and pasted a wave I got from google on there, and then overlapped that with an orca whale and used the paintbrush tool to make the ocean spray.  And in the same way I pasted the bird over the nebula and reduced the opacity, I put some fish in the darker parts of the wave.  

Marlene Dietrich in Photoshop

As directed in class, I took a photo from google of Marlene Dietrich, put her in photoshop, and colored her layer by layer, then I changed the settings of most of the layers to "Overlay" so the color didn't just cover up the photo.  So I guess here's what she looks like with purple hair, pink lip gloss, and crazy blue eyes.

Yet another reason fame is probably horrible:  years and years after you're gone some college student is going to take your picture and manipulate and violate it.