WEEK 5 - midterm

so, we had the misterm today and I think I did really good on it. I liked the way my photoshop pictures came out. I added shadows, color burns, etc . . . overall I am compltely pleased with my photoshop part of the midterm. For the illustrator part I was a little confused on what to do at first, but I got an idea in my head and just kind of went with it. I tried to make the word fun relate to little kids and learning with the big letter blocks they use. I used basic colors, yellow, red, and blue. I then added a drop shadow to the blocks and the letters, I really like the way it turned out. Basically I like this class, I am learning some new things and refreshing somethings I already knew but forgot about.

WEEK 4 - illustrator tutorial

We learned about Illustrator today in class. I have used it before but its never my first choice of applications because it usually confuses me. This week I understood everything we did and actually went back and added in a sky background on my own. I am interested in learning what you would do if you started from scratch, not already having all the layers set up for us. Overall I think my picture came out good. I liked this tutorial

My most disengaged moment of class was the beginning when I couldnt get the password on my computer to work!! Other than that class was good. I like messing around in photoshop, indesign, illustrator, etc. Its really interesting to see how many things you can actually do with these applications.

PROJECT 2 - powerpoint presentation of manipulated images

The picture I chose I am not going to use in my website. I just really like the picture, the colors in it, and I thought it would be fun to manipulate in photoshop. Here is the origial pic . . .

•I then placed the image into photoshop in a 5x7, 72 resolution, and RGB color.
•The first thing I did was go to the filter gallery, brush strokes, and selected ink outlines. This made the image darker in most areas.
•I then took the smudge tool to bring some of the inside color outwards. Then I took the paintbrush tool (a transparent spray paint) and added some yellow throughtout the picture.
•I found a cloud image on that I wanted to use as a background, so I placed that behind the image I was manipulatiing. Using the magic wand and lasso tool I selected what I didnt want and deleted it to show the cloud background coming through.
•I wasnt really happy with the image yet so I went back into the filter gallery to texture and selected craquelure.
•Finally I selected layer styles, drop shadow and adjusted the blend mode, distance, spread, opacity, noise, distance, spread, and size

WEEK 3 - picture manipulation in photoshop

•In photoshop we took a the original picture of Arches, brought in the tile picture and adjusted the texture, added a shadow, and then transformed (you can change perspective, warp. skew, rotate, or simply free tranform). Duplicate the tile as many times needed . . . for the tile that was under the rock, simply place the tile where it should be, get the "lasso tool" and highlight the rock that should be shown, click delete and the rock looks like it is placed over the design. Next we brought in a picture of the ocean, dragged it to the top (covering the arches) . . . loaded the selection as arches, then layer mask - reveal all . . . and the ocean automatically goes in the background of the original picture.

• This week we learned about changing the preferences (making sure cursors and rulers are all correct), image size, canvas size, making sure the picture is viewed in "actual pixels".
• All picture dowloaded to the web should be 72 resolution, a higher resolution doesnt mean a better picture, it just means it will take longer to download on the website.
• Bitmat image is a digital picture

• RASTER VS VECTOR:
- Raster, is a bitmat image and is made up of pixels
- Vector, a combination of lines and dots



•º• RASTER IMAGE FORMATS •º•
BMP - limited bitmat file format not suitable for web (never save image under this format)
GIF - compressed format good for internet graphics with solid clors (not best format)
JPEG - compressed format (compressed at a lower resolution) good for photographs
TIFF - not a compressed format (cant lower resolution) most popular for artwork <~~ personal sketches, etc . . .

•º• VECTOR IMAGE FORMATS •º•
EBS - flexible file format that contains a combination of bitmat and vector information
PICT - used on Mac computers, can contain vector and raster data
SWF - flash applications (all animations)
SVG - emerging xml (what you save images as when you are coding)

WEEK 2 - tutorial

My most engaged part of this class would have to be when we were working in Dreamweaver. I have never used that application before and I actually am excited to work more on my webpage. I look forward to learning more about Dreamweaver and seeing my webpage really come together

My least engaged moment of the class was when we were going over photoshop. I have had classes using this application before so I already knew how to do what we went over. It was a good refresher though, it basically reminded me of everything I learned before.
Here is what we worked on in class . . .

wireframe for project 6

Here is the wireframe for project 6. The background is going to be a navy blue, the script at the top of the page (quote) will be pink and in a script font. The rest of the font will be Optima and will be white. The first page you see will be the quote only and you will click it to enter the site, then the quote will be at the top of the top of the homepage. From there you can click on the links history, different areas, about, contact info, etc. there will also be a few images on the homepage and at least one image on each link.

WEEK 1 - my first class

So this was my first class at The Art Institute of Tampa. I moved to Tampa about 2 weeks ago from the Boston area. Its alot different here but I have been getting used to it. This seems like its going to be a class that will help me learn more about computer applications. I did have a year of classes at Umass Dartmouth majoring in Graphic Design, I already like it better here being in a design school instead of a university. I do miss all my friends back home alot but its ok here.

oh ya . . . the red sox rally was in boston today