Student Critique

I liked this tumbnail because it kept my attention the most out of the ones on the page. The two cows draw attention to the text box and the thought bubbles create a diagonal between the title of the event and the describing text box. There is also no bleed, and the placement of the cows behind the text creates depth, further drawing the attention of the viewer. The first problem I see with this comp is that it does not specifically mention in the title that it is a chili cook off, it just describes the week long event that the cook off is taking place during, which could draw some who know what AG week is away from the ad. Also, there is a large amount of negative space near the bottom of the page that takes the almost disects the poster between the illustration and the foot note text. Also, the comp needs more dark areas. This can be solved by darkening the text color of the title and date. And fiallly, making the text box larger than the title in the thought bubble would make the overall composition seem more balanced and also get rid of some of the negative space near the bottom.

original magazine pics

indesign

For this project I took an article on hotwings and recreated it in indesign. I chose this because it looked the most professional of my indesign projects, most proabaly because it was based of a real magazine. I changed some of the margins slightly and relinked a broken link that was in the file. I was considering consolidating the number of different fonts and font colors, but that was how the magazine realy was so I decided not to alter it.
[sorry for the wonky formatting of this post, I'm running off 2 hours of sleep :)]

Photoshop 2

I had fun with this piece mostly because I was able to use all my own photography to make it. I also enjoyed the message that I made with it combining the message on the billboard (made out of the magazine picture) saying "Do you inhale" with the smoky sky that is a combination of the pen and ink drawing and the posterized effect. I made one major change to the work by adding the posterized effect. Before the effect was added, the picture did not flow together well and looked somewhat like I had just pasted a color photo on top of a black and white photo (what I essentially did) but adding the filter unifed the work better and gave it the look of a finished composition.

Photoshop 1

I love doing photo retouches. I've taken 2 years of graphic design before this and it is always my favorite project of the year. I also get lots of practice at it since my mom is an antique dealer and has me fix lots of the photos she gets in. I also have been experimenting with various retouch techniques and like combining tools such as clone stamp, healing brush, and modifying the color modes. I was not really sure how to fix the parts of the photo that I did not already correct. I had lots of trouble with the fade in the bottom left corner and making it the same as the surrounding area without using a massive amount of clone stamp that would have made it obvious that I sampled the area next to it. I enjoyed this work alot and was happy that I was able to get rid of the crease lines.

illustrator 2

I was super excited about doing the Japanese prints in illustrator. I thought that the different shades and almost watercolor like gradients present in them would be interesting to try and recreate. I chose this one simply because I liked both of the prints for this assignment, I just liked this one more for both its accuracy and for its watercolor appearance. I also liked the way that this looked aesthetically. I would probably hang this on my wall whether or not I made it. I made very minor improvements on this before submitting it. I connected a few paths that I noticed were not originally connected and made some of the shapes more organic looking. Other than that, I was fairly happy with this work.

Illustrator 1

For my first illustrator piece I chose the car obviously because it was my strongest illustrator work. This project gave me a more intense look at how to create vector art and also using gradients on certain portions of the car next to solid colored parts of the car to give a glare, shinny effect. I went back and fixed some of the up close details that needed to be pulled in closer where white spots were still showing, and I also edited the shadow feathering under the car so that I was more accurate to the photo. I liked this one... it took forever, but I'm very happy with the results.