Art Blog #5

1. Looking at my midterm and final, I would say my biggest accomplishment is learning to successfully work with stock images. I'd never really done any pieces with stock images before. It sure is annoying finding good stock images. I learned a lot about how to work with stock images and how to piece them together to look like one picture. The final was actually easier than the midterm because I used less stock images. I thought it would be hard to turn a day picture into night, but it wasn't so bad. I like using lighting and thinking about how the light hits the things around it. Both pieces turned out better than I expected and I'm really happy with them.

2. Umm, this question is sort of similar to the first question. I would say working with stock images was the most challenging thing I did, and my biggest accomplishment. I didn't really "master" it though. Putting them together in the piece is not the hard part, finding pictures that can fit together and go along with your vision is the hard part. But good stock images are hard to find on google. Other than that nothing was really "difficult." I'll just talk about my other projects too, and what was sorta of hard when making them, cause otherwise I'll just end up talking about the midterm and final the whole time.

Text is definitely annoying to work with. On the Harry Potter magazine it took me forever to get the text to be readable and stand out, since the background was kinda busy. The second quiz, the colored image of Lucille Ball, wasn't really that hard. I'd actually never colorized an image before then, but I've known how to do it for a long time. I just sort of figured you use color blending mode. I like colorizing though, it's fun. On the third quiz, the fixed image of a mall, I actually had to extend part of the purse rack in the upper left because it got ripped off a little bit. I had to use the clone stamp on what was originally there. It was really annoying, but it looks ok I think. As for the fourth quiz, the greaseheart poster, this is actually my least favorite of all the pieces. I didn't really have a good idea for it other than the quote. It certainly doesn't compare to the "Dirty Dancing with Wolves" poster.

3. I'm just gonna talk about the midterm and final again here. I'm not really sure what the question is asking. I would say my midterm and final are the perfect examples of creating meaning out of random images. I mean I took various stock images and pieced them together to form a picture. I'm not sure how to compare and contrast that. Not sure what "not being just a showcase of technique" means either. I would say my pieces aren't just showcasing techniques, cause I use a lot of random techniques in each piece. None of them focus on one technique except the mall picture, since I used the clone stamp almost exclusively there.

Art Blog #4

Well I haven't exactly decided what I want to do for my final project yet, but I think I'm going to take a stock picture of either a valley or old Japanese town and make it into a night scene. I was browsing through photoshop tutorials on psd.tutsplus.com and came across this tutorial, which gave me the idea. I think I'm going to continue my themes from the midterm and use solitude and fantasy as my big idea. I either want to make a scene like the tutorial and add a geisha and make a very serene night scene, or make a night time valley scene and add a castle and stuff. I want to add lots of colors to make it more fantasy like. Sort of like this image. I would say that image is part of my inspiration. I was also inspired by that new CG disney castle opening. I really like the lighting and the scene they created with the train and the lights from towns in the distance. I'm considering adding fireworks to my scene and just going with a fantasy big idea. I'll probably just play around with my final piece and see what works like usual.

I'm not sure if I answered all the questions for this blog or not. I'll just list them out.

1a. My big idea will be fantasy (maybe solitude/imagination?). A lot of the times I sort of decide along the way after I see what sort of scene works out well. With the midterm I had no idea what the scene would look like until I actually started piecing the mountains together. When a scene starts working out I like to come up with a story in my head of what it's about and my big idea sort of comes through then. Although we're supposed to know what it is now, so I'm going to go with fantasy for the moment.

1b. This seem more like a retrospective question... I dunno how it's going to communicate my meaning exactly until it comes together a bit. I need more time to play around before I can explain that sort of stuff. What I have in my head now is to do a night scene like the tut, but I want to add lots of pretty colors like the "night sky" image I posted above. Maybe I'll add two moons to the sky. Fantasy scenes always have two moons for some reason. Fireworks would be cool too cause they are lots of pretty colors.

1c. Uhhh... it will be used for my enjoyment I guess? Maybe I could make it into a wallpaper? I really just want to try my hand at doing something different than I'm used to in photoshop.

2. My influences/inspirations for this piece: the photoshop tutorial I posted earlier, the "night sky" image on deviantart, and the cg disney opening. Plus Edward Hopper if I decide to include some sort of solitary mood.

3. One new technique that I will use? Um well, they used a vanishing point filter in the tut, and I've never used that before, so maybe I'll use that? I haven't made very many scenery pictures using stock imagery other than my midterm so that's new.

Art Blog #3

I feel like I have to mention Edward Hopper when talking about artists that influence my work. So I'm going to talk about him first.

I like the feeling of simplicity and solitude that Hopper's paintings evoke. In his paintings, the subject is usually by themselves or simply not interacting with the people around them. The subjects in his paintings frequently have their back turned to the viewer as well, making it seem like the subject is even further detached from the world. I always felt his paintings were very sad to look at, but in a good way, like there's some sort of underlying peace.

I like Edward Hopper's paintings because I think my big idea is the same as his: solitude. I frequently have only one subject in my paintings as well, usually with their back turned. I included two examples of my work that I think are somewhat influenced by Hopper. I always liked Hopper's style as well. The colors and shapes are really simple, but he's able to invoke this sort of sad mood with his paintings that I always liked and wanted to emulate.

I'm not sure what I want to do for my final project yet, but I already incorporated my own big idea of solitude in my midterm. There's only one person in it, with their back turned to the viewer. I didn't really intentionally include my big idea in the midterm. Those kind of Edward Hopper-like sad scenes are just what I usually feel inspired to create. I'm sure my personal big idea will come through in my final project as well.

I think what I can learn from Hopper is to more intentionally incorporate my big idea into my art. I haven't really put much thought into it before now, and my big idea usually just comes out naturally (or accidentally?). Although maybe it's a good thing that it comes out naturally without thought...

As for another artist that inspires me, I would have to say it's Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki is a Japanese animator who founded an animation studio called Studio Ghibli.

Miyazaki has a lot of big ideas in my opinion. The two biggest ones being humanity's relationship with nature, and the blurring of the line between good and evil. His movies frequently pit humans against nature, and he does not always define who the "villain" is. This is especially true is his movie Princess Mononoke. When there is a more, they usually have redeeming qualities, or have their own good reasons for doing what they're doing, even though they're pitted against the main character. I've always preferred this type of "villain" instead of the typical Disney villain that just wants to take over the world.

Miyazaki's work also usually has that tinge of sadness that I find appealing in Hopper's work, as well as a underlying feeling of hope. I like mixing sadness and hope in my art. I'm not sure if it comes off like that to other people, but it does to me at least.

I always admired animators and their ability to tell a story with their art. I would say I am influenced by Miyazaki in that I try my best to tell stories with my artwork too, even though it's just a static image and not animation. Even if it doesn't come through to others very well, I at least usually have a story in mind behind the image when I create art. Same goes for my midterm, but I'll explain that later in my artist's statement.

Again I'm still not really sure what my final project is going to be, but I will most likely have a backstory in my mind when I create it. I'd like to learn how to incorporate stories into my art. Miyazaki's stories are always deep, emotional, and thought-provoking. I would say that is the kind of story I have always wished to incorporate into my art. Of course, I'd say that everyone wishes their work to be thought provoking. If a viewer doesn't think at all about the meaning behind your art that would be sorta sad.

I can't really show Miyazaki's work as easily as I can Hopper's, since Miyazaki's work is all movies and copyrighted and such. But I included some movie trailers from youtube in the links below.

Links:
Edward Hopper
Spirited Away Trailer
Princess Mononoke Trailer

Art Blog #2

I chose this tutorial to follow for this blog. It tells you how to make a strawberry look like a bubble. The stock image I found from google is to the right. I used the bubble image from the tutorial after an unsuccessful google search for another one. It's very hard to find good stock images using google, especially when following specific tutorials like this.


I started off just as the tutorial says. I liquified the bubble in the shape of the strawberry and desaturated it. I then copied the layer and set one of them to overlay. I then cut the red part of the strawberry from the original image onto a new layer and desaturated that as well. This is the point at which I took the 2nd image on the right.

In order to create the illusion of seeing through the strawberry, I had to create a more colorful background than the original image had. I used the gradient tool, brush, and smudge tool to create the background seen in the image to the right. The background is the 3rd image on the right.


I then used the lasso tool to cut out all of the strawberry's seeds. I copied the new seed layer and set them both to overlay. On the layer copy I mirrored the image and lowered to opacity as these are supposedly the seeds on the other side of the bubble berry. I created a layer mask on the two layers with the liquefied bubbles, and made them a little more see-through. I also added some more leaves from another stock image that can be seen through the bubble, as well as a reflection of the original leaves.


For the final result I made the background quite a bit darker, and manually added some highlights with the brush to make it look more like a bubble. I still don't think it looks much a bubble though haha. The problem with some of these tutorials is they're really specific to the stock images the author used. In retrospect I should've just used the same image, cause his strawberry has natural highlights that make it look more bubbly.

Art Blog #1

Well since this blog essentially died as my Japan blog, it's now being used as my blog for art class.

The artist I chose is called Monty Oum. He works for a company called Rooster Teeth Productions, which specializes in creating CG animation shorts based on computer/video games. These can seen on their website roosterteeth.com. Their most famous work is called Red vs. Blue, based on the popular video game series called Halo. Monty Oum originally created CG videos in his free time, and was hired by Rooster Teeth for his skills.

A couple years ago I came upon the CG series entitled Dead Fantasy (a clip can be seen here). It's based on the popular RPG video game series called Final Fantasy, and a popular fighting game called Dead or Alive. In Dead Fantasy the female characters (scantily clad of course) from both series are pitted in an epic battle. This is clearly a video targeted at the male fans. As a rare female observer I don't care so much about the sexual imagery and was drawn in more by Monty's clear talent as a CG artist and the fact that it was based on characters I am familiar with. I have always admired CG animation and the animators who make it happen, and was thus astounded that one guy could make such a a large project like that in just his free time. The graphics aren't top-notch, but they are certainly decent, and the choreography was more impressive than almost anything I'd ever seen, even in professional work. I chose to focus on Monty Oum for this reason.

The following image is a wallpaper that Monty Oum made. It is unrelated to the aforementioned Dead Fantasy series, and features an original character. I will focus on this piece first.

Denotations: The first thing I noticed are the words "transient princess," which is the title of the piece. The image is mostly in grayscale, and there is a girl with long black hair, in a lacy white dress. She is wearing black boots and appears to be standing on a large white terrace or balcony.

Connotations: We all know that sex sells. As with the Destiny's Child magazine cover, Monty makes full use of this in his artwork, which primarily focuses on scantily clad women in sexual poses. This piece is no exception. Much of her outfit is see-through, and there is a strong focus on her showing off her physical appearance. She is looking towards the viewer in a pleading manner, as if beckoning. Her facial expression also seems to show innocence and weakness. If you look close there are various images of feathers within the image of the girl. Her hair seems to be made of feathers, and there are various feathers within the train of her dress as well. The feather imagery, the fact that she has one leg up on the railing, as well as the wind blowing her hair and dress seems to imply that she is about to fly away. Perhaps the girl is supposed to be a bird in a human form. The title "transient princess" suggests she is fleeting, which also supports my previous statement that she seems about to fly away. The title also implies that she is a princess. The large white balcony she is on seems like it could be part of a palace. Perhaps she feels trapped in her palace life, and simply wishes she could fly away from it and be free like a bird.

The next image is promotional artwork for Monty's Dead Fantasy series. It features a character from a game called Kingdom Hearts, which is related to Final Fantasy. The character is going to appear in a future Dead Fantasy installment.

Denotations: The image focuses on a young, blond girl, in a short white dress. She is wearing shiny white boots, and there is a sword-like weapon leaning against the wall nearby her. She is leaning on the wall in a hallway that is brightly lit and appears very sterile. There is text at the bottom of the image that says "I'll change your mind." This is the title of the piece. There is more text slightly less obvious than the title, as it is somewhat hidden in the background, and flows into the vanishing point of the hallway. It is on the ceiling of the hallway and says "Give me a chance."

Connotations: Since this is not an original character of Monty's, it's important to see how he has changed the character from her original design. Below Monty's image is the character's original design from the game Kingdom Hearts. As you can see, Monty has made her quite a bit older with a much more curvy body, and sexier clothing. Her new appearance, along with the text, seems to imply that she is past her innocent stage of childhood, and there is a big focus on sexuality here, as with the previous image. The curves of her body are very much emphasized by her position, and her expression once again seems to show weakness and beckoning. The empty hallway she's in doesn't appear to have any exits, so perhaps she is trapped. However, since Dead Fantasy is a series based on fighting, she is perhaps using her sexuality to lure her enemies into a trap. Her weapon is close at hand, and her left hand is stretched towards it and is close enough that she could easily grab the hilt at any moment.

Sexual imagery such as Monty's art is very prevalent in our society today. As a female who enjoys video games, which is a very male dominated market, I am quite used to the female characters being scantily clad in an effort to advertise to males and draw males into buying those games. It is the same advertising tactic that was used on the Rolling Stones magazine cover. Seeing such images everywhere and daily gets a bit tiring, but I can't deny that it sells. I respect Monty's work because I enjoy good CG animation and epic fight sequences, and because I once wanted to be a CG artist myself. He is currently working on future installments of his Dead Fantasy series, and I look forward to when they are completed.

Links:
Monty Oum's DeviantArt page
Transient Princess Image
"I'll change your mind" Image

Snow Festival

haha, I let my blog die again I suppose. Lots of stuff has happened so I'll summarize.

At the end of December, the mold in my dorm room started growing faster than ever, so I decided one night to just move out. A week later, I had a new apartment next to my friend. It's a lot nicer, hard wood floors, and my own kitchen and bathroom. But it costs over $600 a month instead of $200. So sadly I now have very little money left over in my scholarship each month.

A couple of weeks after I got my apartment, I started to get sick. The first week, it was just really bad headaches at night and some aching. I thought it would go away, but it just got worse. The next weekend I started getting fevers at night, and the headaches and pain just got worse. My throat starting hurting too. I skipped my Tuesday early morning class, but went to the later ones. Unfortunately I could barely talk at that point cause my throat hurt so bad. I got a fever later that night and asked my friend to take me to the doctor the next day.

Unfortunately the doctors here aren't very helpful. I went to two different doctors and all they did was look at my throat and tell me it was swollen and then give me antibiotics. I didn't go to school for a week and a half after that Tuesday. At my worst (which lasted about 5 days), I could barely swallow anything without severe pain, even water, and couldn't stand up for more than a few minutes at a time. I would get fevers at night and could barely sleep because of my throat. I stopped talking because it hurt and I could barely speak. My friend made me eggs and ran to the store for me. I finally started getting better after a week on the medicine. The doctors never actually did any tests, but I'm pretty sure I had tonsillitis.

A few weeks later, I went to the ATM to get my rent payment, and then my friend invited me to the travel agency where a group of my friends were planning to go to the Snow Festival in Hokkaido, the northernmost part of Japan. I'd wanted to go there forever, but I debated whether or not to do because it was expensive. Eventually I thought that I haven't seen any of Japan outside of Tokyo and Tsukuba, my university's city, since coming to Japan. I wasn't sure I'd ever get a chance to see the Snow Festival again, so I ended up using my rent payment to buy plane tickets and book a hotel for 3 nights.

A week and a half later, we were on a plane to Hokkaido. We left Friday morning since we have no classes on Friday. I went with two of my friends, and we were going to meet up with 4 of our other friends who left the night before. They were planning to stay longer than us three, so we weren't with them the whole time.

We got to our hotel around 3, and got really excited because the bathroom was really luxurious. Afterwards we headed to the station and took a bus to a part of the snow festival outside of town. This area had a bunch of ice slides you could ride down. Unfortunately it was freezing because we were essentially in the middle of an open field. We only lasted outside about 15min before having to duck inside to thaw. We went outside again and waited in line for the big slide, which was really fun, but we got so cold waiting we had to run inside again after. We headed back to town around 5, and walked around the main area of the snow festival. Which took place in a 12 block long park in town. The festival had tons of small and and a few huge snow sculptures. Which were amazingly detailed. We walked around for a couple hours looking the sculptures, while ducking inside somewhere whenever we got too cold.

The next day we slept in a little because we were all pretty tired from the long day the day before. We were going to leave at noon, but Home Alone came on tv, and seeing as I've never seen it, we decided to stay and watch it. So we finally left around 2, and stopped briefly at the underground mall so I could buy more socks and gloves, and then we got on a bus to the Sapporo Beer Museum. Sapporo is the name of the city we were in. It's the capital of the Hokkaido prefecture. And Sapporo is quite famous for its beer. It was a rather small museum, but you could try the beer for real cheap. It was really good.

After the beer museum we met up with the other 4 at the station, and we headed to the district of Sapporo with all the bars and restaurants. Another part of the snow festival was there. It was where they had all the ice sculptures. These were just as amazing as the snow sculptures. Pictures really don't do them justice. It started blizzarding while we were there, so we ducked inside a ramen shop for dinner. After dinner we headed home and watched The Bodyguard on tv before falling asleep.

The next day we had to check out of our hotel by 11 and change hotels, because the hotel we were in was booked that night. The next hotel was a lot farther out of the way, and not as nice. We dropped off our luggage and sat around for about an hour deciding what to do next. We looked through all the sightseeing books and eventually decided on a rather remote scenic mountain village where they had hot springs. The bus there took about an hour.

Our first stop in the mountain village was a small hot spring outside where you could bath your feet. Even with just my feet in that water I felt so much warmer. After the foot bath we walked around taking some pictures of hot spring waterfalls and the scenic river valley. Everywhere was covered in more snow than I've ever seen before. We eventually found our way to a shrine, which had a creepy underground tunnel with alcoves where they placed statues of the Buddhist goddess Kannon. After the shrine we wanted to go to this scenic suspension bridge overlooking the valley. Unfortunately the only path there was through the snow. Luckily people before us had carved a path already in the snow. The snow must've been 4-5ft deep. We made it up to the bridge finally, took some pictures, built a rather sad looking snowman, and heading back to the bus stop to head home.

We stopped at the hotel to rest and discovered our room was Japanese style, which made it a little more fun. After an hour we headed out for one last look at the snow festival.

The next day we were up by 630, and at the train station by 8 to catch the 30min train to the airport. The plane was a little over an hour, and then we had to wait another hour for the 1 hour bus ride home. We made it back 30min before our class started.

Kinda wish I'd chosen to go to Hokkaido University instead. It's in Sapporo. And Sapporo is a much more interesting city that Tsukuba. The trip was really fun, even though it was so cold. The temperature was about 5-10F. And a little colder outside of town. The whole time I was wearing earmuffs, a hat, two pairs of gloves, 3 pairs of socks and leg warmers, leggings, pants, boots, 4 undershirts, the warmest sweater I own, and my winter coat, and I was still cold. I would go back though. It was so much fun.

No, I didn't die...

Yes I know this blog has virtually died. It's been over a month since I last posted. I should've seen this coming really, when I got out of the habit of not updating daily. The last month has flown by, and I've been caught up and busy and distracted, much more so than the first 2 months here. I'll try to summarize as best I can, but really, there's far too much to say, much more than I could write here.

To my disbelief school finally got somewhat difficult here as the end of the quarter approached. Still not near as difficult as OSU, but enough that between hanging out with friends and doing homework I had little time to myself. Which was just fine really. The past month has been filled with the most of fun I've ever had I think, and I'm more than sad to see it has now ended. Most of the Californians that I met what feels like so long ago have now returned to America, as they were only here for one quarter. From mid-October, I had finally gotten really close to them and really felt like part of the group. As the end of November approached we all spent more and more time together, so I was quite sad to see them go. Thankfully some of our group is staying for a year like me, but at least for now, it doesn't feel quite the same. I already miss our 20+ people group outings.

As far as schoolwork goes, I had a presentation, two 10 page essays, and all my Japanese finals to study for within the last month. Many hours were spent in the library and quite a few all-nighters were pulled to get through that. Still no where near as rigorous as OSU's finals week, but quite time-consuming nonetheless. But it's all over now, and I've already started a new quarter. There's absolutely no break between the two quarters for some reason. Finals week ends, and the next week the new quarter begins. At least, we do get a month off after next quarter.

About two weeks ago before everyone left we all went on one of our last big group outings together to Disney Sea. It's a little different from Disneyland, with different scenery and rides and such. It's must prettier than Disneyland, and according to our Japanese friends, more romantic. The rides were on a whole less exciting, but there were a few highlights. Namely the Indiana Jones ride and the Tower of Terror, which I finally rode for the first time! The last chance I had was at Disneyworld when I was 5, and I was way too scared to go anywhere near it. I was really nervous waiting in line, cause I generally don't like freefalls, but it was so much fun! I don't know if the ride itself was different from the one in America. It kind of bounced up and down instead of just falling straight down all the way once like I thought it would. All in all it ended far too quickly :(

I can't really promise how much I'll update this from now on. I'll try to not let a month pass by again at least.