Poster Reflective Essay

I chose the theme of movie poster because to me it seemed more eye catching and easier to do. I tried to make up a movie but had no luck with the amount of time I had and the ideas I wanted to convey so I picked two movies that were already out there. The first one was Black Swan and surprisingly it had a couple posters made for it already that weren't the original movie poster design. I had a hard time making sure I didn't copy them, but I believe I did a pretty good job. The second one was Spiderman because I thought I could do something cool with a spiderweb in it and I think it turned out pretty good as well.


The main tool I used for these two posters was the masking tool. At first I planned on making everything from scratch with the shape and pen tools but decided that would take to long and since I'm kind of an OCD freak I wouldn't have it finished in time for the due date so I decided to mask the main characters front he movies and then put a solid color overlay on them. The Spiderman one I did all gradient overlays and the Black Swan one I did all solid color overlays. It turned out pretty well except for the fact that I'm really OCD so I took a very long time making sure the edges were perfect with the picture. Doing the solid colors to me made it more dynamic and abstract. I didn't want to have any part of their faces or outfits showing but at least have the main outline so you still knew what it was.

One of the main compositional components I did was symmetry with a little abstract in the Black Swan poster. The dancers and the swan are all perfectly symmetrical with each other but to add the abstract I put in the red feathers in random descending order to show the sort of chaos I guess of the movie and the fact that their red as opposed to all the black and white and grey draws the audience's attention towards them and makes the poster pop a little more. The Spiderman poster was suppose to be sort of abstract but I sort of got a little lazy with the the placement of the figures and name. That was the poster I'm not the most proud of because I ran out of ideas in the amount of time I had for cool effects.

Spiderman Movie Poster

Black Swan Movie Poster

Portraiture Reflective Essay

I believe that participating in a global project is exciting. Knowing that something small as one contribution to a huge collection can make a difference in the world. Knowing the background of the project by watching the video about how it started is also very exciting because you know it worked if it’s still going on. 

The people I used in this project were myself, and my two friends Shannon and Taylor. When I asked them if I could take a picture of their face the first reaction was “Can you take away my acne?” and I was like “Of course so is it a deal?” And they accepted. First they didn’t now how close I was going to get to their faces and if they were suppose to smile or not. I told them to make a strong face of something they believed in and at first they didn’t know what I was talking about so I told them to just smile. The pictures still turned out great. I used photoshop to take away their acne like I promised and the lines under their eyes so they look young and awake. Other than using black and white afterwards there wasn’t any major changes. It took me awhile to get a picture of myself since I was alone but after about 20 pictures I got a good one. 

I believe very strongly that art can change the world. Art is what everyone sees on a daily basis. Art isn’t just painting and drawing. Posters and advertisements are art as well and people are swayed by what they see in the media. So yes art can change the world if you get enough people to look at it. 

Shannon Inside Out

Taylor Inside Out

Me Inside Out

Photomontage Reflective Essay

I acutally used six images instead of just four because I was originally only going to use four until I started adding a couple and a whole new world started creating itself in my head so I added two more pictures to round it off. All my images are snagged from the internet. At first I really had no idea what I was going to do or what pictures I was planning to use but I knew I wanted some sort of scenary in it so I started with the mountain reflection picture which I took from http://desktopwallpaper-s.com/42/-/Norway_Mountains/ . Then I decided to have a whole different background but in space since it seemed like a cool concept so I looked up pictures of space and pulled the sweet background you see on almost every new mac model from this site http://www.coolwallpaperslk.com/2011/03/space-hd-wallpapers.html . Then I didn't know what to put in it but the mountain was floating so I decided to put some sort of flying thing in there so that's where the airplane came in which I snagged from http://www.loc.gov/pictures/ . Then I decided to through an animal in there and thus the eagle takes form and came from http://www.squidoo.com/bald-eagles-?utm_source=google&utm_medium=imgres&utm_campaign=framebuster . Then when I saw that these two melded together I decided to put something on the other side but with ground transportation so I got the horse from http://www.whitegadget.com/pc-wallpapers/141792-horse.html and the car from http://www.carinsurancecomparison.com/minimum-car-insurance/

The most challenging thing for me when putting the images together was finding a way to blend them so they all kind of looked as if they sort of belonged in the picture. I played around with different lighting and textures and finally came to consenses of putting all the small pictures in luminasity and the background in pin light. The mountains remained the same. It was tedious when I was masking the the smaller pictures and the mountain so that their backgrounds didn't show but I got it done and it wasn't terribly difficult.

The story I guess I'm trying to convey here in this photomontage is that there use to just be nature in the world before humans and electronics and those kinds of modes of transportaion but now they're just a refection to today's society. I thought the mountains and space could tie it all together and make it look like a different world.

Two Different Worlds