Baby Steps in Progress

 This week was part two of last week's attempt at making myself an Avatar person.  I decided that scouring my own face and neck for wrinkles was doing me no good on a holiday week! So instead, I repeated the project with a picture of my daughter, Hannah, and I am glad I did.  After doing it the first time, some of the procedures were lost on me in the attempt to keep up with the instructional video and just get every step accomplished. I quickly learned I didn't learn enough to do it from the written instructions only.  I like this attempt much better. The lighting on her face was better to begin with, and while I thought that would make it easier, it did not.  I also want to point out that people with blue eyes needed to find their own colors. I couldn't get them as yellow, even when I turned down the blue and turned up the yellow. I like how it turned out, though. The lips gave me the most trouble.  Fun project! Here is the original picture for reference: 

 This week's brief has me turning myself into an Avatar, you know, the blue kind. .  In retrospect, the tutorial started out with a perfect model, flawless skin already tweaked to perfection. I jumped right in and it proved to be a mistake, but a good learning tool. I wasn't quite sure how the sketch process was supposed to work with this. Maybe it should have been about picture choice. I say it was a mistake because, dang, wrinkles look SO much worse in blue! But I'm not here to be Christy Turlington, so I did not go wipe away my beautiful life lines. Also, the "roughing up" of her porcelin skin is a step I likely could have skipped. My glasses were also a challenge! I tried several things, eventually, the process lessened the glare on my right side, but the left almost looks perfectly clear.   If we consider this my "sketch," then for next week's post I will go back in and smooth out the skin first and we can compare the two.     

 I seem to be obsessed with this assignment.  I've had some great feedback and after seeing my classmates' beautiful art I was inspired to go back and make a couple tweaks.  The first one I straightened all of the text and made the logo a bit smaller on the back cover. I'm not sure if I like the text on the front being straightened, but it is here for comparison.  The second one, I made the adjustments I thought worked best and added the star. Leaving it out has been bugging me all week. The bottom one is my choice, but I'm also left with the feeling that the back needs less text...Either way it was WAY fun to play with the blending options this week. 

I decided to go right from the sketches to working on the project this week, without getting distracted. These book cover designs are shown in order: The final draft, the first workup and the original cover. While I liked the colorful book cover, I decided to add gold text as the new element required by the design brief, and I was glad I did! The black, with the appropriate shadowing makes the title stand out so much better. It also has a way of pulling they eye to the center, to see the shadowy man on his journey. I think it uses the Law of Pragnanz -- that we want to see the most simple stable image. I think this is a cover that would catch the eye and draw people in. It was fun to do the gold. I could not figure out how to turn the barcode gold, but that would be my preference. The white draws away a bit from the contrast and the idea of coming out of the blackness to the shining gold print. This is the first attempt. Although I like the colors, it comes off to me as chaotic, and dr

 This project asks me to re-imagine a recently read book. I have chosen It Is All Right by Isabel M. Hickey. I love this book and have read it many times. It is currently out of print. I was able to obtain a few copies in the early 2000's from Isabel's daughter, Helen, who had continued the company after her mother's death. It is a self-published book and has a leather cover with gold inlay print. Very simple.    In the first sketches, I imagined doing a similar cover, adding color and depth to the gold star on the original. I did not want to change the symbol as it has meaning. The first sketch shows the words representing the meaning of each spike and I also imagined adding the text. The third sketch, would place a depiction of the Tarot card "The Fool" with the text of the title superimposed over the card.                           The fifth sketch imagines "the fool" walking up a mountain, and I toyed with using a sunburst and a sunset, all images d