Matte Painting

The assignment was much easier masking out the sky background and the background for the man in the cliff. Using any other tool other than the brush tool will take anyone quite a long time to finish. Color correcting the images together was quite difficult since they all had completely different color saturation and lighting. I ended up choosing a light filled theme for the entire piece since I believe it is much more vivid and good to look at. I used the eraser tool for the ‘man off cliff’ in order to get the right alignment for the layer masks, then used the stamping tool.

                I definitely liked how the layers worked with each other. The man on the cliff mixed well with the background after I was finished with the piece. The sky mixed well within the same cliff image. I decided to get rid of the blue cliffs all the way in the back since it messed up the color corrections too much and just added the bottom half of the sky image instead.

Final Inking

For this assignment we were assigned to ink our self-portrait and our redrawn image that we have done on that same week (illustrator). It was essential for me to use thin and thick lines in order to create a good illusion in the drawings. I had to make the thin/thick lines based on distance and the coloring/shading based on light. My self-portrait looks like a Picasso sort of piece which makes the look more unique, but it can have more lines in order to get the shading in there properly. It is a fairly straight forward assignment, but it was difficult working with the pen tool in order to fill in spaces with colors/shades. I had to ground the pen work in order for the fill bucket to work, but doing so didn’t allow me to shade in the pen strokes themselves. That being said I should of just copied the whole layer in order to keep an original one and then make edits to the other one in order to ink the strokes.

Self Portrait

For this assignment I was assigned to redraw a picture taken of me. This self-portrait was layered out in adobe Illustrator using the brush blob tool. I had to work more with geometrical shapes to make the portrait much simpler. I had to outline the hair in a weird way in order to make the portrait more fluent and easier to color in when I shade in color. Using the pen tool is actually pretty difficult for me. If it wasn’t for the practice on illustrator/Photoshop I had before, this would of taken me hrs., except it took me just one. I did manage to make the outlines of the major shapes and dents though, and I have to say I really did capture my face in this one.

Redraw Image

For this assignment, we were given the task to ink a picture of a drawing we made in either illustrator of Photoshop. I used Illustrator for this drawing since it is a lot easier to manipulate all sorts of drawing utensils, while Photoshop is more about photo-manipulation. I had to use the pen tool for the contour of the whole picture. Making the lines for the main drawing was important, but I had to change the coordinates of the anchors and I had to change the thickness of the strokes in order to make it look nicer.

            It was hard trying to make the thin and thick lines at the same time. Connecting the lines with the pen tool was hard as well. That being said, all I did was change/connect the strokes uniform when I messed up. The hot keys “O” and “P” was really useful when I had to work in consistency with the drawing.

Color Blending #2

            In this assignment we were given objects to fill in and color-blend them in their interior. It is essential to copy the borders of the object and select the interior of the objects in order to color in and shade without having any messy mistakes. I used the hard brush in order to fill in the objects first. Then I used the soft brush with lower opacity in order to blend it in the end. The other assignment was to redraw a drawing made from hand. All I used was the brush tool in order to redraw the drawing. Later on I can color in the drawing, as well as add blending to it as I please. The assignment wasn’t that hard to begin with, but it was time consuming. I have good experience with the type tool, but I should of just copied the borders instead of the whole thing to save more time.

Color Blending

Photoshop to me just turn into an entire piece of canvas with a lot of different utensils at my disposal. The only reason I used the brush tool was for filling in cut outs I did with the lasso/wand tool, along with the eyedropper tool. Creating a whole piece out of scratch seems extremely difficult, especially if you don’t know how to blend colors. In this assignment I started by using the eyedropper tool to adjust the colors I wanted and stamp the colors with the brush tool right next to the shapes (to make the work more efficient). The same process was used for the extra credit (apple). After that I just made my custom brushes out of pictures I have.

              I started coloring with the shapes with a blurred out brush tip, going with a 50 sized brush. The sphere was difficult to work with since the colors weren’t in a straight orderly fashion, so I had to arch away the painting strokes. To make the visible strokes disappear I used the same blurred out brush tool and lowered the opacity and flow (using the eyedropper to get the color in the middle).

Color Correction #2

For this assignment we had to color correct an image that we have taken over the past weekend. In this image my girlfriend’s mom is posing in front of a pair of vases and a nice painting with light shining on her from the outside. The image originally was too bright and had color problems (little saturation and it looked burned). I had to make the picture look normal by adding enough saturation in the highlights but not in the shadow parts. The most difficult part for this assignment was making the subject colorful with-out making her look too fake.

            I used levels, curves, and hue/saturation in order to control the balance of colors in the picture. The brightness/contrast of the image was then solving by using the so named adjustment. In the end I just finished it off with the color balance and the vibrance in order to make the picture very vivid.