Illustrator Self Portrait

This is my final image for our Illustrator vector project. The self portrait photo I used was of myself at the beach. However, since the goal of the project was to somehow transform the image to reveal something about ourselves, I decided to create a background out of objects in Illustrator that was inspired by art nouveau images that I had seen online while I was looking for an object-building tutorial in Illustrator. I decided to juxtapose the natural imagery with the geometric shapes in the background because they both reveal something about myself- I love the natural, wild, unpredictable-ness of the outdoors but I am also a person who likes to keep my environment ordered to reduce chaos.

New Media Reflection

     

Today we had a speaker, Prof. Benjamin Bellas, show us examples of art using New Media. I especially like the pieces he showed us by Arcangel, particularly the one of the spliced videos of cats playing pianos to recreate an classical music. The way that the artist uses the medium to create a juxtaposition of new and old to make the 'new' versions seem ridiculous was a very successful concept. I also like the art exhibition with the hacked bowling video games that play themselves. I think  that when you see the idea put in such a  way, it makes it seem stupid to spend money on a video game to recreate an experience that you could easily have in real life. One thing that does strike me about the pieces where the artist recreated old paintings using video game technology, is that although the new medium made the paintings look absolutely ridiculous, there wasn't necessarily less skill involved in creating the new pieces. Creating physics engines, character skins, and all the other elements in the video game pieces must have taken hundreds of labor hours.

Visual Poetry Assignment

The purpose of our visual poetry assignment was to serve as an introduction to Adobe Illustrator. As I worked with the program, I became increasingly frustrated by the limited 'scope' that it was designed to work within. As a medium, I found Illustrator to be the inferior of Photoshop because it cannot work with images in the same way that Photoshop can. While I understand that the text component of the work was to be the focus, it was frustrating to be limited in that way when we were expected to create a work of art. I eventually strayed from the assignment, and finished my design in Photoshop. Here are two versions of my work in color, using a background photo of Windsor Castle that I took in spring 2005.

This is the second version, without the white highlight of the sword. I quite like this version better, but I wasn't sure if the sword could be clearly recognized, hence why I added the highlight in the upper version.

Staying within the scope of Illustrator, I lose the image entirely because it cannot be manipulated in conjunction with the sword in this program. No modification of either image can be done, except for some scaling up on the sword because it is a downloaded vector image. Since it is unrecognizable in this form, I do not feel that I went outside the scope of the assignment by including an outside image. 

Or the inverse of this image, which looks something like this:

But, you see, by changing it to the white background and the black words I have been forced by the program to change the meaning of my piece. The point is for the sword to be missing from the picture- but I cannot work with the image in Illustrator so I cannot change it from black. And having it read as a black image on a white background makes the sword present in the image, and not missing. 

So, I have four versions of this assignment and the ones that I modified in Photoshop are much closer to what I originally conceptualized while the two created solely in Illustrator fall short of what I wanted. Que sera, sera.