VIST 205 Graphic Design: 3D Representation and Final

With this design step I imported the "evil red LED light" .svg file into Maya 2013 and messed with converting the paths into planar geometry, and then extruding/beveling the geometry. Eventually I came up with sort of a landscape. I finished it off with a basic texture and a couple of lights.

The final step involved arranging each design iteration into a composition. I started with the original photo and arranged the steps so that they progressed into the posterized cropped images and then the vector images. From there you can see the split between the orange and pink images and their variations and the "Sinister"-themed images.

Poster for El Eternauta

I was bored so I decided to try my hand at an Illustrator Project that was more interesting. Here is a poster for the Argentine graphic novel El Eternauta by Hector G. Oesterheld and Francisco Lopez.

El Eternauta is a classic comic tale of aliens, robots, melodrama, flying saucers, ray guns, giant cockroaches, and zombies; all of which was the pulp of 50s and 60s comics. Having lived in Buenos Aires, I appreciate Oesterheld giving Argentina a voice in action comics. The book is well-paced (as long as you can read Castellano) and is highly entertaining for its "vintage" quality.

Here I took a bunch of scans from my personal copy of the book, arranged them into layers and messed around with transparency. The figure in the foreground is from the iconic scene where the main protagonist, Juan Salvo, steps out into a flurry of radioactive snow armed with a hunting rifle. In popular culture, the image has come to represent the ordinary man's honorable struggle against the forces of evil that surround him. The image is also a popular subject for graffiti artists in Buenos Aires.

The color of Juan Salvo's figure is based on the dark blue color of Salvo's suit on the "official" 50th anniversary edition of El Eternauta. It seems to be the "canonical" suit color, though I have seen it colored orange like a haz-mat suit.

Check out El Eternauta on Amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/El-Eternauta-1957-2007-50-x303/dp/9879085264/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1379546009&sr=8-3&keywords=el+eternauta

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VIST 205 GRAPHIC DESIGN ASSIGNMENT # WHATEVER

Working with adding text to the abstract vector images and including the word in the foreground, background, and as a pattern. The typeface needs to reflect the word chosen, with conscious design of color, composition, size, proportion, letter spacing, etc.

VIST 205 Graphic Design Assignment 05

Moving on to incorporating colors into the vector graphics:

Here I added a de-saturated ochre, a mix of red, orange and brown. Red, orange and brown are "appetite stimulants". Since the vector graphic was cropped originally from a photo of a toaster oven, I feel this choice of color symbolizes the comfort of food, brought with ease to our tables thanks to 20st-century technology.

For this image I added a cyan-teal color, indicating the cool, sleek, calm, detached life of ease brought to us by modern convenience products such as the toaster oven.

In this image I added a bold, somewhat darker tone of red. The red in the isolated round area is a symbol of the LED light, which turns red when an electronic device is activated or given power. The red spot becomes almost like the sinister eye of a potentially sinister beast: technology.

In this image I added a color trying to capture the sickly, green-yellow glow of florescent lighting, a symbol of 20th-century technology. Filmmakers often use florescent lighting because of its distinct color when recorded on camera. This color can represent the oppression of the city, as seen in Van Gogh's Night Cafe. 

VIST 205 Graphic Design Assignment 04

Week #3...

Moving into even more abstraction. First image is an invert of one of my "Abstract Vector Graphics":

Next I combined the original crop with its color inverse:

Below I took a crop from one of the high contrast images, ran an image trace and formed into a texture.

I multiplied the texture across the art board on Illustrator and applied it to each area of the graphic of a certain tone. The assignment was to replace all the black or white in the graphic; I thought it was too boring so I applied it to one of the lighter gray tones:

VIST 205 Graphic Design Visual Organization Annotations

Here's what my peers had to say about this first image:

"Repetition"

"Has similarity in curved shapes; repetition with the curves"

"The proximity and transition of the fuchsia object in the top half of the image creates a kind of rising motion"

"Clear division of shape and texture"

"Alignment that leads eye throughout composition"

"Repetition of color, shapes; figure-ground reversal in bottom half"

VIST 205 Graphic Design Assignment 03

Graphic Design Project Part 3:

Taking from one of the images from Tuesday, I made even smaller crops that formed abstract images. Then I opened them in Illustrator and converted them to vector graphics. I played with the Golden Ratio, unison, contrast, noise vs uniformity, balance, and emphasis. You know design stuff.

Here's the original image:

And below is the link to my vector graphics taken from cropping images from the original. I tried all night to figure out how to embed .svg files into Blogger, and it was really just too much trouble.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5sI_CZRTIKxalpPbFd3VGxYQTQ/edit?usp=sharing

VIST 205 Graphic Design Assignment 02

Assignment 02:

Selected one image from my previous six photos as my original:

Used Threshold filter. The first image is more simple and provides more contrast; the second image used more black in the threshold filter, adding detail:

Took second image from previous step and cropped out three smaller images:

And finally, used Posterize filter on the second image from the previous step, two color and two greyscale. I experimented with different levels of Posterization. Using fewer levels made the images more appealing:

VIST 205 Graphic Design: Assignment 01

Assignment 01

Six photos, two of each category: animal, plant, industrial/mechanical: