Singing Tiger

We took another children's drawing and made it sing along to a song of our choice. Here's "Hakuna Matata". I will fix the aspect ratio soon.

The entire project had a total of 593 frames.

In Honor of 1,000 Pageviews...

My favorite part of having my blog isn't checking the number of pageviews, it's seeing where the views came from. Ever since I made this in late January I've been keeping track of the different countries, and I figured I'd share it when I hit 1,000 pageviews just because it's so cool to see that people are connecting to it from all over the world. I don't even know where some of these countries are! In order, the top 5 are the US (of course), Germany, Russia, the UK, and Slovakia. Here's the comprehensive list:

US
Ireland
Australia
Lebanon
China
Germany
Bahrain
UK
Czech Republic
South Africa
Aruba
Canada
Russia
Poland
New Zealand
Italy
Venezuela
Pakistan
Macau
Sweden
Malaysia
France
India
Macedonia
Netherlands
Singapore
Vietnam
Norway
Spain
Brazil
Slovakia
Colombia
Finland
Austria
Egypt
Malta
Georgia
Philippines
Thailand
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
Japan
Vietnam
Ghana
Hong Kong
Indonesia

I guess I'll update it as I go.

Light Rays

Cloud filter, mezzotint filter, radial blur, find edges, invert colors, and another radial blur.

Icon

2D Icon made by layering objects in Adobe Illustrator.

Magazine

As an introduction to type and graphic design, we made magazine covers out of the cartoon project we did earlier. I like the top half, but hate the word placement on the bottom half, so hopefully I'll change it soon.

3D Logos

Original logos made in Adobe Illustrator.

Rubber Ducky

Also with Adobe Illustrator, using the pen tool and gradient fills.

And for your listening enjoyment:

Only one of the greatest songs of my childhood.

Flower

First time with Adobe Illustrator.

Natalie the Na'vi

So I made this:

into this:

and MAN it took a long time! I'm really excited about it. It definitely looks better as an enlarged image, so just click on the picture to see it. The background will probably change; however I needed to get it up on the blog. So here it is!

Retouch 2

Retouched:

Original:

Retouching

You know how everyone always says, "You're perfect the way you are"? Then Photoshop came along. We suddenly had a way to fix or even eliminate all the parts of us that didn't fit in with societal ideals of beauty. And pretty much all that 'perfect' stuff went out the window. That being said, retouching has been my favorite unit so far. The fact that a beginning photoshopper such as myself can do all these changes makes me realize just how much is changed from start to finish on a professional job. 

For this picture...

- erased any and all blemishes using patch tool and spot healing
- went over the whole face with gaussian blur
- highlighted cheekbone
- lightened and contoured face
- accented jaw
- smoothed undereye wrinkles
- eliminated undereye shadow
- filled in eyebrows
- smoothed lips
- changed eye color
- made bottom lip bigger
- decreased skin redness
- accented cheekbone
- enlarged eyes
- highlighted browbones




As they say, perfection is never real.

He Came With the Couch

 This animation was taken from a children's drawing posted on Artsonia. The kids read a book called He Came With the Couch and drew creatures to go along with the story. The artist that made this said "My creature wus on a cloud it mad strorms.It wus raning."

You can see their entire gallery at http://www.artsonia.com/museum/gallery.asp?exhibit=574796






I decided to make it look like there was lightning shooting out of his head. The most difficult part of completing this piece was making all the different layers for each frame of the .gif and recreating the background when the lightning was erased. I learned how to use the paintbrush tool efficiently, using the Alt key to easily sample colors from the eye dropper tool.

What do you get when you cross a Kangaroo, a Crocodile, and a Velociraptor?

Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, doesn't it?

I'd like to introduce everyone to Macropus Velociraptorae, commonly known as Velociroo. He's what happens when the head, claws, and feet of a velociraptor get combined with a kangaroo's body and crocodile spikes.

The hardest part of this project was the beginning. It seems that when searching for images to use for a project, you can pick between high resolution, uncropped, or good quality pictures. Found one? It's copyrighted. I have a newfound respect for photoshoppers everywhere.

For this CA² assignment, I copied the head of the dinosaur (after rough erasing the surrounding area) and pasted it onto the kangaroo. To make it blend in, I used a low opacity eraser and clone stamp on the neck. I used a burn tool to add faint stripes to the kangaroo's body, then individually added a dinosaur claw to each of its fingers. Turns out kangaroos already have large claws, but I wanted them to be the same color as the feet. I pasted the velociraptor feet over the kangaroo's, then used the clone stamp to add fur to the top. The crocodile spikes were added about three at a time to the kangaroo with a reduced opacity near the ends. Needless to say, this project was basically all erase, copy, paste, transform. In the end I had about 25 raster layers.

I'll probably change the baby kangaroo into a velociraptor and add a background later.

Colorizing

We took a photo of a dancer and changed the threshold, then made a new layer and painted over it. By changing the underlying layer's blending options, we confined the colors to where the picture was black. I'm not a huge fan of my color placements, but this was just an exercise so I'll leave it for now.

Photobooth

For this picture, I used a screencap of Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon, a picture of a curtain, and a self portrait. My arms are overlapping with the dragon, and we are 'interacting' as if we were in a photobooth. I had to erase a bunch of each picture to make them cohesive, using a clone stamp to add extra dragon at the bottom to make it fit the crop. I also used drop shadows on both the dragon and the portrait layer. I tried to make the areas where the two layers touch more believable, but it's still a little weird.

Zanda? Pandra?

The original tutorial was of paint splats on an elephant, but I thought it'd be fun to do zebra print on a panda bear. I like how it turned out! I tried out different textures added on to the zebra print to make it look furry, but none of those looked natural enough either. The most difficult part of this project was making the pattern blend/fade into the black fur.

Frog Tongue

This was a really intriguing project. I still have a little more work to do on it. The edges of the frog are really sharp and need to have more shadow on the tongue itself to make it more look three-dimensional as well as making the drop shadow look more natural. It was also really tedious to have to switch between layers on the clone stamp tool, but there's not way around it without merging the two layers. The reverse select tool was also really useful for moving the frog onto the face. I'll be coming back to this project!

Update: I went back and made some minor changes.
Now I need to fill some of the frog shape back in.
Also, is there some way I can get rid of the drop shadow at the bottom while keeping the rest?

Surprise!

This was an interesting assignment that covered a lot of ground in Photoshop. This was my first real time working with this program versus Corel, so I guess it was pretty successful. The liquefy tool was difficult to work with at first without completely distorting the picture. It was also hard to make the jaws and the pancakes look cohesive, and they still aren't at the point that I'd like them to be. There's still a big color difference between the two. I would also make the mouth bigger. The most important thing in this project was using shortcuts to make the work more efficient.