Halloween Octopus

Now that my drive is actually working, I can show off my octopus project! Woot!

The eyes and mouth I finished up using a red/orange gradient, and I made the tentacles using the pen tool and the object-expand function on the darker copies of the tentacle and exact copies of the original. Using the copies, I used the intersect function in pathfinder and made sure the result lined up well with the original tentacle to make shading. Once I finished the octopus, I created a black/red gradient for my background and created striping for it using rectangles and transforming them so that they became inverted (they became narrow in the middle but widened out toward the ends).

Panorama

Last class I was assigned a small project in Photoshop to make a panorama from a series of small photos (all of which had some sort of overlap). You were to select the images and use the Photoshop-photomerge function in adobe bridge, which would give you this result.

 Once you got to this phase, I merged the layers and cropped the resulting image so that you could not see the checkered background on the top or left parts of the images. After that, I used the magic wand tool to select the checkered background on the bottom portion of the image, then used the edit-fill function to fill in the empty space with water. This was the end result.

I also finished the octopus thing a while back, but I keep forgetting to upload it. Now I have to wait until my drive stops acting up so I can upload it the next time I get the chance.

1st Quarter Reflection

Throughout the quarter, I have worked on a few different Adobe and Maya projects, some to develop technical skill within each program, and others to experiment with what I am capable of doing (or putting up with). These projects include the first levitation project, a handful of experiments with PSD networks in Maya, two "emblems" which i made using skills from freshman year, a robot in Adobe Illustrator, and the Illustrator octopus I am currently working on.

The first levitation project was rather easy in my opinion, though I admit that I could have probably done better. The shirt of the guy in the image could have been brought down more so that it looks like the shirt is hanging rather than it looking like it's being stopped by an invisible wall. I'm not too sure how difficult the second levitation project will be (if we get back to it), but I don't think it will be too much harder.

The PSD network projects I think I learned the most from, learning how to manipulate the layers of the network to produce different effects. I still need to try out other functions of the PSD networks, and will likely be doing that in the near future.

The emblems were... interesting. Since I'm not particularly skilled with a drawing tablet, I had to draw the images on a sheet of paper, scan them, put them into another layer in Photoshop, and then scale them down until they could fit on the 128x128 pixel border. After that I had to use several layers to do the outlines, colors, shading, any effects I wanted, and any text I wanted. Shading was probably the hardest part, since the emblems were incredibly small and adding any sort of color had a much more harsh effect than on a larger image.

The robot I'm struggling with, as I can't get the merge tool to function properly. Every time I use it on the part of the bot I'm on, I somehow manage to lose my bot's legs. Rather annoying. Aside from that, the bot is rather easy. That said, there are some valuable skills that can be learned by doing this project.

The octopus is another particularly easy project, and I feel like it should be doable in one or two classes. I think there are one or two things I learned during this project, but overall it was more of a side project than an actual one for me.

Overall I feel like I learned a bit more this year than in previous years, and I have learned how to run through projects while keeping the "value" (for lack of a betetr word) of each project the same. That said, I may want to work a little faster, as I still have to do my big project, and I don't want it to end up being last minute.

Halloween Octopus of Sheer Awesome

So I put the Illustrator robot on hold, as I'm having some technical difficulties with it at the moment. However, I started the next Illustrator project, making an cartoon octopus. This would have already been done yesterday, but someone hit the switch on the power strip for my computer by accident. Oh well. I'm a bit behind now, but this is what I have

Basically I made the head by making a colored circle and stretching it out, and then shaded it by pasting on top (ctrl+f) the old circle, squishing it a bit, and then making the color lighter. The eyes I made using the polygon tool, and the mouth I made by making a circle, cutting it in half, using the polygon tool to make moer triangles, and then using the triangles to punch out the "teeth". I'm going to get to lighting up the eyes using the gradient tool (trying to make it look like candle light), and then get to work on the tentacles (where I was before the accident) and finish up my octopus.