FeedBack On Mine And Other Peoples Final Pieces

On the left is feedback that jack left on my final piece.

On the right is the comment i left on jack's final piece.

Why Use Graphics Tablets

Graphics tablets, because of their stylus-based interface and ability to detect some or all of pressure, tilt, and other attributes of the stylus and its interaction with the tablet, are widely considered to offer a very natural way to create computer graphics, especially two-dimensional computer graphics. Indeed, many graphics packages are able to make use of the pressure (and, sometimes, stylus tilt or rotation) information generated by a tablet, by modifying the brush size, shape, opacity, color, or other attributes based on data received from the graphics tablet.

Graphic Tablets are also very commonly found in the artistic world. Using a pen on a graphics tablet combined with a graphics editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop, give artists a lot of precision while creating digital drawings. Photographers can also find working with a graphics tablet during their post processing can really speed tasks like creating a detailed layer mask and dodging and burning up too.

Photoshop/Touch Screens/Graphics Tablet

Adobe Photoshop -  is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems Incorporated. Photoshop CS5 was launched on April 12, 2010. In a video posted on its official Facebook page, the development team revealed the new technologies under development, including three dimensional brushes and warping tools. A version of Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended was used for a Prerelease Beta. A large group of selected Photoshop users were invited to beta test in mid-February 2010.

Touch Screens - A touchscreen is an electronic visual display that can detect the presence and location of a touch within the display area. The term generally refers to touching the display of the device with a finger or hand. Touchscreens can also sense other passive objects, such as a stylus. However, if the object sensed is active, as with a light pen, the term touchscreen is generally not applicable.


Graphics Tablet - A graphics tablet (or digitizing tablet, graphics pad, drawing tablet) is a computer input device that allows one to hand-draw images and graphics, similar to the way one draws images with a pencil and paper. These tablets may also be used to capture data or handwritten signatures. It can also be used to trace an image from a piece of paper which is taped or otherwise secured to the surface. Capturing data in this way, either by tracing or entering the corners of linear poly-lines or shapes is called digitizing.

Photoshop Tools

Custom Brush - Custom brushes can be very useful. Use them to paint texture onto an object, create seamless tiles, and much more. Any time you find yourself using a symbol repeatedly, you can define it as a brush and you'll always have it handy. Follow these steps to define a custom brush in Photoshop.


Filters - Photoshop’s Filter Gallery is basically a one-stop place for working with filters in your documents. In the Filter Gallery, you can browse through many different types of filters, apply them individually to your image, or even stack them on top of one another like you would with layers.


Clone Stamp - The Cloning Stamp Tool does exactly what its name implies. Using this tool, you can copy a portion of an image and reapply it repeatedly to cover an unwanted portion of the image.

Mouse vs Touch Screen

I dont think the mouse will soon be outdated. For desktops & desktop replacement laptops they are just the more comfortable way of working. Touchscreen will become more popular I think, but I hope more as an interface for control devices ("next gen" keyboards or something, or for handheld devices. I wouldn't want to be holding up my arms to poke my screen all day.  The mouse has been a mainstay of the personal computer ever since the first GUI-enabled Apple Macintoshes hit store shelves. It’s how the vast majority of us interact with our computers every single day.

Yet of the many basic computing features that have evolved, the cursor interface really isn’t one of them. Point-and-click has mostly been the same since the mouse’s introduction in the 1960s. The rise of the iPhone, iPad and Android devices have begun to alter how we interact with our computers, though. All of these devices use touchscreen interfaces out of necessity, but the result has been the birth of a wide variety of user interfaces that don’t require dragging a little arrow across a virtual desktop.

Stuff I'm Currently Working On

To the right is a very rough drawing of a koi fish which will be edited in photoshop later on. I used photoshop with using a graphics tablet for some parts, using touch screen for other parts and using the mouse for the rest of the image. This image is still not finished yet it needs waves and colour to be put into it and also needs a shadown effect so it looks better.

Health And Safety Quiz

 Here is the health and safety quiz. It shows some of the questions and also it shows that i have passed the quiz.

Health and safety is needed in a work place even if it's a classroom.

Because no rules or no safety actions can cause serious injury and it can also make the work place not fun because of all the hazards.

Display Screen Equipment Risk Assessment

Workstation User ...........Danny Matthews.....………… Room .…T.132…

COMPUTER Screen

Are the characters readable ?                                                          YES

Is the Image stable ?                                                                          YES

Can brightness and contrast be adjusted ?                                   YES

Does the screen swivel and tilt ?                                                     YES

Is the screen free of glare and reflections ?                                  YES

COMPUTER Keyboard

Can the keyboard be tilted ?                                                             YES

Can a comfortable keying position be found ?                             YES

Can the hands be rested in front of the keyboard ?                     YES

Is the keyboard clean and glare free ?                                           YES

Can the characters on the keys be read easily ?                          YES

FURNITURE

Is the work surface large enough ?                                                 YES

Is the surface free of glare and reflections ?                                 YES

Is the chair stable ?                                                                            YES

Do the mechanisms work ?                                                              YES

Are you comfortable ?                                                                       YES

ENVIRONMENT

Is there enough room to change position and move ?                YES

Are the levels of heat, light and noise comfortable ?                   YES

Is there a source of fresh air ?                                                          YES

HEALTH  Whilst using the computer, in the past year, has the operator suffered from :

Eyestrain                                                                                              NO

Pain in the: back                                                                                 NO

elbows                                                                                                  NO

fingers                                                                                                  NO

neck                                                                                                      NO

shoulders                                                                                             NO

wrists                                                                                                     NO

If YES to any health issues above, has this been reported to the Manager/Supervisor or Safety Officer?                                                                                                                            YES / NO

If YES has a Doctor or Occupational Health Adviser been consulted? YES / NO

ACTIONS NEEDED TO REMEDY PROBLEMS

Continue on a separate sheet if necessary or write NONE if no action is required.

......................................................................................................................................................

………………………………………………………………………………………………....................

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………......

To the right is my underwater themed poster that i created on photoshop. At first i wanted to choose to do a graffiti effect underwater but soon realised it wouldn't work as well as i thought it would so i decided to sink new york city into the ocean. First of all i got the picture of new york and put it as the background after that i added a layer mask for hue/saturation to make it blend in with the ocean colours. After that i added in the coral and just darkened them a bit as they were already the right colour. Next I put in the lights from the sky to give another effect to the image and finally i added the shark into the image to finish it off.

Next time I would choose to do a different image instead of the usual city sinking with fish. I would change the shark to a massive explosion going off underwater with graffiti on buildings which are collapsing and smashing i would also add extra effects like people dieing or running away and richocet from the explosion and the building. I would also add my human stuff into the image instead of the usual fish. I like my image but it could of been a lot better, the shark could have been blended in better and also the corals could have been a better shape and could have been together more where as now they are different images trying to be blended into one, I dont think you would recognise it until someone said but it's my work so i will notice everytime I look at it.



Here are our mind-maps of our plans for the projects that we are choosing to do.

 

For todays task I am researching graffiti and gadgets. The reason I picked these two images was because they are a mix of graffiti and underwater which gives a really nice effect when mixed together.

http://www.todayandtomorrow.net/2008/11/10/underwater-graffiti/

This image forms together quite nicely with the blend of colour, shadowing and the little design for an O which stands the image out even more than usual because it gives you something different to look at instead of normal graffiti.

http://www.wallpaperbase.com/wallpapers/photography/graffiti/graffiti_3.jpg

This is one of my favourite images because of the different styles, techniques, colours and techniques within the whole piece I also love the way how the whole image flows together like waves in the sea.

http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2009/07/miami_graffiti_artists_tag_los.php

Next up i picked a rubix cube for a gadget the reason for this is because i love retro stuff and the rubix cube is the most well known retro gadget in history and also it's hard to solve.
http://mamchenkov.net/wordpress/2004/06/16/rubiks-cube-mad-skills/

I also picked a pacman machine for a gadget due to the fact that its retro, oldschool and just damn right cool. Pacman inspires people to create games due to the fact that pacman was created by someone whilst they were using graph paper got bored and drew the main pacman level design characters and level scores.

http://www.geekalerts.com/tag/pac-man/    

DPI And Vector Design

DPI is used to describe the resolution number of dots per inch in a digital print and the printing resolution of a hard copy print dot gain; the increase in the size of the halftone dots during printing. This is caused by the spreading of ink on the surface of the media.
Up to a point, printers with higher DPI produce clearer and more detailed output. A printer does not necessarily have a single DPI measurement; it is dependent on print mode, which is usually influenced by driver settings.


Vector image is the complete opposite of DPI because when your using a vector image when you zoom in on what image you have just made you dont pixels where as when you zoom in on DPI you can see all the pixels which ruins your image. So vector image saves your image when it is blown up or shrunk down.

Lorne Lanning

Lorne Lanning is an American game designer, writer and voice actor. He is also co-founder and president of the video game developer, Oddworld Inhabitants. He is best known for creating the Oddworld series including the games Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus and Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath.

Lanning is also known for his voice talent and has voiced many characters in the Oddworld games including Oddworld's signature character Ae, Munch and the Stranger, as well as Alf (Abe's Exoddus), the Vykkers Humphrey and Irwin (Munch's Oddysee), Blisterz Booty, Doc Vykker, Castraider and Sekto (Stranger's Wrath), General Dripik and Director Phleg (Abe's Exoddus) and the Sligs (Abe's Oddysee, Abe's Exoddus and Munch's Oddysee). Lanning provided every character voice for Abe's Oddysee alone but was later joined by other Oddworld Inhabitants crew members to voice characters in Abe's Exoddus, Munch's Oddysee and Stranger's Wrath but with Lanning still voicing the majority of the characters.

His creative vision in game design and property development at Oddworld Inhabitants has gained him worldwide recognition, including several documentaries and his character creations featured on the cover of Wired Magazine. Lanning claims he has always had a fascination with video games, stating that his father was an engineer for Coleco.

Great games are all about gameplay. Of course, the gaming audience prefers if there is a tolerable story, but Lanning believes the audience will accept something a little cheesy so long as the gameplay is great. “So when you begin the preliminary work required to make a game you must start with gameplay and then try your best to synergize a decent story around it. It’s a difficult dance to do well, but in the end you compromise story and character before you compromise gameplay. That’s the nature and priority of the gaming medium.”
Lorne Lanning is another artist that i really like because of how he uses his skills to create amazing gameplay in video games as well as create amazing films. He inspires me by using his techniques and skills to the extreme to create amazing and meaningful gameplay if it wasn't thanks to people like this then games wouldn't be like they are today.

Jaime Jasso Digital Art

Jaime Jasso born in 1974 In Guadalajara Mexico, since the early times I love drawing and painting. I practiced and learned watercolor, oil, and airbrushing , later I moved from comic books to illustration. I found in matte painting and conceptual art a great field to develope into ,
in the middle 90’s I started to practiced computer graphics and started to learn the software
that’s how in 2001 I was co-founding as visual effects supervisor and art director of Metacube technology and - entertainment, in 2001 , I got a chance to learned from many talented people as Craig Barron at Matte World Digital , nowadays I work at Blur Studio in Venice CA. where I am Digital Matte artist and Scene Assembler. Jaime Jasso is a Digital Artist from Mexico and his work is just mind blowing – He works as a Digital Matte artist and Scene Assembler at Blur Studio in Venice, CA – The Universe he recreates are beautifully inspiring.

These two pieces are really amazing digital work by Jaime Jasso. The artist states: “I love drawing and painting I practiced and learned watercolor, oil, and airbrushing, later I moved from comic books to illustration”

Since I was kid, I was always fascinated by sci-fi and art, starting in comic books and traditional painting techniques such as oil, pencil, air brush, inks, and later found out that the computer was the ultimate tool. I tried it and of course fell in love with technology and how quickly you could get results with no stains on the floor or on your clothes. New video game cinematics are evolving into a new era, where the actual game has an incredible amount of detail and effects. The new cinematic has to always be the pre-rendered story teller and get the gamer into the game with realism and fantasy. This is where studios like Blur are implementing film VFX techniques in the pipeline to make the cinematics look awesome. Matte painting was used in Film before but now is a common tool for cinematic studios, due of course to the fast and high detailed results it gives, rather than trying to model and render big 3D Environments

This artist realy inspires me by the way how he has formed from matte paintings to be working on doing scenes for major games like halo wars, fable 2, prototype and many more but its the fact that he has gone even further and is working making sci-fi film scenes so not only is he an amazing matte painter but also a highly talented digital artist. He has changed the way how i look at things instead of just looking at the main good points of an image i am studying the whole image taking notes and making my own design to some of his art.

Dc Comics

DC Comics (founded in 1934 as National Allied Publications) is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing division of DC Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner. DC Comics produces material featuring a large number of well-known characters, including Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Captain Marvel, Hawkman, the Teen Titans, Zatanna, Green Arrow, Aquaman, Martian Manhunter, Robin, Supergirl, Plastic Man, and the Justice League; villains such as Lex Luthor, the Joker, and Catwoman; and the rest of the DC Universe.
The initials "DC" came from the company's popular series, Detective Comics, which subsequently became part of the company's official name. DC Comics has its official headquarters at 1700 Broadway, Midtown Manhattan, New York, New York. Random House distributes DC Comics' books to the bookstore market, while Diamond Comics Distributors supplies the comics shop specialty market.
DC Comics and its major, longtime competitor Marvel Comics together share over 80% of the American comic-book market as of 2008.
 Dc comics is really inspiring because of the amount of different characters that people have created in the past and now. This inspires me because of the different style and techniques that are used. Dc comics is inspiring to different age groups not only one you have 10-16 year olds 17-40 year olds and so on and also comic books not only inspire men but also women to achieve great animated/normal art. The world's #2 comic book publisher (behind longtime nemesis Marvel) controls 30% of the market and owns the rights to what is arguably the best-known roster of superheroes, including Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. DC publishes about 90 monthly comics and licenses the rights to its characters for use in movies, TV shows, books, and other products. Other operations include comic imprints WildStorm and Vertigo, as well as the iconic "MAD" magazine.

Here is a tutorial on how to create a fire effect on photoshop

Brad Schwede

Brad Schwede- Digital Graffiti Art

WG – How did you get into 3d design?

Brad – It’s really a spin off from my Career as a motion graphics designer -
I’ve been animating logos in 3d and TV Ads for 10 years so it was an
easy step.

WG – Where are you trying to get to ultimately with the 3d art? So you
working towards a plan or are you doing your art because you want to
make art? Both?

Brad – The original aim of the site and my work was to mix graffiti and
technology which means taking visual elements from technology and
using it in my design work. I saw so many modern devices that would
make perfect elements for graffiti designs. I got bored with that as
it was a bit limiting, now I want to start building up a folio of work
that explores what is possible with having graffiti as a 3d element.

The next step is to start incorporating my work into vision so that it
can be virtually stuck to the side of a wall or crawling up the side
of a building. I haven’t really seen this done before and I think it
would look good.

I love this artist’s work, I’m into graffiti and digital graphics as it is so now that Brad has combined these two techniques together just inspires as me as much as Jesus inspires Christians. The way he uses the same colours that is in the picture and is in the graffiti piece makes his work stand out even more and makes it blend it more. The reason he done this was because graffiti stands out a lot more if it’s with a background with some of the same colours instead of being on its own in one colour.  

Graffiti inspires younger people that are from negative areas street art like graffiti inspire kids into art and give them something to try and achieve because of how much they see around them. Some people think that graffiti is not art and just vandalism where as I think the complete opposite I love graffiti and would have it on the side of my house if someone just came along and done it.

WG – How long does it take to do a major piece of 3d graff art?

Brad – It depends on what style and what vibe I have in my head for the work.
I try not to spend more than 2 days on a work as a rule. Takes about a day to get a final 3d object to stat compositing with.

As you can see from the two images above, that i have created an underwater scene with a shark and a smashed plane in the background. To create this effect first we edited the image on the left with hue saturation to get the underwater scene after that we went into filter and selected noise so that it looks like how the sea flows. Next we got the gradient tool and set it to foreground to background with the colours dark blue and light blue, made a new layer and put that on top until the pebbles at the bottom so it looks like the sea bed. After that we made the two shines of light the way we done this was by going into the polygonal laso tool and made the two shapes then selected colour and picked white and set the opacity to 40%.
Next up we needed to add the shark and the crashed plane to do this we made two new layers with mask on top. We then proceeded and pasted the crashed plane into the image and then edited it with the opacity tool again so that it looks like its behind everything and fits in with the whole underwater scene. Finally we needed to add the shark to get the image looking as good as it can, the way we done this was by pasting the shark into the image again selecting edit and hue/saturation, got the colours as close as we could from the shark to look like it blends in with the background after that our final image is completed.

As you can see in this image now the women has got the reflection on her face from both orbs which makes the image real and alive. The way that we done this was by making a custom brush i.e scattering, size, jigger, fade and spacing. We also used multiple layers and used the image to adjust the shadowing and highlights in her face from the orbs. We also made the computer draw elements to blend in with the background image but the most important thing that helped me making this project was using quick mass mode and adjusting layers like levels and hue saturation this effect is easy and useful to use when editing images.

As you can see from the image on my right how the orb has changed and gained fairy like bubbles to give it a better feel. How we done this was by going into the brush tool box and creating a new brush set-up, put the size down and then went into scattering to set the control to fade with spacing of 30% and size of 12% both axes were on to make sure that not only one side has this effect it also has a mininum diameter of 25%

We first downloaded the picture from the desktop set it as the first layer then made another layer on top but it as the background colour and used black then we made another layer and named it blue orb. To make the blue orb we first have to get the brush tool and set it to 160 pt with the hardness to 0pt with the colour dark blue after we put the first dot onto our page we then made another dot with 100pt brush with softness at 0pt again with the colour bright blue. Next we got the colour white with the same set-up and made another dot then that was the blue orb done. The only thing to do now was to make it actually look like a blue orb the way we done this was by using the smudge tool with 85% strength and 0pt hardness to alter the image to make it look alive. What helped us with this image coming alive very quickly was the amount of shortcuts we used like "b for brush" "CTRL+Z for undo" "left and right square brackets for making the image smaller and larger. I would defiantly use this technique at home due to it making images look alive and giving them a better effect and plus it is a lot quicker and easier to do.