Blog Assignment #3

The first artist that identifies with my Big Idea of the unknown is one that I already found in the first blog assignment. Daniele Gay seems to work with the Big Idea of technology and uses digital manipulation to combine humans and technology, creating a sort of robot. I was especially attracted to his work because our technology is continually changing and increasing and we could end up with robots running the world and overtaking human life, much like you would see in a fantastical horror film. The works make me wonder if in the future this will become something that is normal, and if our ideas of fantasy will be able to become reality with technology. I also really enjoy the very simple compositions, but it is obvious time was well spent seamlessly piecing the image together and making it look as real as possible, an aspect I will take away from the work and hopefully be able to reincorporate into my own. Gay effectively makes decisions to make certain parts of the image black and white while adding color to other areas to create emphasis.




http://www.somethingwelike.com/inspirational/chitchat-daniele-gay


http://bodnar.wetpaint.com/page/Gallery
The second artist I found is Vasily Bodnar. While Daniele Gay works very realistically, Bodnar's work is very animated. After looking at the website, it seems this artist has a Big Idea of humor. What caught my eye about these pieces was the play on the depth of field, and how sharp the focal points are even though it is an animated style. This is something I hope to use in my work as it gives the piece such a nice finishing touch.

Blog Assignment 2

http://www.worth1000.com/tutorials/162201/robotics


I chose the tutorial titled Robotics! for the second blog assignment. It provided three images that I would need to complete the project so I downloaded them and opened them in Photoshop. I followed the first few steps by selecting the background, wood piece, and grasshopper and giving them each their own layer. I then used a paint brush to blacken the background (different from how the author did it because it was easier for me), desaturate the grasshopper and left the wood by itself.



I skipped the part where he outlined the grasshopper following the exoskeleton because he noted this was just for helping point out where things went, so I figured I could just follow it on the tutorial. Next I created a folder titled Robotics (as instructed in the tutorial) with a subfolder titled 'back leg' and began cutting and pasting pieces from the engine images onto the grasshopper. This part was pretty easy to use the warp tool to fit pieces together, but I found that the images I used weren't great resolution so everything was very pixelated.





After piecing everything together, I merged all the layers of the grasshopper and played around with contrasts and colors, as well as on the background to pull everything together and give it a more realistic finished look. I used gaussian blur to add highlights around the body and the eye.



Final result: