Illustrator

This is try one at something seriousish in Illustrator. I can't really say what exactly I did, because I have not been able to figure out how to see my history. I took a black and white photo of myself, posterized it in photoshop, and placed it into Illustrator. I made it into a live paint image, and did live trace. After altering the live trace settings, I came up with a "cartoonized" or traced image like this. I made the edges softer and changed some of the edges. The live traced traced by eyes in a strange way, so that they looked really angry. I took the warp tool and stretched my eyes so that they did not look quite so angry. I'm going to try and do another image of myself, because I actually have time to and I'd like to try out some of the other tools.

I am happy with this image because I have been able to alter the original significantly!

Let's Do Coffee

Let's do coffee. I heard a rumor that the airplane image did not count for a grade... so of course, I got nervous and did another image. I still do not even know what exactly does or does not count for the exercise, but regardless, I did two images. Doing two actually helped me out with learning how to do the curves. I'm kind of glad I ended up doing two...

Marina Abramović's portraits contained so many different emotions. The way she captivated feeling and emotion made her portraits seem alive, rather than a stagnant representation of an individual, mostly herself. I particularly enjoyed her black-and-white portraits. The rather eerie settings she used made the portraits alluring and thought provoking. Her other words had very direct statements being made about women. Her work with the woman in the kitchen and the other of the woman amongst children in uniforms were particularly interesting to me. The way she captures the individual's face seems particularly important in her work.

Frida Kahlo's portraits, while very unique, displayed similar emotions. The medium is clearly different, as Kahlo used canvas and paint instead of photography. Many of the portraits involve a sort of solemn feel, or a sort of distress. This particular piece seems less emotional at first, when you first consider the coloration. Once you realize that the meaning of the picture on her forehead symbolizes her thoughts about death, you quickly reconsider your primary thoughts on the piece. I found the emotions behind this piece were related to the emotions behind Abramovic's pieces. I felt, distressed.

Cui Xiuwen's works were quite different from the other artists. Xiuwen's works seemed to had a recurring theme about them, with the young girls who looked very similar, with the white dresses and black hair. I usually like variety in an artists's portfolio, but I must say that I really enjoyed Xiuwen's common theme with the similar looking girls (who may actually be the same girls). Again, the idea I gathered was distress. Between the three artists, the most prevalent similarity (besides the fact that each artists works were based on femininity) is the repeated emotion of distress. Distress does not always as a "heavy" emotion. None of the works seemed particularly light hearted and positive.

Illustrator Exercise One

This is my first try at Illustrator. I can't say that I understand it very much, but I'm pretty excited to learn about it. What I did here was trace over an image to create this, using different tools to manipulate the edges. and of course, I made it hot pink because I'm a girly girl.