Jim's Blog

Hello and welcome to my blog. This blog will be used primarily (or rather ONLY) for posting research and work I've done for I-media. So yeah...knock yourself out.

Thursday, January 28

Keeping research relevant leads me to one simple Flow Diagram.

When researching my topic of drawing I came across a Wikipedia page, which contained loads of different sub-topics within the topic of Drawing.

At first I was confused as to what I was going to include in my website in terms of subject information, however I then realized that I only need to keep things extremely relevant - this means I excluded anything that was relevant to a certain extent (or rather information that was only a little relevant) otherwise there would have been too much information to include and I would have made a mess of things (most likely).

This leads me to one basic Flow Diagram.

As a result my site will look something like this:

Home

Drawing/Painting/Sketch/Digital/Media

This is basically a simplified version of the Flow Diagram in my Sketchbook.

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Sunday, January 24

How I will go about my Presentation.

So first of all, I have decided to do my presentation in Flash for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I think I have been quite successful in my Time Management and as a result have the extra time required to build something in Flash (as from my own experience I know Flash is quite a time consuming piece of software).

Secondly, I wanted to use something more creative than either Keynote or PowerPoint (though keynote does have a nice collection of themes) and make something more interesting, although making something in Flash look professional is no easy feat.

In my presentation I will show work that I have completed, this will include:

Sketchbook work -

Ideas
Mockups
Content
Font ideas
Layouts
Flow Diagrams

Blog work (only a little as Sketchbook covers most) -

Research
Sites I used

I will now begin to build my presentation although I have yet to finish various other bits and pieces, however I require only one background theme that I can use for the whole Flash presentation.

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Friday, January 22

My research collection so far.

The following is various chunks I have taken out from my research (so there is more). This research will hopefully help me decide which parts a relevant aren't which parts I don't need.


Wikipedia:


Drawing:


Drawing is a form of visual expression and is one of the major forms within the visual arts. There are a number of subcategories of drawing, including cartooning. Certain drawing methods or approaches, such as “doodling” and other informal kinds of drawing such as drawing in the fog a shower leaves on a bathroom mirror, or the surrealist method of “entoptic graphomania", in which dots are made at the sites of impurities in a blank sheet of paper, and lines are then made between the dots, may or may not be considered as part of "drawing" as a "fine art."
The word 'drawing' is used as both a verb and a noun:
• Drawing (verb) is the act of making marks on a surface so as to create an image, form or shape.
• The produced image is also called a drawing (noun). A quick, unrefined drawing may be defined as a sketch.
In simplistic terms, drawing is distinct from painting, perhaps more so in the Western view; East Asian art, which generally only uses brushes, has historically made less distinction between the two. Critics may praise a painter's ability to draw well, meaning that the shapes, especially of the human body, are well articulated, or a drawing may be considered painterly.


Sketching:


A sketch is a rapidly executed freehand drawing that is not intended as a finished work. If in oil paint it is called an oil sketch. In general, a sketch is a quick way to record an idea for later use. Artist's sketches primarily serve as a way to try out different ideas and establish a composition before undertaking a more finished work, especially when the finished work is expensive and time consuming (as in the case of a large painting or fresco). Sketching sharpens an artist's ability to focus on the most important elements of a subject and is a prescribed part of artistic development for students.
Dry media such as pencil or pastel are often preferred due to time constraints, but a quickly done watercolour study or even quickly modelled clay or soft wax can also be considered a 'sketch' in the broader sense of the term. Graphite pencils being a relatively new invention, the artists of the Renaissance could make sketches using the expensive method of a silver stylus on specially prepared paper (known as silverpoint), with results similar to a modern pencil sketch, or, more cheaply, using charcoal, chalk, or pen-and-ink.
Contrary to popular belief, artists often use erasers when drawing; the eraser may be used to remove rough construction lines, or to soften lines for visual effect. The most commonly used eraser for pencil drawing is the Kneaded, which has a soft, sticky surface that enables the artist to lift the graphite or charcoal from the drawing surface without smudging. White plastic erasers can cleanly erase line work, but tend to smudge heavy shading.


Painting:


Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, colour or other medium to a surface (support base). In art, the term describes both the act and the result, which is called a painting. Paintings may have for their support such surfaces as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, clay or concrete. Paintings may be decorated with gold leaf, and some modern paintings incorporate other materials including sand, clay, and scraps of paper.
Painting is a mode of expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing, composition or abstraction and other aesthetics may serve to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner. Paintings can be naturalistic and representational (as in a still life or landscape painting), photographic, abstract, be loaded with narrative content, symbolism, emotion or be political in nature.


42explore:


Drawing:


Easier - People use a tool like a pencil, crayon or chalk to draw a picture, an image, or a likeness. The act of making the picture is called drawing. A picture made by drawing with a tool is also called a drawing.


Harder - Drawing is the act of making a design or image. Drawings can be made for artistic or technical purposes. A technical drawing shows how an object should look, how it will be put together, or how it looks from different directions. An artistic drawing can be made as a preliminary step for a finished artwork, as a piece of art itself, or as information for future use.


Artists may draw with chalk, charcoal, crayon, pen and ink, or pencil. Sometimes they scratch drawings into a surface. Almost any surface can be used for drawing.



Britannica Concise Encyclopaedia:


Painting:


Art consisting of representational, imaginative, or abstract designs produced by application of coloured paints to a two-dimensional, prepared, flat surface. The elements of design (i.e., line, colour, tone, texture) are used in various ways to produce sensations of volume, space, movement, and light. The range of media (e.g., tempera, fresco, oil, watercolour, ink, gouache, encaustic, casein) and the choice of a particular form (e.g. mural, easel, panel, miniature, illuminated manuscript, scroll, screen, fan) combine to realize a unique visual image.





DT&G:


Digital Painting:


Simply put, digital painting is the act of drawing or painting directly into your computer. The idea has been with us for quite awhile, with older programs like MS Paint. In the last few years, advances in hardware and software have made it much easier to get a high quality image, and much more accessible to the average Joe. These days, artists are creating digital drawings for posters, book covers, illustrations, video games, and even matte paintings for Hollywood blockbusters.
___ Unlike other computer graphics, the foundations of digital painting are in traditional art skills, rather than filters or design techniques. It's a very simple process, and many people use little beside the paintbrush tool and eraser. Once you have a few basic techniques down, the only limits are the amount of time and practice you commit. A fun image can be created in a matter of minutes.



Wikipedia:


A graphics 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.
A graphics tablet (also called pen pad or digitizer) consists of a flat surface upon which the user may "draw" an image using an attached stylus, a pen-like drawing apparatus. The image generally does not appear on the tablet itself but, rather, is displayed on the computer monitor. Some tablets however, come as a functioning secondary computer screen that you can interact with directly using the stylus.
Some tablets are intended as a general replacement for a mouse as the primary pointing and navigation device for desktop computers.


As you can see I have split up me research into categories or rather drawing topics and hopefully this will help me layout my website and help me decide what heading I can use for the different pages in my site.

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Tuesday, January 19

Links that can be used for information in my website.

Here are links that I am saving. These links will be useful to me and provide various pieces of information on drawing and all things related:






http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_drawing_topics

Also if necessary (and it probably will be) I will search for various other sites when needed to. 

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New Web Design project based off Digital Design Theory.

I have now been given a new brief as the start of a new project. This new project consists of creating a website - a hand coded website created in 'Text Wrangler' that provides information on a certain subject to do with Digital media Design.

The topic of my website will be 'Drawing' and I plan to explore various different components of drawing such as sketching, painting etc.

I will need to research my topic and also place ideas down into my sketchbook and also prepare for the coming presentation in exactly two weeks from now.

The presentation will either be done in Flash or in Keynote and will consist of everything I have done as in research, ideas, mock-ups etc.

After this I will need to build my website in 'Text Wrangler' while making sure the site I build functions properly, looks good and easily navigated.

An essay is also going to be written and this needs to be around 750 words.

The software I will use (or be likely to use):







These are Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Text Wrangler I may also use Flash or keynote for my presentation.

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Wednesday, January 13

My project development.

Now that I have an extended deadline I have had a little more time to do various things. So I am pleased with my work and am happy with my poster though I need to change quite an important part and this is the young Art Nouveau girl in the center of the image.



 Originally, I took this girl from the Internet so it's not my work. However, I am currently tracing over it in Illustrator and then will colour it again. This means that a combination of both Photoshop and Illustrator have been used for various different elements.

So far I have done my postcards, which I am pleased with though they are a bit basic and despite my using real postcards as a guide I am still unsure whether the dimensions are correct. For this I simply used Photoshop to alter the colour with adjustment layers and added gradients to my postcards.




I have also done my essay using Indesign though it was first written in Word and I have now applied a background to it in order to make the booklet a little more visually interesting.

I am somewhat pleased with my leaflet, the only thing I am not 100% sure about is whether the text will overlap or stop me from folding equally without any of the folded areas overlapping onto text. This leaflet was produced in Photoshop and written in Indesign (I did the background in photoshop and then the text in Indesign).

Everything is ready to be printed at the Printshop (I'll be going to one in Burgess Hill).





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