Artist Post

The artist I chose to research is James White. He was born in 1977 and calls Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada his home.  He began his professional design career in 1998.  His personal projects have gained recognition in the idustry and led him to working with Toyota, Universal Music, MTV, Google, Wired and other clients.  He now mostly works on graphic pieces.

He has a very retro style and likes to use a lot of bright neon colors in his pieces to give his work that 80's sort of feeling to it.  After working with Photoshop and Illustrator I really admire when I see a piece that looks so simply made and flows with the same type of style through out the whole piece.  This one in particular uses all of the lights and dark's to compliment each other and make the style look like almost like a logo that could have been from a company in the 80's. 

 

He really likes to do remakes of old movies and characters that he likes and it can be seen by this blade runner poster that he made. This poster captures everything that he like to focus his pieces on. He likes the 80's style theme and much of his work is using the dark hues, like the dark blue and greys in this piece, contrast with the light bright colors in the piece to make all of subjects stand out.  I'm fascinated by how simplistic all his works look because I know how much work must have gone in to making something like this simple looking poster. I think that after looking through all his works, I want to make a somewhat interactive website that's more art-like and not so much a website that is built for a company. 

Identify Yourself

I really liked this reading on many different levels.  On one level the reading is talking about this ever evolving technology of the internet and how it has made us as people slowly evolve with it is very interesting.  On another level the way that this reading is formatted is a representation on how interactive the internet is.  Every paragraph on the left has a related paragraph on the right which moves down the screen and adjust for each paragraph you're reading on the left hand side.  Also, each paragraph has multiple options to click on a video icon that has a video option to watch something that is related to the paragraph you are reading.  This format of this reading in itself is a representation of how the internet works.  It is literally connecting to you to related information as you are reading through the one article.
The paragraph that stood out to me the most was the one that described "The System." It interested me because I am currently taking an operating systems class and everything that I'm learning in that class makes me think very similarly to the ideas written in the paragraph.  The idea that the "we create machines to compensate for our deficiencies and software to translate our ideas into the language of machines." In my operating systems class were learning about everything that goes into an operating system; how processes, threads, and memory works to make the operating system function.  Every job the computer does is delegated to  certain process or thread.  Within a single process the system can delegate threads to carry out individual jobs to make the process work as efficiently as possible.  The base idea behind every process and thread is to allocate and save memory in the best way to reduce the time it takes for a certain process to function.  All of these ideas of an operating system come from the human mind.  We have made this machine that literally acts like the human mind and can lee track of so many different jobs and hold so much more memory that it has become an extension of our mind, and extension of how we store memories and ideas.
The related paragraph asks the question: "Are we losing the richness of our experiences and memories because we know we can depend on blurry iPhone photos to supplement our memories?" I don't think we are.  I do think that some people go overboard trying to capture that memory but I think that people are just adjusting to the technologies they have.  People want to remember the things that have happened in their lives.  They want to look back and physically see the good times that they have had in their lives.  Its a way of traveling through time.  Sure people are looking through the screen of an i phone during a portion of an experience but that's not what their doing the whole time.  In my opinion we as people have created a way to stop time and record it to be saved and stored in an external memory bank that we ourselves have created.  The experiences you have make up who you are and I feel like physically having an image or video of an experience you've had in the past just justifies who you are as a person.  

Proj 2 progress

For my project I wanted to turn a picture of my friend wake boarding into a vector type portrait.  I spent a lot of time on just his portrait and to me that was the easiest part because everything was kind of laid out for me for his face and body.  All I had to do was trace over it with the pen tool.  The hardest part for me was trying to figure out how to make the water look simple yet detailed.   The vector artist that I chose (Mel Marcelo) was able to create a style that smoothed out all the details of a person and made them look like they were coming out of a comic book.  It took me a long time and I redid the background like 6 different ways to try and find the right style for the water.  I looked into the different brush strokes and found one that says splash which worked perfectly for the splashes in the water.  I still have to work on the sky and the different gradients in it to make the sunrise more realistic.  It's funny the part that seems to look so simple is actually the most difficult part because it takes so much trial and error to make it fit the right style of the portrait I made.

Artist Post: Mel Marcelo

Mel Marcelo is a digital artist based in San Diego.  He attended the University of California earning a BA in Visual Arts and has lived all over the U.S. and also the Philippines.  He spends time between working on his fine art and working for different magazines and newspapers where he makes images like the ones above and below.  He's had his work in Newsweek, Oakley and a number of other clients in the music and apparel industries.  His style makes many of his pieces look like he turned actual portraits of people and made them look like they could be in a comic book. He uses vibrant colors and is able to contrast all of his lights and darks to make the figure in every image stand out in comparison with the background. Most of his work is done through Illustrator. 

In the piece above he uses the absence of color in Jim Morrison combined with the bright background to make him stand out in the piece.  It's like he is being brought forward to the viewer.  The way that everything is cut off around him (his arms, stomach, and head) makes him the center of attention because he is touching every edge of the piece.  Also, the way Marcelo uses the greys to highlight Morrison's muscle definition is done in a way that seems so simple that it's like he should be out of a comic book.  Marcelo makes the viewer look deep into his pieces because when you first look at them you just think of the person that he has made.  However, at second glance you notice that the entire piece is made mostly of 4 or 5 different shades that add a simplicity to the piece.

I really like this comic book effect that he is able to use.  It reminds me a lot of Shepard Fairey's street art.  He takes images of people that everyone knows and is able to manipulate them and make them into beautiful pieces of art.  The simplicity of each piece is what I like the most.  I know that a lot of work goes into each piece and it takes a serious amount of effort to make all of the layers come together so well that you don't even notice it.  I plan on trying to make a portrait image that copies his style and focuses on the simplicity of characters.  I studied a lot of Shepard Fairey pieces and pieces from Banksy  as well and this style really intrigues me. I hope to make something that is both simplistic and meaningful to the viewer.

music line drawing

5 portraits

Line Drawing