Graphic Design Week of Jan 21 - 27

On January 21, I continued my project collage by adding more pictures and editing out parts that didn't fit. My end product is:

On January 24, my Design 101 class looked at all the collages and made comments on each other's works. Not all were given feedback, but as for my project, many stated that it is good, but it needed more direction and message. The collage is supposed to have a message of the interest or culture we were doing, which I didn't do on my first iteration of the collage. As a result, I redid my project but with the same interest.

The message that I'm trying to get across is that Japanese Animations usually start off as a Manga, or Japanese comic. Since it is Japanese Animation, I used the map of Japan and inside are Japanese mangas, which means that's what Animes are made up or they're the backbone. Then on the outside, the map of Japan is surrounded by Animes. The hand represents drawing the mangas, which was suggested by one of my classmates in the Design class.

The work is still on the process but here's the outcome so far:

I want to make the map of Japan stand out more and probably rearrange some of the animes.

Total Hours of Work: 8
Total Hours with Design 101 Class + Work: 17

Graphic Design Week of Jan 14 - 20

On January 17, I received the topic for my first project in my Design 101 class. The topic is either what interests me or a culture. The project is due next Thursday, January 24. For this project, I decided to do either Starbucks, or Japanese Animation. In the end, I chose Japanese Animation as my project topic. The project requires 11" x 14" paper without any white or blank space and must talk about the culture without any letter or number.

I began my project by gathering pictures online. I used mainstream Japanese Animes, such as Naruto, Bleach, Death Note and etc, to show how Japanese Animes are not only popular in Japan, but also around the globe. I started to put the pictures together last Saturday. I had problems with the corners of the pictures and placing them together. I had to cut parts of a picture and adjust different layers. At some pictures, I cropped the whole background and only included the main character(s) of the Anime. As I added more pictures, more and more adjustments were made and I'm only halfway done through this project as of January 20.

Total Hours: 4

Graphic Design Week of Jan 7 - 13

As a person who knows and uses Photoshop, I do not know how to create complex or better designs and barely know how the tools work. To start off, I watched a Youtube video called Photoshop CS4 Tutorial: Create a Colorful Aurura Effect. Out of all Youtube tutorials, this tutorial caught my interest because it uses different effects that I have not tried before. I had problems with the burn and dodge tool and I had to go back over and over again to try and have a better floating image as shown in the image below.

The outcome of my first tutorial video is:

The next tutorial video I watched and tried to do was inspired by the Final project last semester, which asked to make a Macbeth promotional poster. The name of the video is Make a Shattered Dagger Poster: Photoshop Tutorial. Rather using the idea of Macbeth, however, I used my favorite artist, Kim Jaejoong. Cutting the dagger into shards took a lot of patience considering that if the shapes of the shards are too similar, it won't look as convincing as it would be. 

Here's the result of my second tutorial:

After that, I decided to learn on how to use Curves by watching Curves :: Photoshop Tutorial Learn the Power of Curves! on Youtube. It didn't take long to figure out how the Curve tool works though trial and error is a must.

Here is the before and after of an Image I used for the tutorial:

Total Hours: 2