The Results Are In!

I know you all have been counting down the hours for my DNA reveal. Guess what?! Today is the day. I would like to say one thing before I post the screenshot of the results... No matter what these results say, my family is my family. My dad is the only dad I know, he raised me and never treated me any differently than his biological kids, I think that says a lot about a person. I didn't get this done so I would feel closer to my biological father, and certainly not to hurt any one's feelings. I just wanted to know WHAT I am, I already know WHO I am.

TADA!  49% Irish.  Wow, I am really, really white.

My mom is super upset that there is no Native American in there and is still convinced that she is a majority Cherokee Indian and basically says that she doesn't want to live if she's not because that's all she has ever felt she was... Blah. 

Anyway, thanks for going on this journey with me. I'm happy to finally know where I come from. [BANG! Winston Churchill just shot a kitten because I ended my sentence with a preposition.]

3D Magic - y0

This week in my Digital Media class we learned about 3D art and used a program called 123D Catch to make some. I have just come back from a trip to Iowa to see my dad, and my instructor's emails talking about the program were kind of ominous... however, I didn't think it was that bad. There are some parameters on the object you could use, it couldn't be transparent or shiny... Since I'm always tripping over dog toys, I decided to use one of them for this project. I set Mr. Squeakers down on a piece of newspaper so the program could use the paper as reference points; unfortunately the online editor isn't working so I wasn't able to get rid of the newspaper. My first go around I took 36 pictures, that wasn't enough and my object didn't render properly, so I chucked those and started over. By the way, did you know it was 32 degrees today? My house does not get good natural light, so I went BACK outside to shoot again - this time 60 shots... much better but there was still a little spot under Mr. Squeakers' hat that wasn't captured so I ended up taking 4 more shots from a low angle to get that all pieced together. All in all, I enjoyed this project and it wasn't nearly as hard as I expected it to be. Anyway, here he is:

Vector Graphics with Chittram (eg. Infuriating)

Vector Graphics! Woo! Love 'em.

This week we had to create a couple of logos for our blog with a web-based program called Chittram (you can click that link, but I totally wouldn't if I were you). Vector graphics are great because you can resize them a bazillion times,  and your image or artwork isn't going to get all pixelated like a raster graphic will. It's been a bad week. I lost so many logos because Chittram wouldn't save, or I would make an object and want to change it, or delete and the program wouldn't let me. Sometimes when it would let me save, it would change the dimensions or stroke size of the things I created, so I would have to go back time and time again to fix it. It is NOT user friendly, at all. To top it off, I'm about to post screen shots of my logos because they refuse to embed into my blog, so you're not going to get the clean lines of a vector graphic, you're going to see a pixelated screenshot of my logos. Great. Maybe all of these web-based applications are turning me off, or maybe I'm just not good at this stuff. I want to enjoy what I'm doing... right now, I don't.

I tried to keep my logos cohesive with the blog colors I use, so you'll see some orange, purple, green and black. In the first one, "my" head is way too small, but after creating so many different logos, I really just don't have it in me to go and resize it. Let's just pretend I have a really tiny head, ok?

I will say the one highlight of this week's assignment was my instructor's tutorial videos. I can't remember when I have laughed so hard - it's been a LONG time. She reminds me of the relationship Bubs and I have along with our furbabies: she makes weird noises, has a dry sense of humor and her relationship with her cat is hilarious.

Anyway, here are my screenshots. Don't leave a comment. I know they're crap.

 

Typography and Text Based Art

This week we learned about typography and text-based art, which is the technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. Did you ever have anybody wish you "Happy Birthday" on Facebook and there was a bunch of characters all put together to make a picture of balloons or something like that? Honestly, that stuff kind of gets on my nerves a bit. Who has time to make stuff like that? The simplest part of this is just like that, but we did go on to learn more advanced and nicer ways to use text as art. There are several websites that allow you make text-based art, and I'm going to show you some examples of them.

The simplest form we learned about was ASCII art. ASCII is short for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Basically, this program uses characters from the English alphabet to make pictures out of characters, this was used a lot back when computers were not able to do a lot of graphics and image editing software was available. I wonder if any of my other classmates besides me are actually old enough to remember this...

This image was made with GlassGiant.com, I used a picture you are probably familiar with, my Drug Corner shot from Urban Landscapes. I thought it would be perfect for this application since I wanted to keep with the dark and dingy theme.<br><br>

For the following three pictures, I used TEXT-IMAGE.com to alter my Rock Grid picture in three different ways. The first one ASCII, the second was HTML which allows you to specify the characters I wanted to use, and finally the third was Matrix - yeah, like the movie.

The next application we learned about was Tagxedo, which was probably my favorite program this week. It creates word clouds or tag clouds which are visual representations of text which may include additional imagery. I, of course, chose a selfie that I took the other day (I think I mentioned before that I am the queen of all selfies - even though this one isn't that focused, I like it because it kind of shows how I feel about this week!). I used some words that I feel describe myself. I like this program a lot, you can use different themes to change the colors and feeling of the photograph. This one is great too, because it has a save option, which makes it easier than doing a bunch of screen shots. Here's the original and what I created in Tagxedo:

Finally I used Textorizer to create a few different pictures, this one also had three options to choose from: Textorizer, Textorizer 2 and Excoffizer. Textorizer could be great, but man is it a pain to use, I kept timing out and getting script errors, luckily, my instructor warned us ahead of time. Her advice was to have patience - as you probably know by now, patience is NOT one of my virtues.

The first picture I used Textorizer - this is a shot I took the other day in the middle of my bike ride. I was able to pick my own text so I used words like "autumn" "serene" "cycling" and a few more... Here's the original and the Textorizer'd version of it.

 

 A couple of weeks ago I got to go into the Toledo Museum of Art after hours with another class. I have to say, it's absolutely amazing to go in there, in the dark with no crowds. I wish I could get locked inside! Here's a painting by Frank Stella - I love this shot, the whole museum is dark and just this fabulous painting was illuminated.

Finally, for Excoffizer I used a picture I snapped of my dog trying to get my attention while resting on my other dog. I'm actually proud of this one, as Excoffizer has some amazing options to use, but I didn't take it too far this time, which I tend to do with any type of altering/Photoshopping of pictures. I cut back the opacity so you could still get the orange of Murray's fur - I didn't want to lose him as Gili is the focus. Enjoy! If you liked any of this, or even if you didn't, feel free to comment below.