Saturday 29 June 2013

Design Project-- How Technology Affects Humans

Summary/Background about my design project: 

As the title of the design project was ‘How Technology Affects Humans’, I did some research on this topic. I read about how technology was not only limited to social media. Technology also meant the discovery of fire and how transportation came about. I got my idea when I was fetching a friend home after class. I thought about the evolution of transportation, how we used to walk instead of drive back in the past, and now we are so blessed with bicycles, trains and cars. So I went home and drew the diagram of the ‘evolution of transportation’.
When I passed my drawings of my ideas up, Mr Azhar told me to merge my ideas of communication and evolution. That meant that I could draw the evolution of man diagram but instead, show the evolution of communication devices. In my final drawing, the primate begins with a tin can, which was one of the first ways humans communicated with another person who was at a distance from him. Then the second primate holds a phone which is connected to a case, which is a form of one of the earliest non-home-phone devices. Then a caveman holds a large, bulky cell phone which could be used without the huge case connected to it, then a cro-magnum is seen holding and looking at a clam-shell handphone, and then a more modern-looking man is seen holding an iPhone. Lastly, my lecturer said I could show a form of communication for the future and I chose a robot. This is because I think in the future, we would either be similar to robots or have our own personal robot to communicate more easily with others. 




Now I will outline the steps I took to make my final design project artwork.



Step 1:
The first thing I did was scan in my sketch and open the document in Photoshop (CS6). Then I made a new layer because I did not want to edit the actual sketch but instead colour the sketch in but in layers on top of it. 




Step 2:
Then I coloured each figure. So for the primate, I made a new layer and coloured it in with a brown colour. Then the second primate, I used a lighter brown. Then for the caveman I used another shade of brown, the cro-magnum was in a peach-kind of colour, the modern man was a sort of yellow, an the robot was silver.

I used the polygonal-selection tool to select the area I wanted to colour in, then I filled the area with the paint bucket tool. Then I changed the layer's blend mode to Multiply so that my sketch's outline can be seen.





Step 3: 
Then I started on the shading of the primate and also colouring in the communication devices. I decided to use red for the colour of the communication devices because red is really very striking and it will be the first thing the viewer looks at. This is because the communication device is the main thing I want people to focus on. After all, this artwork is about communication's evolution. 

So for shading, what I did was duplicate the layer of the primate and then that layer was actually a darker shade of brown, so I simply erased the darker brown from 'most' of the primate. So now it had it's original brown colour, but also with a darker shade where I left on the back, the stomach, the head and his feet. 
This was the same technique I used for the second primate and the caveman. I also did this shading technique for the communication devices, as you will see later on. 




Step 4:
Then after colouring in the tin can, I moved on to the second communication device. This is the 'mobile phone' with a case connected to it. I researched more about this device and it needed a case because of its large, bulky battery (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/7906638/Mobile-phones-a-brief-history.html). [Side note: So we are actually so blessed now that our iPhone's and Samsung phones have small batteries that actually fit into the phone instead of outside of it in a huge brief-case. Imagine carrying that around a mall along with your handbag and shopping bags!!]

Once again, I did that shading with the double layer-trick. Plus, for the phone, I drew using the brush tool, the keypad and coloured it black. 



Step 5:
I shaded the caveman using the same double-layer way.




Step 6: 
I coloured in the bulky mobile phone and later drew in the outline with the brush tool.





Step 7:
I changed the cro-magnum's skin tone colour, this is because the previous colour was too pale and I thought that a cro-magnum would spend all day in the sun. Then I added hair all over his body with the brush tool. Then I also coloured in the clam-shell mobile phone and the iPhone. Notice that all the communication devices are the same shade of red. This is so that the viewer can easily see the evolution of the communication devices at one glance. 



Step 8: 
Finally, I added more normal looking hair to the human's head and gave him a little refined body with a line to show abs, using the brush tool for both the hair and the defined abs. 
I also gave the clam-shell phone and the iPhone more glossy looking screens. I did this by using the brush and changed the opacity of the brush. I recall learning in class that if we want to draw  glass, we should change the opacity so that it looks reflective and thus, glossy or shiny or see-through -- like glass. 






Step 9:
Lastly, I changed the colour of the robot's visor so that it is also red, along with the other communication devices. I did not change the robot as much as I changed the others because I felt that the robot had to look uniform and very straight forward as an object. It cannot look too complicated because it is a form of the future so we expect the future to make things much more simple and straightforward. I also used the brush to colour in the visor and I also changed the opacity because the visor is made of glass. 

And so there is my final design project artwork. 





Artist Statement:
Though I am not a professional artist, I tried my best in drawing out my idea of the evolution of communication. The main point this artwork is supposed to convey is that communication has improved over leaps and bounds. It has changed so much and for the better. I am glad that communication has evolved over the years, I cannot imagine carrying around a huge briefcase of just mobile phone battery! Also, one day I hope to be in direct contact with a robot that communicates and does things that humans cannot physically do. It will be amazing to watch and see it perform things we cannot only dream of today. 


References:

Monday 24 June 2013

Sketches-- How has technology affected our lives

The following pictures are of my five sketches, and one of which has been chosen to be my final design assignment piece.

Quality family time now looks like this, thanks to technology



We have become so unhealthy because of technology. Not only is this man eating fast food, he is microwaving it which means that it would be even more unhealthy than just eating fast food without reheating.



Nowadays, our devices have an app for almost everything. This is my interpretation of 'EVERYTHING'.



How has technology helped us for the better? We needn't know how to manually start a fire. Just press a button and ta-da!



The evolution of communication-- I guess it speaks for itself?

Monday 17 June 2013

Pop! Art!

This photo is of a Korean star from one of my favourite boybands BTOB.
I made a pop art out of one of his selca's, he posted on Twitter, using Photoshop.



Friday 14 June 2013

Photo montage!


This is a collage of seven photos (which I photographed myself). The main photo is of scenery I saw when I was in the car on my way outstation. Then the KLCC towers was when I visited there with my family. The umbrella is one from a seaside that I took a photo of when I was on a holiday.
The dog is my cousin's dog and the drink is a green tea smoothie, and the helicopter was a helicopter I saw when I went to KL. 
The picture of the slippers are my slippers, and I am the girl on the left of the collage picture.

Tuesday 11 June 2013

Art Movement

There are many types of art, types of genres and movements. One of the art movements I have come to like is Realism. The Realist Movement in art was most popular in France from 1840 to about 1890. Realism has the aim of conveying and communicating real life-- such as people, animals, and daily life as it appears in observable life-- through art. It mostly values truth and objectivity in portrayal of life in paintings.

The reason why this art movement stood out to me was that it is about humans and the reality of life. 


This painting is named 'Young Girl Reading'. 
It was painted by Camille Corot, and it was completed and revealed to the public in 1868. 
It shows girl intently reading at her desk
Source: http://media.nga.gov/public/objects/6/6/4/0/7/66407-primary-0-440x400.jpg


Realism is about the portrayal of people in their everyday lives, working, relaxing, at the market, walking and even just sitting down-- like these following realist paintings.

This painting was named 'Whistler's Mother' and it was painted by James Abbot McNeill Whistler. It was the painter's mother and because it didn't seem to have all the characteristics of a portrait, it was renamed 'Expression of black and grey'.



This painting was by the champion of Realism back in the day-- Gustave Courbet himself. It was completed in 1852. 
It shows three women walking in the fields, probably going toward the town, and meeting a younger girl along the way and giving her money. The cows are not perfect, and the women are not as beautiful as society would want them to be. That is the essence of realism. 



This painting was by Fernando Cueto Amorsolo and it is named 'Marketplace during the Occupation'. 
It was painted in 1942.
Ordinary, working class people, buying and selling at the marketplace.


This painting was by Francois Millet, and it was named 'The Gleaner'. 
It was painted in 1857.
It shows 3 workers gleaning from the harvest.



Realism was meant to show life through the eyes of the artist and his sensory observation of the 'real world'.  Realist artists desired to show in every detail the unpleasantness of life and experiences of 'normal, ordinary, everyday' people. Realism mostly was protest to the art movement of "Romanticism" which showed life in a very fantasy-like way. So the artists who subscribed to Realism instead, wanted to portray everyday life with all its imperfections. (Source: http://www.ducksters.com/history/art/realism.php).

An example of a Realist artist is Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). He put forward that painting should only  be of real and existent things and people. He was the main painter who promoted Realism back in his generation. Despite opposition from society who probably preferred Romanticism, he tried hard to illustrate in his paintings accurate scenes of ordinary people and places. (Source: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rlsm/hd_rlsm.htm)

The Stonebreakers, painted in 1849 was done by Gustave Courbet. 

The Stonebreakers (1849)
This painting showed two humble men working hard at stonebreaking, without perfect features nor clothes. They are represented as truthfully as Gustave Courbet could represent them. 

References:
http://impressionist1877.tripod.com/realism.htm
http://www.starrabbott.com/article-realism-paintings.htm

Typography

Today Mr Khairuazhar taught us about typography. He showed us different types of typography and asked us to make our own typography, unique to each individual, by drawing on a piece of graph paper. We wrote/drew our names. I thought about how to design my name, and I thought about what I like about life in general. I thought about fancy typography, cute typography, and even large rounded typography.

But in the end I remembered that I like people-- children, adults, teenagers and the elderly!--which is partly why I am studying psychology in HELP. I am passionate about people. I also like observing human behaviour, learning about human behaviour and I like making friends. So, I decided. I would make a typography based on people. I am not good at drawing at all, but I tried my best. I googled people typography and found a few types which I kind of copied. I tried my best to make it unique to me though. I just hope you can see what I drew. :P



Shapes

For our assignment, we had to draw many basic shapes in order to form a picture. My picture is the alphabet 'K' which is actually both the initials of my name and surname. It is made up of rectangles, squares, flowers and circles.

I made sure that there was balance, because the many rectangles seem to be about equal to the flowers and the circles, so the whole picture does not lean only toward one side of the A4 page.

There is also repetition of the similar shapes, and also harmony because the shapes fit well together to form the alphabet 'K'.