Part One of Generative Art :Scribbler

I really like experimenting with this program. While you can determine a general outline, it is up to the generative output program to determine what lines go where. I don't tell it exactly where to go. As much as I like having control over every detail, it was nice just to see the different ways my initial outline could turn out. There were setting to change the color of the lines, how 'scribbly' the lines are, and the thickness of the lines. It was really left to us what we created and there weren't too many boundaries other than putting enough effort into making it. I have a touch screen laptop so it was really fun to practically draw just by touching my screen. It made the whole process that much more fun because drawing is a medium that I like the most. I made the mushrooms first because I wanted it to be something that people could recognize right away. My second creation I wanted to be a little more vague. It has some obvious characteristics but I kept it simpler so that it could be interpreted as different things. Although, I won't be terribly upset if people only see a specific thing in my picture. 

I Was Being A Bad Student

I unfortunately realized that I was not utilizing my blog they way I was supposed to. Granted, I have been posting my projects from my Digital Media class but there is another purpose for it. Early on in the semester, we had to decide what our theme or focus was for our blog. I chose to make things personal. This means that I post confessions about myself like secrets, faults, and little celebrations in my life that make me the person I am today. I will also we doing a twist on 'What's Inside My Bag' but I will get into it more when I make the post itself. My goal for my personal posts is to post one picture of myself every few days, or once a day if possible, providing a confession or the like. I want the people reading this blog to know the things that make me who I am and to see the things that I'm proud of, that embarrass me, that make me ponder the most, the things that scare me and so on. So, for starters, I will post my first confession. It isn't something very serious but it's something that I hold deep within myself that I just enjoy.

Confession #1

Mixing It Up and Mashing It Up

I present to you the combination of a horribly put together song and an equally horrible put together video. I again faced the problem of transitioning well and just couldn't quite figure out a way to make it better. This project focuses on video mashups and the like. The goal was to create a mashup video that works together with the original song of our own creation. As I have clearly stated in the past, I am not good at these types of projects. Although, I did like this a bit better than the song creation project. There was a lot of searching, cutting, rearranging, and so on. It was a little hard getting started but after listening to each type of 'song' from my original song creation, I was able to start picturing what I wanted the video content to focus on.

Mixing It Up and Making It Up

This was a very difficult assignment for me. I've realized that I can not count and made this much longer than what was necessary. I'm not quite sure how I managed to do that but at least I gave it my all. And while I was giving it my all, this project was tearing me apart. I could not find good transitions, it was hard to find specific loops, they all sounded the same to me, the process and practice was new to me even after watching the instructional videos, everything that could go wrong went wrong. I'm 99 percent sure I scared my boyfriend due to the smoke and fire coming out of my ears. To be honest, I hope to never use this again later in life. I could have had my boyfriend do this but then I would not have learned anything. I did learn that I dislike this process very much but I also learned that the people who do this are really creative. I like to draw and paint. That is my way of art. I like it. If this is how other people express themselves, good for them. I will be one less person they have to compete with.

Typology for Earrings

This is my rendering of the Typology project from my Digital Media class. Although I have never done anything like this before, I really enjoyed it. I owe most of the easy process to my professor who provided helpful videos to guide us. These videos made everything about this project simpler and more enjoyable. When I first saw the project, I was worried. I had no idea where I could find 16 similar, yet different in their own way, objects. I used my boyfriend to help me brainstorm and after he gave me a few ideas like coffee mugs, shoes, and cards I was struck by an idea. Earrings. I wear them every day because it is the only way for me to 'spruce up' my outfit due to work. Which is surrounded by dirt, cars, men, and cursing. Sounds like the perfect place to wear my nice blouse right? Unfortunately I have to wear jeans, a T-shirt, tennis shoes, and have my hair in a ponytail constantly. It is very bland and there aren't many ways to change it up. With earrings I can and I feel very naked when I forget them on occasion.

Toledo Meets Linkin Park

The Little Things Give You Away

If I admitted to being bad with digital art, I am worse at working with audio. I gained some experience doing sound tech for my high school. I worked more with pre-made presentations and microphones than with audio. I did like experiencing something new and outside of my comfort zone. When I tried to transfer the video the first time, I did it wrong. I hadn't noticed the very helpful video of instructions my professor had posted. After I watched the video the process was very simple. Even though Animoto only uses a 30 second clip from the selected song, the website was very pleasant. It has a setting where you can select when the song is played, thus picking the 30 seconds that fits best. I chose The Little Things Give You Away because I don't own any CDs of my own and I borrowed this Linkin Park CD from my future sister-in-law. She had other CDs like One Direction and Katy Perry. I prefer Linkin Park over those artists and is why I settled on it. Enjoy the result of my shaky experiment.

The Land of the Urbaness Compared

These are my favorite pictures from my Urban Landscape/Urban Landscape Edited Assignment from my Digital Media class. When we initially got this assignment, I was frazzled because I didn't think I could find twenty photos of urban landscape. I didn't even know what 'urban landscape' was. But, after finding out what it really was I started noticing things I saw on a daily basis that could fall into this category. Theses were places and buildings that I passed from home to school almost every day. I didn't really see them as artistic creations but merely part of the background.

I chose this pair of my original and edited pictures because it was one of the first pictures I took. I was on my way to school a little early and saw this on the side of a building I was coming up to. I had to make the quick decision of turning sharply into the overgrown and narrow driveway that went along this wall. Someone driving behind me didn't like that I had slowed down and honked very loudly at me.

The difference between the original and the edited picture, I found very striking. The first picture is fairly light and colorful. There's a bigger distinction between each color and the vines are easier to see. In my edited picture, it reminds me of a Hellboy comic. For those who do not know, Hellboy is a red beast and in the comic books the colors are dark and muted in contrast to his red colored form. I used one of the effects to darken the picture and then bumped up the contrast to take it one step farther. In result of this, my edited picture is fairly dark and has this bright, almost neon, yellow in contrast. I was surprised how different I could make these pictures but I like how different they are.