The End of the Semester Musings.

As we reach the end of this semester, I am thinking back over the information that was learned from our text book. Although I don't feel like I was using a lot of that info in our class, I see how it has been affecting my creative process in my freelance Photography work.

I have been able to see how the background, foreground, and subject[s] are working together, and how to correct it while in process rather than after the fact. I have learned more about placement and the creation of shapes, and how light interacts with these shapes. And I'm sure there is more, but overall, I believe that the textbook we read for this class was one of the most useful textbooks I believe I have ever had for a class.

Overall, I think this class was awesome, and I can't wait to learn more skills in the follow up class next year!

The photo above is an engagement photo I took in which I consciously utilized what I had just read about recently in our text to set it up. I love how this one turned out, and I think it is very visually pleasing and interesting to the eye.

Tear of the Unicorn

Introducing my new website, marketing my new cruelty free, GMO-free, Organic energy drink!

http://users.tricity.wsu.edu/~rachel.mccall/website/index.html

Dreamweaver

Okay, I've got to be honest here. I was abso-freaking-lutely not looking forward to(or rather, borderline dreading) this Website project for DTC 355.

I really really dislike writing code, and I had never touched Dreamweaver before.

Now that we are actually working on our project and I have used the program? I am actually really digging this project. 

While trying to come up with a product to sell on my website, I remembered a funny fake product that my friend, James, and I  came with a couple of summers ago, and it is working out great to create a 1980's themed marketing website for it! 

Here's a slightly edited imaged to show what my product may or may not be about!

#energydrinks

Forest of Tolkien

Today, you will experience a walk through a Forest of Tolkien.

Neutral Materials

In chapter 11 of our book Stewart talks about all of the different materials used in art and how structures are created, etc. I absolutely love seeing art pieces that are made out of already existing materials, so I really enjoyed reading this chapter. I tend to think of home crafting and art journaling when I think about stuff like this chapter brought up. I know that it's kind of a broad leap, but I greatly enjoy viewing and creating art journals myself, and I do find them to be a type of art piece.

People who do art journaling put a lot of creativity and thought into their work and create absolutely beautiful pages, so I'm going to share a few that I've seen here! I LOVE to see how many layers are put into this work!

Design Principles

While reading this chapter, I kept applying all of the principles to my thoughts about my photography process. I realized that a few of these things are things I have always struggled with.

Balanced grouping, especially in Family Photos, is something that I have a special frustration with, because I feel like I really just don’t have an eye for. I can do 1-2 people easily, but when you get more than that? I pretty much cannot come up with any really nice combinations when in the spur of the moment. I realized this struggle a couple of years ago, and while I still haven’t gotten a lot better, I have made a little progress and it is a skill I am very definitely trying to grow.  

On the other hand, there are some aspects of design that I feel like I have been able to gain skills in more easily, such as Emphasis through Contrast, and Scale and Proportion. Four years ago, I taught a three week photography class to young teenagers about Dramatic Emphasis through Contrast in Photography, and it was super fun, and I loved getting to share my love of dramatic, contrasting photography with young teens who were super willing to soak up all I had to share. It was a great three weeks.

Anyways, my thoughts here are that it is very interesting how some of these principles come much more easily to me as an artist than others.

Below are four Dramatic Light/Contrast shots that I used or took for that class, and one is a photo that I took to show texture, which is another design principle.

Stop, It's Hammer Time

I'm having a ton of fun working on my Stop-Motion project, currently titled "Stop, It's Hammer Time" simply for lack of a better, more reasonable title. I am going to try and come up with a title more acknowledging of the content of the video, but we'll see.

My project is very heavily Lord of the Rings related, so just be aware that my nerd side is definitely showing right now. And I'm very much considering using the idea of vignettes... My video is currently resting at about 40 seconds, and I am hoping to get it over one minutes, but we will see how that goes when I actually make it into Final Cut Pro.. In the mean time, I am trying to come up with another 'light bulb' (please read this again in Gru's voice if you didn't already) moment idea!

I can't wait until I am able to see my own finished video!!!!! I'm so impatient. Lol.

Our Campus...

Have you ever stopped outside in the early morning and taken a moment to just realize and appreciate how amazing stunning our campus is?

I did yesterday morning on my was to the COMPASS club Bible Study. 

I am so glad I stopped to take a few photos.... I was astounded by the beauty!

All are taken in HDR on my phone with the colors boosted just a bit and a vignette added!

Site Specific

In chapter nine of our text on page 187, Stewart talks about Site-Specific artwork, and after some reading as well as the additional input from my F-A 331 class, I have developed an interest in large-scale site-specific artworks.

Recently online I came across a couple of articles about major art pieces that have really interested me, and this is one of them. I find the whole thing, concept and execution stunningly beautiful. 

The text from the article below:

"“Man and Woman” is a 8 meter (26 foot) tall moving steel sculpture by Georgian sculptor Tamara Kvesitadze. Located in the seaside city of Batumi, Georgia, the two figures represent a Muslim boy, Ali, and a Georgian princess, Nino, from a famous 1937 novel by Azerbaijani author Kurban Said. The tragic story ends with the lovers separated by the invasion of Soviet Russia.

The statues begin to move every day at 7 p.m., merging for a short embrace, before leaving each other behind. After 10 minutes the movement is complete. The statue was designed in 2007 but only installed in 2010; it has since been retitled “Ali and Nino.” You can find and English translation of “Ali and Nino” on Amazon."

Chapter 8: Cliches

     When our text talks about “Cliché’s” in chapter 8 (163 Stewart), they mention the concept of thinking of death when we see skulls or thinking of tranquility when we see seagulls, but I immediately thought of Ads for perfume and cologne. They are always totally cliché images of men and women looking super sexy and like they are about to “get it on” with just about anyone who might look at the picture. 

     

Honestly I find these images sleazy and more of a put off than a turn on, and I wish these companies would find some other way to advertise. I’m not wearing perfume because I want to get it on, I’m buying and wearing perfume because I want to smell pleasant. So the other idea in the text about cliché’s-- that they get “worn out” is definitely true in my mind.  

Join the Movement.

Join the Selfie Life.

You know you want to.

For my Propaganda poster, I again used the idea of the Selfie(fancy that!), and projected it in a way that if you were to simply glance at it, it would appear to be a political poster of some sort. I tried to be slightly humorous in how I presented it, by adding a QR code that links back to a google search for my personal "selfie" hashtag on Instagram. If you follow the QR code, it will take you to loads of pictures of me taking weird selfies, and in my mind, hopefully encourage other people to take some silly selfies and hashtag them in funny ways. 

Editing out the Non-essential

In chapter seven, Stewart talks about critiques and the techniques of critique that help you develop your artworks. About critical thinking.

I really appreciated this chapter and how she brought up the concepts of comparing and contrasting artworks that have similar themes. I also greatly appreciated the small section at the end of the chapter that talked about editing out the non-essential things in an artwork in order to make it better.

I have kind of always been a reverse minimalist when it comes to my art. I tend to overload my art pieces with just...stuff... in hopes of making it better, and in doing so I almost always end up killing the aesthetic of the piece. Time and time again I do it, and seem to never learn, but I am hoping that learning to apply these types of critical thinking will help me to create beautiful and meaningful art and be pleased with it when I originally think it is done and not continue adding more 'filler'. 

"Minimal is good" is probably something I should chant to myself on a daily basis... I need to channel my inner Daria, I think.. Haha.

Variety

When I think about varieties on a theme of an artwork, as Steward touches on on page 134 of our text, I think of fan art. 

I don't know if that is necessarily a "normal" thing to think about in these regards, but I was highly involved in DeviantArt at one time when I was younger, and drew "fan-art" quite a lot.

I always loved seeing different people's renditions of characters from my favorite movies, books, tv shows, and games--and also actors and actresses somewhat as well!! I still enjoy looking at these things occasionally, though I no longer participate in drawing these things any more, and I really appreciate a great fan-art artist!

 One of my favorite artists on DeviantArt is one who draws portraits of famous Asian actors, actresses and singers.

Imuya is their username, and here is some of their work:

And here are some fan-art images by other artists, of Aragorn in different styles, just cause he's my favorite :D

Fun fonts

I'm having quite a bit of fun looking at all the fun fonts I can find online.

Dafont.com is literally the coolest place ever. I've been using their website for a few months now, but I can always find new, cool stuff!

Typography and lettering is something I think I would really enjoy studying.

Not for submission

Here is a second TripTych that I created. 

It is not my submission, but I thought I would share it just for fun!

Triptych

In this Triptych piece, I used my own handwriting using the pencil tool to create the letters for this exercise, rather than using a type from the program. The letters I used are--classic--my own initials, which I know is a little boring, but I happen to like them. For the brush strokes, I used a tapered effect to make the lines look more like calligraphy strokes than the original brush strokes, and then I added backgrounds that I felt would give it a classic Oriental or Japanese Art feel. 

Overall I'm very pleased with this triptych, and I think it is very peaceful in its simplistic nature.

Words

Exploring connections in words in order to gain new ideas for art pieces is something I had't necessarily ever thought of before reading about Strategies in Chapter five of our text. Stewart really shows a huge plethora of different sources for influence and inspiration to artwork. 

I have been learning about Divergent and Convergent boundaries in my Geology class here at WSU, so learning about the artistic approach to Divergent and Convergent thinking was pretty interesting. I feel like I was clearly able to understand what Steward was writing about because of my prior knowledge of the application of those words, and I think I can see why words and being able to link them to other words and thoughts might play a key role in art creation.

Since our minds tend to tie words that we know or think we know to a meaning, we can then utilize those words to tie emotions related to them into our art, and that is pretty freaking cool. 

I once tried to participate in a 100 day drawing challenge where you took 100 subjects/topics based entirely on words or phrases and create a drawing for each. I failed utterly and could only stick to it for about twenty days, but it was really challenging and fun trying to think of original artworks to draw that would go along with the theme but not necessarily be completely obvious. 

Reading through this chapter is almost making me want to try doing that challenge again.

McCall: Playing with Photoshop!

So, I played around a little bit with my sibling headshots this afternoon, for fun. Looking forward to continuing to play with these once I learn new techniques. 

In the first mesh, I just took random portions of all of our faces and added them together.
In the second mesh, I aligned it from top to bottom by age.

McCall: Headshots

In which I show the head shots I took of six of my seven siblings. 

The age range represented here is over 20 years. 

What do you think, do we look related?

I personally think that I look like the odd one out. And not just because I'm on my own line.. Haha.

McCall

For another class, DTC 101, we are going to start a project where we mesh together multiple people's faces, which Sena let us know about ahead of time. So this put an idea in my head!

Over the weekend I saw six of my seven siblings, and I had the idea to take head shots of each of them, as well as myself so I could compile a single photo of all of us put together, just for fun!

It's not for any of my classes, but I'm pretty psyched about it in general, so I thought I'd share it as I work on it! I haven't uploaded the photos to my computer yet, but I'll keep you updated!
It has already been really interesting looking at the photos on my camera and seeing just how different and also how similar we all look from one another!

Kinesthetics

After reading the section of our text on ‘Spacial Dynamics’ and especially pages 100-101, I realize that my mind tends to gravitate almost immediately upon viewing an artwork to attempt to find a sort of movement in the image or other media. I tend to really love movies that have a lot of wide or other interesting angle shots (Mulan—which just so happened to be mentioned on pages 100 and 101, and The Two Towers, and others like that!). I always look for movement. When an image is stagnant, I don’t really like it, usually, but if it has an element of movement to it, that will almost always draw me in! (example of an image that I find really interesting, below.)

 On another note, the idea of the study of movement, or kinesthetics, in general just really excites me. I have always loved noticing peoples little hand movements while they are talking or dancing, or how someone maybe cocks their head while they are thinking, and I feel like how someone moves tells a lot about the beauty of their inner self. 

Multi-faceted

In my Photo Montage project, I kept with the “selfie” concept, and took it this time as a way to represent the different aspects of my life that I deem important. I am a photographer, a reader, a dancer, a Tolkien junkie, a church-goer, a lover of dresses, a coffee drinker, a plaid fanatic, and much more-- but I also represented myself in my work uniform and my pajamas, and my normal every day clothes. I took photos of all these different personalities by dressing to the character and snapping shots over the course of four different days at multiple times of day, including 7:00 am, 3:00 pm, 5:00 pm, and 8:00 pm.
 I know that if a person was to take this montage out of context they may think “wow, she’s really vain and obsessed with herself” but what I wanted to show was the idea that every person has an un-imaginable amount of facets to their character and personality, and each of those aspects cannot represent the person fully. This montage simply represents a few aspects of who I am right now, and I think it is cool that I can make this and have it to remind myself in the future of what I thought was important or interesting about myself in September of 2015. Maybe some of these things about myself will completely change or develop more fully, and that will make it a really cool experience to look back on this project and see what has changed, when and if the time comes.