Art With Words

Hi everyone.

This week for school we were asked to create typographic and text-based art using a few different online programs. I decided to base my work on some of my favorite things; butterflies, Hello Kitty, and I Love Lucy. These programs were really fun to use. They were all pretty straight forward and easy to navigate but also allowed for some customization which I liked and tried to utilize.

Glass Giant ASCII

Glass Giant has a lot of cool applications available and for this assignment we used the ASCII Art program. ASCII takes random characters and puts them together to form an image. I tried a few different images but ultimately decided on a simple line drawing I found of Hello Kitty. I made the image in white with black text and black with white text and it was interesting to me how the program used different characters for the same drawing.

TEXT-IMAGE.com

TEXT-IMAGE.com is another online text-based art program that offers three options for creating an image. I chose a rainbow colored butterfly from freepik for all three to see the differences from one to the next.

The first is HTML which was my favorite of the three. This creates an ASCII type of picture but it can use the color of the image to determine the color of the text print. The best thing was that it lets you choose your own text to form the image. I found a quote about on BrainyQuote that says "What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly." (Richard Bach) and I used that for the characters. I also chose a dark purple background since the images in the program stand out better on something dark due to contrast.

The second type of image you can make is with ASCII just like the previous program. For this one, I used the same dark purple background as the HTML image and used white text for contrast.

The third converter available is Matrix which is also an ASCII type of image but this one uses special characters in a bright green color on a black background to look similar to Sci-Fi/Matrix text. It was really easy to use, not much option for customizing due to the specific look of the design.

Tagxedo

Tagxedo is a word cloud image creator. It form an image by taking words and laying them out in such a way as to form a picture with certain words having more emphasis depending on the text source. Unlike the other programs, this one has a save feature which was nice. I saved my image as a 2MP PNG file, although it allows for higher quality if desired.

This was by far my favorite program as it allowed for the most customization and experimentation. I started with an image from my favorite episode of I Love Lucy, "Vitameatavegamin" for the shape. I had to edit the picture to remove background and increase the contrast and change the image to black and white so the program would pick up on the lines of the image that I wanted to bring out. Tagxedo will do this for you but I preferred the control I had using Photo Paint (I also had to draw in a few lines to make parts of the drawing stand out a bit more). I also created my own color palate that used red, purple, pink, and black since that seemed to fit my subject the best. For the text itself, I found an online script of the "Vitameatavegamin" episode and used that to create the word list. I also found a font similar to the one for the I Love Lucy heart logo (Savoye LET Plain) and used that. I removed a few words that I didn't want to use and played with the arrangement of the words a few times to get one I liked. I spent a lot of time on this, trying to make sure my image came out recognizable. I really like the end result and am already thinking of other ways I can use this program to create art to hand around my house.

I hope you enjoyed seeing my work this week!

Keep customizing!

Draw On

This week's class assignment was threefold (sixfold, actually, if you do the math). We needed to make two each images in three different online programs to demonstrate generative art. 

I am grateful for an instructor that understands technical difficulties and the stress of a student because this week was the week for me! Whew. I'm just glad to have six pieces to submit that I am pretty pleased with. Not to draw out what could be a very long story, I have an old, cheapy graphics tablet that I was trying to use for The Scribbler Too/Flame Paint images. For some reason when I was using the online programs, they would go "back" to the previous web page and I would lose all of my work. This happened several times before I had to quit for the night. I also saved one image but it saved as something else and I didn't know that until I was uploading everything! It was crazy but I persisted and finished and that's what's important.

Made with Scribbler:
I tried several images and these are the two I liked the most. For the first, I love peace signs and I thought this looked like something off a vintage poster. I wanted to add some dimension to it so I tried my best with that but it's hard when I'm not looking at an object to keep it with the right perspective. The second image was harder than it looks to create since scribbler does not offer an eraser. I would definitely fix a few things if it didn't meant having to redo the entire picture. It is sign language for "I love you" and I actually use it a lot with my boyfriend as it's easier to "say" in a room of people or if we are in a quiet place or when he leaves for work. We're pretty much cheesy like that. LOL. No save feature in this program (ick) so these were screen captured and cropped.

Made with Scribbler Too:
The first image, again, is retro inspired and was created to look similar to tie dye. I played around with settings to find a good balance with the line work on this one. The second image was my experience from hell described earlier. Too much work was put into this but I love it! I thought the program made great spiderwebs and fishnets seemed similar and much sexier. I used an image underneath to trace over all of the lines so I could get the perfect shapes and then I did the shading. Shading was hard in this program, but achievable.

Made with Flame Painter Free:
The first image is supposed to be a faerie holding a flower in a blue flame. The second image is a nod to flowers and I'm kind of in love with it. With the unpredictability of Flame Painter's drawing tool, it was a little hard to draw with any real type of accuracy so that was the difficulty with this for me. I could have just drawn lines and been a little less specific with my drawing but that's not really my style and what I did try ended up just looking like random squiggles and didn't evoke really any type of feeling for me so I went this route.

All in all, this would have been a fun assignment if not for my troubles. I enjoyed Scribbler Too the most because of being able to incorporate other images and all the controls available to vary the look and style of the drawing.

I recommend trying each of these programs, they are all free and good for experimenting with ways you normally wouldn't draw.

Keep calm and draw on!

My Type of Typology

Typology done with nail polish. Click for larger image.

This was a really difficult assignment for me this week so I'll get right down to that for this post.

Our assignment for class was to make a Becher Grid/Typology based on the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher.

My creative juices we just not flowing this week which is not good when you need to be creative. I wanted so badly to do a typology with origami, I even checked out a few books from the library. It just didn't work out (for various reasons) so I tried a different approach with earrings and they just didn't photograph well. Long story short, I remembered my plethora of nail polish and decided to go with that. So I took a tablecloth and set up a little studio in my kitchen and off I went.

I hadn't anticipated the amount of detail work this project would need! I had to put down a piece of tape to try and make sure the bottles were photographed in the same spot, at relatively the same angle. My camera I used is my cell phone (LG Optimus G Pro) camera and there is no tripod for that so I used the case as a stand and had to be reeeeeally careful not move it when I took the pictures.

I ended up taking three sets of pictures because the first two were very, very different in terms of their exposure and all of that (the backgrounds were noticeably different for one thing). I finally realized I had the white balance set to auto. Once I turned that off, the final set turned out pretty similar.

I used Corel Photo Paint X6 for this project because I am slightly familiar with it and I also knew I would need grids which that is capable of producing easily. I first straightened each image slightly because they looked a little "off" to me. Then I took each image and squared it up to with cropping. I then took each image and resized it to a smaller size. I didn't change any of the other settings on this assignment because I took great care on my lighting beforehand (and it was a controlled environment) and liked how they looked (but I did use the value editing process to try and fix my other two series of photos).

I started a new image and added the photos in as objects/layers. I then used the grid feature to add an even spacing between the pictures and arranged them to my liking which ended up being in order of color. After merging all of the layers to the background (I chose a color that would compliment the images), I saved it and posted it.

The editing part was really pretty easy (except for a small error I made with the straightening that gave me a white line on the top... had to start over) in comparison to taking the actual photos. I like how this turned out and would probably just change the subject if I could change anything but I did learn a lot during this assignment so that's a huge plus!

Stay colorful!

A Walk With My Shoes

I was lucky enough this week to be in the right place at the right time. Right place? Meijer. Right time? Well, I don't remember exactly but it was on Monday. So I decided to meander to the shoe department just for kicks (see what I did there?) and looked through my favorite aisle, the clearance aisle. Because I like to tie everything together with a theme, we will call this 80's pricing. I found a pair of super cute, purple K Swiss shoes in my size marked down from $50 to... ready?... $10! Had to buy them! Did buy them!

Our school assignment this week was to make a "day in the life" slideshow presentation. I could have chosen myself but I'm not big on selfies and it seemed like something most people would do. So I thought and thought about it and finally decided on my new shoes as the subject for this project.

I spent the morning running some errands (UT for a meeting with my advisor, the library to return a movie, Speedway for gas and a drink, and then back home) and document my shoes' adventures. Hope you enjoy!

Stay trendy! (at clearance prices, of course)

80's Music Mashup - Part 2

Last time I wrote, I showed you guys my skill(ish) for music mashing. This time around, I took that song and put it into a video mash-up. This class assignment was definitely more fun for me than the last but it was still a challenge.

I used Windows Live Movie Maker to take pieces from two movies from archive.org and reassembled them into this mini movie I've titled Changes. I added, of course, my music mash-up and some well-placed sound effects to make the finished product.

The story I tried (and hopefully succeeded) to tell was about a man who realizes he needs to change himself after he gets a bit of a wake up call. It sounds like a serious plot but it came together to be a little more comical in a way that only sped up silent movie footage can achieve. I’m glad for that, though, I love making people laugh (or I’ll settle for a chuckle).

All-in-all this was a good time but I think I’ll leave the movie making to the professionals for now. So, Spielberg (if you read this) your job is safe for now.

Keep creating!