For Lab 5, I decided to use Adobe Illustrator over Figma (I’ve worked with it for many years and find it to be easier to use). I also did not find it to be incredible challenging since I’ve done work similar to this design in the past for my own creations. What I did find hard was what exactly I wanted to do, but I decided to go with sustainability since I thought that there was a lot that could be done with that.
Category: DMA 212
This project was difficult for me specifically mostly due to the fact of what was being asked versus what I had at my disposal. Some of the steps I either couldn’t work how I wanted it to or didn’t feel right to me with what I had. I decided to use my two photos of CSX #911 and #3194, two of CSX’s special painted honorary units. I then used a photo of Strasburg #90, a steam locomotive currently residing on the Strasburg Railroad in Pennsylvania. I figured that this was a good way to show the rail industry as a whole, a very dirty and black past with a bright and promising future.
I would say one of the things that I learned was how to use Adobe InDesign, I had never worked with the program beforehand and I think it can definitely be handy in the future, although I found it a little difficult to work with at the beginning. The easiest part was resizing the images in photoshop for the online portfolio. I think the one thing that could be improved was the photos I took of the different things that I purchased on the trip. They could have been better but given my time constraint I think they came out okay in the end. The one thing that could improve the project for the professor was maybe the explanation of the instructions for what to do, as I found them a little complicated. I think I can use InDesign for future projects (both school and my own) as I find it handy for making PDF style art. What I am impressed with is my level of creativity as I came up with this idea on my own and had no outside inspiration for this one.
Using the process of image masks is something I am definitely familiar with, yet doing them in these format was a different experience entirely. Using the magnetic lasso tool helped out an immense amount, and would say that was the easiest to accomplish, the hardest being trying to use the final option and getting into the finer details with trying to mask hair. I’m still not 100% on it, but I think I can be better over time.
Categories
LAB #1
If I were to compare my original photo to the one from Unsplash, I would say that mine is better for a few reasons. While they both have this sense of motion, I would say the lighting and angle of the photograph is significantly better. I always find that roster shots versus a head on angle shot tend to turn out better, especially with capturing this sort of motion effect. As for the other photos, I would say that scans would turn out much better, mostly for the fact that the lighting as well as cropping can be used to enhance the image, as well as it can create a photo based on the image when its completely flat, to make sure you get as much detail as possible, without outside forces.