For this week we worked with ASCII programs. This sort of art just uses characters in order to create a picture. I remember this used to be a big thing in middle school when cell phones just started becoming popular. It was a fun way to send little pictures to each other based on a keyboard. These programs were simple and straight forward. You just found an image you wanted to convert to text and put it in. Depending on the image I think I like the ASCII version better than the HTML, just because the colors in the HTML are so much darker and I like the simple shading in the ASCII one. Although I did like how I could specify which characters I wanted to be used in the image for the HTML version. For this one I chose to use REYNASTARK, as that is what the image is based off of.
For my ASCII art I decided to use an image I actually created in Krita. It is sort of a character token for my D&D character Reyna Stark. It is a purple d20, because purple is the color associated with royalty, and Reyna is sort of royalty. Then the green gemstone at the bottom is for her arcane focus, an earring with an emerald gem in it. There's a wand because she has two wands she uses frequently. Then the potion bottle is because she is a healer, and a lot of potions in D&D are just healing potions, then there's a tag on it with her initials that I don't think shows up well in the program. Then the fire wings are because she is a celestial sorcerer and likes to use fire a lot.
So, after the previous post about the generative art program we used, I learned that my drawing tablet just needed to be unplugged and plugged back in, because it wasn't working in any program. So I did that and retried with the scribbler site. Well, the drawing tablet still didn't work with the site unfortunately. But I got to thinking about how the scribbler art reminds me of a few famous artists, such as van Gogh and Paul Signac. After watching Doctor Who I had a newfound love for van Gogh, so I looked up some of his paintings to try to replicate in the program. However, I found this piece from the movie Loving Vincent and found it absolutely beautiful. So I tried to replicate this piece. I thought the swirly patterns already in the piece would look neat replicated into scribbler. The background was fun and easy to make, as was the suit. It was the face and hair that I really struggled with this time. I think part of my problem is I want to put too much detail in it when it is meant to be more abstract. At first I had an eye actually somewhat drawn in there, but I decided to just show the shadows. I think I may try this again, but using Krita and using the texture brushes the program has. So look forward to that!
Two years had passed since I had seen my brother Titus. I thought the day he returned would be the best day ever, filled with welcome home parties, and lots of laughter. However, it ended up being the opposite. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ The gate bells were rung early in the morning, alerting the town that soldiers were returning home. It was more like a funeral proceeding. It was a line of horribly wounded soldiers from our village. Titus was in the front, being rushed into our home. He was gravely wounded. We all knew he would die by the end of the day. The next few hours went by in a blur. I stayed by Titus's bed all day, bawling my eyes out and angry at the stupidity of our village. There was magic all around us that could save my brother, but our village was too worried about an ancient prophecy to do the reasonable thing and accept magic into our society. I couldn't stand it, this placed disgusted me with its ignorance. My grief and anger quickly lulled me to sleep, but sleep wasn't a very welcoming thing in my life. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ I had the same night terror I normally do. Everything is on fire. I can't seem to find the winged beings that normally annoy me in these, so for once I wandered about the flaming lands. I couldn't actually make out any details of the landmarks around me or tell where I was going, it was very disconcerting. Eventually I found myself atop a hill, where the winged beings finally showed themselves. They told me they could help me save Titus. I didn't care what the cost was, as long as I could live with my brother again. I woke up to Titus shaking me awake screaming for the guards. I was so happy! My brother was alive and moving! But he didn't look happy. In fact, he looked scared of me. He started telling me I was the prophesied damnation of the world and couldn't believe I would delve into magic like that. I didn't understand what he was saying, I didn't do anything? Then he did the craziest thing of all, he grabbed his sword and swung at me! I barely managed to dodge without losing my head, but he managed to cut across my eye. I could hear guards starting to come towards our room, I had to leave fast before Titus told them these lies. He managed to grab me before I could leave though. He was too strong for me to break free from. Damn him! Before I knew it I was in a alone in a cell, but not for long. My mother came to speak to me before anyone else did. That's when I learned that my life was a lie. ________________________________________________________________________________________________
The second part of this week's blog involved using Flame Painter 4, a unique program that uses life-like particle brushes to enhance your art. Just like any other digital art program, this program has many brushes to choose from, and allows you to use layers. It is like a Krita or Photoshop, but only with crazy brushes! I had a lot of fun with this program, however, I am cheap and will probably not end up ever buying the full version, despite how cool it looks!
After playing around with the brushes and the different settings, I began creating random stuff. I wasn't sure which emotions I wanted to display, so I started with just creating stuff and seeing how it made me feel. It was hard to do by solely using an abstract form, so after the first two I decided to add a semi-concrete element to the art. For overwhelmed, I modeled the person off of Edvard Much's The Scream. Then adding a lot of colorful busy backgrounds, I created a sense of the scene overwhelming the person. The person clutching their head adds to this, as this is a stereotypical action we see people do when they are overwhelmed. Without the person added to this piece, I think it could be interpreted as just a happy piece, which isn't what I was going for. Despair was the first one I had created. I tried creating an actual flame, but it was a lot harder than I was expecting. I was going to go with a blue tone theme for it, since we correlate blue with sadness. However, after playing around with the filters, I ended up with this and I thought it looked really cool. The black in the background feels like shadows that are about to consume the light in the center, creating a sense of despair. Then lastly I couldn't decide which two I liked the most, so I picked my top 3. Excitement was the last one on this lit. I used a simple stick figure to show someone running or dancing, then added bright colors around them. I tried to make it look as though they were almost playing with ribbons in the air, going from hand to hand. However, some of the brushes are tricky to use, so it ended up a little awkward. Then at the bottom I used this aloe brush the program had. It helped create a sense that the stick figure was frolicking through the grass.
Boy was creating this a journey! Being an android user, I lowered my standards a bit and used iMovie for this video. I couldn't quite figure out how to use the windows video editor, while the apple version was much more straight forward.
I wasn't sure if I wanted to do a specific theme for his project or not. At first I created a neat little list of video themes I wanted to include and the order they would go in. At the end though, I just did some random stuff. I included a lot of D&D and cat stuff because those are my favorite things. I found the Cats movie clip and had never even heard of this movie before. It was so bizarre and freaky I just had to use it. I also included a video clip of a lady dancing around. This clip was actually used in one of the tutorial videos, but I really liked the old fashioned sense to it, so I used it as well.
I didn't actually edit any of the videos, other than trimming them. I wasn't sure how to do that in iMovie, and I'm always scared if I do something it'll ruin the rest of the progress I've made and I'll have to start over. It actually took me a little bit of time to even figure out how to trim the videos though, so I'm glad I didn't try to do anything crazier with them. It would only allow me to trim a video to a certain size, so I would have to split the video and then trim, then repeat.
For the music, I used the song I had made for the last project. I don't think I ended up getting the exact part of the song I really wanted though. I liked the ending of my song, so I wanted that to be in the video, but I don't think that ended up happening since I didn't know what I was doing at first. Then I really love listening alternative indie and epic music that you hear in theaters, so the last song in my video is one that I've been listening to often lately. I actually didn't plan to have that song line up with the battle scene from Game of Thrones, but I was happy it did. Then there was random music from iTunes that I used. For these I stuck with more "poppy" and happy songs that would go along with the goofy scene of the cat playing D&D and the intro of the Cats movie clip.
Overall, I liked this project. I'm sure my video isn't as elaborate as others, with it only consisting of maybe 5 video clips. But, I had fun making it. And now I actually know how to use iMovie! Now I might just have to go and make some goofy trailer for my D&D group!
This is the song I created for class. I have never worked with music before, so this was a first time for me. It was honestly a really hard little project to do. Finding the right sounds to go together proved to be very hard. Thankfully the website, soundation, was fairly easy to use. I wasn't able to discover a way to change the volume of sounds at different points in the song, but I guess it could be done by just creating a new channel. I used synth music as the basis of the song, then at the end changed it to a more trap. I think together they created a fairly unique sound.
