Text Designs

1. Which one of the four of your Text Designs is the most successful? In what ways? Please be specific.

Of my two text designs, I am inclined to think that my poultry in motion design was the most successful. I view it as the most successful because I think the picture represents the pun well, how the text looks fits the design, and I used photoshop well in order to make it. The chickens crossing Abbey Road like the Beatles really describes poultry in motion. It is both literal, the chickens crossing the road, and figurative in the sense that the Beatles used poetry (“poultry”). I also think my idea of putting the chickens in place of the Beatles was successful because the Abbey Road picture is famous, and many people will recognize it. How I placed my text and how bold I made it makes it easy to read. The way that the word “motion” is stretched also gives a sense of movement to the word. Finally, I think I used photoshop successfully to make this design. I think I recreated the background really well with the stamp tool.

2. List some of the tools that you learned and used in this assignment. Which ones did you find the most helpful and in what ways?

Some of the tools I learned and used in this assignment were the lasso, stamp, eraser, text tool, color adjustment, and the transform technique. I think the most helpful tools were the stamp and lasso tool. With these tools, I could cut out the Beatles and replace them with chickens. I could also cut out legs and arms to put in the sink. Using the lasso tool, I could cut and paste two photos together. The stamp tool was also extremely useful. When I cut out the Beatles, I had to replace the background they were on. I used the stamp tool to accomplish this. On my other design, I had to add on to the original photo so I used the stamp tool to enlarge the sink, add counter space, and add more of the view outside.

3. With regards to Design concepts and/or Photoshop tools, what do you think you need to know and what do you want to know?

I think I need to know more about how to adjust text, not just the regular waves or arcs. I also think I need to learn more about color manipulation and some things about making two photos blend better. What do I want to know? I want to know everything about photoshop. I want to know how to make the stamp tool cleaner. I want to know how to make everything I draw on here neater. I also want to learn some other cool tools like the stamp tool.

Type Design

1. Are you happy/satisfied with your design? What are some of the features that make it so successful? If you are not satisfied, what would you have done differently to make it more successful?

I am incredibly happy with my design! I think it’s a great first start for designing things with Photoshop considering it’s a program I have never used before. I think one of the most successful things in my design is the color scheme. Taking Art Fundamentals and having the color unit to use as prior knowledge was very helpful. I was used to complementary color schemes, but using a double complementary scheme was something new. I used the complements of blue with orange and blue-green with red-orange because I love blue-greens. I also thought that orange and blue would be great for this project since they really make each other “pop”, and we had been looking at different pop arts. Another successful feature I think is the letters. Their type is a solid, bold font that is like my bold colors. The letters themselves add to the design too. They have interesting shapes that look good put together-- literally!


2. List some of the tools that you learned and used in this assignment. Which ones did you find the most helpful and in what ways?

In this assignment I used the transform, paint bucket, rectangular marquis, type, paint brush, opacity change, new layer, and the eye dropper tools. The ones I found most helpful were probably the opacity change, eye dropper, transform, and the paintbrush. These tools were fundamental in the overall design because they allowed me to manipulate the background layers and my letters. The opacity tool was largely used on my background, and with it I could over lap my rectangles to make new colors. I used my overlapping layers to bring more attention to my focal point. The eyedropper was helpful when I wanted to go back and fix my layers. The transform was used in every part of this design. My letters look so much more interesting when I used transform to tilt or distort them. Finally, I really liked the effects I added by using the paintbrush. This was the tool I used to make it seem like the A was hanging off the T and the Q was hanging off the L.

3. With what areas/aspects of Photoshop do you have questions? What activities would help you better understand basic design concepts, along with more Photoshop tools, tips, and tricks?

Questions about Photoshop? I don’t have a broad enough knowledge of Photoshop to even begin asking questions. At first I thought Photoshop was just for manipulating pictures. Now I know that I can create my own design with it! I’m not sure what else I can do with this amazing application. I think that more projects such as this one will help me to learn the basic concepts of Photoshop. Activities that build on what knowledge I know but also have some new elements and tools I need to learn would be the best.

Pop Art

1.What is Pop-Art?
Pop art is a kind of medium that takes mundane, everyday kind of objects and draws them in a simplified, almost abstract form.

2. Brief biography (3 to 4 sentences) of Stuart Davis
Stuart Davis was an artist who began under the wing of Robert Herni. His first works were merely covers and drawings for papers, but then he dabbled in watercolors, which had a huge impact on him. One of the more notable things about Stuart Davis was how he affected American Cubism. His art was centered more on the synthetics rather than the analytical aspect of this medium. He moved from realistic to abstract paintings, drawing some that doubled as both a piece of art and an advertisement. Even though he his paintings were abstract, Davis claimed that all of his works could claim American daily life as their source of inspiration.

3. Brief biography (3 to 4 sentences) of Robert Indiana
Robert Indiana, or Robert Clark, was an artist much like Stuart Davis, full of creativity and ideas. His pop art is edgy, multicolored, and certainly stands out. Influenced by both American cultural and such things as road signs, Indiana used his works of art to express his positive and negative views on american life.

4. Choose a favorite work from each artist and write 3 to 4 sentences describing why you like the work of art/ find it interesting. Be specific. Include the title and date of the work.

Title: Constance Fletcher
Year: 1977


The painting Constance Fletcher is appealing to me for several reasons. One of those is the way Indiana paints her body. He has designed her dress and hat so that even though a head hasn’t been drawn in, you can see a rough outline of where it would be and what shape it has. This is a brilliant usage of positive and negative space. He also brings in the positive and negative technique to add detail to her umbrella and hat. The simplicity in this piece of art is also very nice. He uses big shapes, only going into detail on her hat and on the sleeves of the dress.


Visa
1951
Champion seems like a painting that clearly portrays Stuart Davis’s style. It’s an abstract piece of cubist art that also has some lettering in it. It is in fact the lettering that makes it so interesting to me. I like how he takes something both abstract and realistic and puts them together so they complement each other. To me, the poster has an excited, charged energy about it, probably due to the fact that it says “champion” and seems to have confetti all around it. It inspires a sense that someone won a race, or a game.