Drawing 4 - Inspiring type

Moving on from the object drawing we now started to look into typography workshops. This session involved inspiring ourselves to create different styles of type , eventually leading into creating our own alphabet. The session began by picking different illustrations and photographs to base our type on. The image i picked was an illustration of a man with psychedelic hair. I chose this as i felt there was a lot of potential for development , the hair provided flow and could be morphed into various shapes and forms.

We were given the letters ANESG to work with as they provided variation. i used the strands of hair to build up each letter , i made sure they flowed well and retained the style of the original illustration. I then began to adapt the hair to the illustration and started to use typography as the hair of the figure. I feel that one thing i would improve with this piece is colour , the colour adds to the psychedelic feel of the illustration , providing the vibrant characteristics. My type lacks this but could be easily adjusted. My type feels relatively messy in these stages as typography is a new thing that i have done before and never gone into it with this much detail.

In this stage my typography was only an experiment , i favour sans serif fonts as i feel they look cleaner however in later stages one of the things i hope to explore is serif fonts , mainly because i think they are more skilful to produce.

Photoshop 1 - Basics

Photoshop is one of my strong points within graphic design as i have self taught myself and been using the software since high school. Unfortunately on the day this session was held i was ill therefore i have had to catch up and produce the work in my own time. Photoshop is the software used mainly for working with high resolution images. Unlike Illustrator , photoshop works in Bitmap therefore scaling an image will result in lower quality resolution. I feel that photoshop tools are easier to locate and get the hang of , although most of these tools are present in illustrator they work slightly differently or are hidden in many of drop down menus.

Our first task was exploring the different colour modes of pictures. This was done through the Image > Mode > Adjustments then selecting an option. We first changed an image of our choice to greyscale.

After changing the colour to grayscale the menu opened up the duotone option. This setting allowed two-four colours to pass through the image , acting like a filter. This would add a slight tint to the image making it more interesting than just black and white. Other effects we looked at was Hue and saturation which would change the colours of a whole picture , for example you could make a lemon turn purple without ruining the image. Levels and curves also came in useful for editing photographs as you can alter how intense certain colours were in the image. 

Our next task was to create a non destructive self portrait. We achieved this by using different layers to merge a picture of ourselves with objects or landscapes. I started out by picking a suitable image of myself to merge with another image. I then duplicated the image and placed a forrest scene picture between the two pictures , this was the image i was going to blend with my self portrait. To blend the image i used a rubber with 0% hardness so i could feature away at my portrait that would slowly expose the trees into my face. 

Finished Piece