Week 8...Lab Time

This past week in class we were given the opportunity to work on our projects and have any of our questions answered regarding our third assignment. We also learned about exporting saved files to Adobe and Photoshop for printing purposes. I found this information to be very helpful, even though I was satisfied with the appearance of my projects when printed from InDesign. In addition, we learned about placing images inside of text outlines and closed paths in InDesign. I utilized this technique for the first part of Project 3. I really liked the idea of adding texture inside of the designs that I created with text.

I really struggled with coming up with my creative concept for our latest assignment. I spent four or five nights in the Steel Plant last week working on my project, and I found myself throwing out things that I worked on for hours and starting from scratch again and again. Eventually I decided on a springtime theme. I used text, including the shapes created by the text's negative space, to create pictures of butterflies, ladybugs, and flowers. I incorporated texture in the background of both of my images. I created a checkerboard pattern with scanned textures for part one of Project 3. The design that I created reminds me of a quilt. Tools that I found particularly helpful were Illustrator's LiveTrace tool and the opacity tool. In the end, I feel that my two pieces are similar in style and work well together despite their different color schemes and orientations.