Starting Book Images No. 2

A live trace and live paint to the owl. The photo was made in photoshop, but I live traced it and live painted it in illustrator. I thought that the brown color for the wood texture and then the green eyes to give it a different look was good.


Where is Hoots? My pen rendition of this little owl. I used the illustrators mesh tool to create a funky background for my owl. And for this I was inspired by the fashions that are coming back. The summer of love is a huge hit, so I wanted to use some psychodelic colors to emphasise this aspect. And because everything was so different, I used a smaller owl and made the colors more outgoing.

My Pencil rendition in photoshop. I scanned in my original piece (just the hand drawn owl) then I made it so I could knock out the white. Copy and Pasted him in a 7x7.5 postcard and then added some color with the paintbucket. It was hard because I had to thicken the line. I used the pencil tool to make lines where I needed them to be darker. Then I went with an organic, earth tone colors for the bird and then I added a night scene for him in his little tree.

Starting Book images

This is Hoot. He is an craved owl that I gave my boyfriend. I took a photo of him and this is a picture of him with a filter off of illustrator. This is the stamp filter and I changed the settings around so it showed some details.

This is my tri-toned owl. I made him black and white first, then I went to image - mode- duotone. and then from there I changed it to a tri-tone. I used a m+m looking blue, m+m looking green and a yellow. I don't know how the figure has highlights but it makes it look like someone carved it out of stone.

This was a hue and saturation change. The hue was -42 and saturation was +43 and it created this really cool  pink color. I thought it would be cool if there were a multiples. 

This was my second rendition of this group. I thought it might need a background color. So I thought that possibly a green would be good.

This was an interesting idea that I thought up of. Just his head popping out was a cute idea. This was a combination of a photoshop image and the thought bubble and words are in illustrator. 

This was my original picture that I thought up of. I just took the image I had and I put him to the edge of the page that I had. 

Week 3 Tutorial

This tutorial was very interesting and helpful because I needed to put text in a circle. Starting out with a circle, you would then add text to the circle. Then you would copy and then paste it right on top of the original text. That makes it so the text is bolder. From there you would go to the type on a path option. You would select the accender and flip options. You can also preview it if needed. From there you can select your flipped image and then all you have to do is rotate it.




This was interesting tutorial because it taught me how to create my own spirals. I was wondering how to do that because the spirals for illustrator are quite recognizable. So this was a good thing to know. The person started out with an elepse and then used a direct select tool to pull out one side to create a brush like stroke. Take the convert anchor tool and make the tip more at a point. From there you can go to the brushes section and create a new brush. From there you select the spiral tool and create a spiral. Then you select it and then apply the brush you just made. Then from there you can change the point size of it so that way you can thicken or shrink your spiral.



This tutorial was how to use the illustrator tutorial without really making to much change. To make a spiral then use the direct arrow to change where the edge of the spiral to match with other spirals you may have. From there you can change the thickness of the point level.

For the Andy Worhol look I looked up http://www.melissaclifton.com/tutorial-warholphoto.html. From there I learned a way on how to make my own pop art with my own pictures. First you want to create this main picture in another layer so that way you will still have the background to work on. From there you could pen tool the outline of the objects you want to see. Then you would use the desaturate and change the brightness. From there you would use the cutout filters to make the levels change to the picture up above. To get the colors that you want, you could fill in color to the background layer the color you want. For the people colors you could it this way.

Create a new layer in the "frame 1" set and rename it "pc". (That stands for people color, not very imaginative). Place this layer between the two existing layers. See below picture. Now holding down Ctrl click on the layer "photo" in the Layers Window. You will see a little dashed-line square appear on the cursor hand. See image below.
Note if you are HAVING PROBLEMS WITH THE ABOVE, instead click on your "photo" layer in your layer palette thenSelect >> Load Selection
Look at the canvas and you will find the "photo" subject/s perfectly selected. Now still working on the "pc" layer, grab the paint bucket tool and fill the selection with you a vibrant color.
Now click on the "photo" layer and change the mode to Screen. See images below. That's method 1 done
Create a new layer in the "frame 1" set and rename it "pc". (That stands for people color, not very imaginative). Place this layer between the two existing layers. See below picture.
Now holding down Ctrl click on the layer "photo" in the Layers Window. You will see a little dashed-line square appear on the cursor hand. See image below.
Note if you are HAVING PROBLEMS WITH THE ABOVE, instead click on your "photo" layer in your layer palette thenSelect >> Load Selection
Look at the canvas and you will find the "photo" subject/s perfectly selected. Now still working on the "pc" layer, grab the paint bucket tool and fill the selection with you a vibrant color.
Now click on the "photo" layer and change the mode to Screen. See images below. That's method 1 done. (Taken from the website)

Photoshop Tutorial: Lynda.com training

Watched a movie on how to do select tools. 

We started with magic wand tool. I used one of my own photos of a little owl.

This is my selected picture. When watching this movie, this guy showed many ways to select the part of of the picture that you would like. It almost is too much information sometimes. He is using a difficult photo where I'm using something simple-ish.  Then he wanted to use the quick selection tool. The Quick selection tool is used for painting within the image you would need. 

He went through his process and I found the entire tutorial very informative yet almost too much. He was funny at times but I almost fell asleep.

Book Ideas No.2- Random Objects/1 drawing

This is a neat wine bottle that my father had in his wine closet. I have really grown up around wine so I thought I would fine a wine that was decent and had a good shape bottle to it.


This is Hoots the Carved Owl (named it that; was going to go for Hooters, but then people would get confused). I thought that this would be interesting just because he just looks so neat. I would have to use a better camera to take his picture but overall I think it is a great idea.


This is one of my shoes. I thought that this one was interesting for its belt buckle, and its one of the best shoes to sink your feet in.


Soy Sauce....who can live without soy sauce? If anyone could, I feel bad for them. Anyways, my family has had this same bottle for years. We have never changed it and its a staple thing on our table for dinner. Yum! (too andy worhol? possibly, but I thought of it so why not.)

And last but not least, I drew this Ice Cream cone a week ago or so. I thought that this was a great pencil drawing. so if I want to do anything for that, I would scan it in. I could see this one going a long way with how big it is, multiple colors, patterns, etc. I think this one is my favorite.

Book Ideas No.1- Outside Scenes

My family and I were walking down in the Pearl and I looked down and I saw this little plastic horse figurine attatched to old horse ties. I read about it later that art students were taking different little horses and attatching them to old horse ties that have remained over the years here in Portland. I thought that it was a really neat idea and I took this picture with my phone. Turned out good if I must say myself. And out of all the ones I saw, this one was the coolest because I think it's a paint horse.


This was in my boyfriends backyard. This was taken a couple weeks ago when we actually had some sunshine here in this grey state we live in. I thought that these flowers were beautiful; I wanted to capture them from odd angles and this was was wonderful because of how the sunshine makes them transparent and brighter.



This has to be one of the coolest flowers on the face of the earth. Pink as it may be (not my favorite color in the world), this is the "Bleeding Heart". My mother has some of these in her backyard as well, but these are at my boyfriends house as well. I took his camera and started shooting everything cool I could see (he has a better camera than I do...How does that happen?). Take advantage of the sunshine....I got some color and also some fantastic pictures. I think that is a win win situation.

This picture was also at my boyfriends house. This was a potted plant that was in the shade. It had the smallest flowers ever, but they were so cool I just had to zoom in and shoot it. These flowers are about the size of my thumb fingernail. That entire cluster. Just so small and delicate and yet so neat.

Art Building Proposal: Final

This is my first proposal for our art building. It consist of a meerkat that I took a photo of. I decided on the meerkat because I think these are fasinating creatures. They live in a colony yet their individuality is still extremely strong. I believe that that is what art students have to go through. People who are in art are linked together in the same way as meerkats are, more experienced people will help the "young" ones.

This is my second proposal for the art building. I designed this in mind that there are hundreds of flavors of ice cream in the world. Each flavor could represent what art students are. Different yet still the same basic thing. I used the unity of only two flavors because art students are not just "designers", but they can also be in the entertainment side of art (theater, etc.). So the two types of ice cream is a quick representation of that. Again I use the idea of re-painting the brink to give them a little more punch rather than keep them the weathered things that they are now.

This is my final proposal for the art building. I used a picture I took down in Las Vegas's Bellagio Hotel and Casino. This piece was made by Dale Chihuly and it contains over 2,000 individual glass flowers. I took my photo and transfered it over to photoshop and then used different sections of the photo to create a different view for each side.

Illustrator: Masking

I watched a tutorial that helped with masks and I decided to try it out.

So this was the picture I picked to try out. The great thing about CS3, to put a mask on a photo, all you would have to do is click the Mask button. From there I could shrink the mask to fit the main part of the photo

So this is the "new and improved" picture. I shrunk the photo so it just encases the only part of the photo I like

The next thing I learned was that I could make a curve to the mask since it has individual points. So what I did was I curved all four sides of the picture and then fit it more to just fit me and the horse Riley.

So this was the last little bit. Not really refined, but it was a great skill to learn for illustrator without having to go into photoshop.

Week 2: Reading Tutorials

This tutorial was about making 3-D Stars. I read the whole process about how to do it. This person that made the tutorials went into great detail about how to make gradients for the starts and how to make it look "realistic" They used the illutrator star to demontrate the capabilities of this process, but I am sure that a person could do this with their own designed start. It would just take a little bit longer to do.


Making a business card I think is an important thing for when you want clients or you just feel like you want to pass them out. I absolutly love looking at peoples business cards so it was nice to see a tutorial on how to make one. They used a simple and boring design, but it gives a nice starting look to see how these things are made and what you would have to do to get it started.

This tutorial was absolutely confusing. The person had three different ways to make a vector cd look real, but none of them went into great detail. There were some that seemed really easy yet another that was explaining how to get the rainbow effect on the cd, so that was really hard to understand.

More pen tool of course, one of the most important. Saw this first and was just watching it. A very good tutorial. One of the only ones that I found that was in video form, Adobe live docs sort of thing. Excellent way to demonstrate the use of the pen tool and step by step actions on what to click and how to use it.

Vector Pen Tool Excercise

This tutorial was used to practice how to make the word vector with just the pen tool. I saw that people were doing it so I wanted to practice the skills I learned by myself and see how they did it.

This is the starting point of my tutorial. The straight edged letters were really no problem for me. Those are the letters V, E, and T. Vet...funny stuff. Anyways, those letters were easy as making toast ( or scrambled eggs) but the parts where I really learned on were the curved letters C, O and R. I had a little snafoo with the letter C because on the lower straight edge of the C, I couldn't get a line across there. Fortunatly, I figured out that I wasn't clicking there to make the line so that was my issue. Quite simiple remedy actually; but overall, that experience was enriching since I had never done anything like that before.

This is a tiny picture of my final piece. Very colorful if I might say. The whole vector thing took me about 15 minutes or so. The R and the C were I must say the most interesting to do. I might try other words and see how those go. Alphabet? Maybe not till summer time haha.