Landscape painting

apparently this blog is going to be recycled for special projects:plein air painting....so thats kinda exciting

havent really been working on anything lately...I have really been wanting to make some wood toys that resemble the science fiction toy rush from when my dad was a kid (robots and whatnots)...When I go home for the weekend I am probably going to draw out some plans and hopefully use my dads woodworking shop to start on some of them while im home...

Following that theme I kinda wanted to turn my watch box from packaging design into a series...I will probably work on that during senior seminar

also finally to the younger kids who might be coming across this now that babcock is linking his intro to commercial art class to this:

hang on to these blogs, they are a little more useful than I first thought they would be. Even moreso that some of the other teachers are starting to toy with the idea. Using the links panel you can keep everything separated. Also the more you post ideas and suggestions on other peoples stuff...the more welcome they feel when posting on your stuff

good luck to everyone on the upcoming semester

Note

@Babcock: I downloaded fetch and uploaded everything to the server. Everything is in a folder under my name labeled "Digitalillustration". If there are any problems with these files let me know and I will fix them as soon as possible.

Website Progress

this is pretty much as far as im going to get tonight. Tomorrow I am going to upload everything to the server before I go to this wedding. From what I have found out...From what my dad said...it is jewish tradition to get married on sunday...who knew.....I didnt even know I had jewish family...I think my dad suffers from a mild case of the crazys so who knows how accurate that is.

I digress.....

http://mikefreemanart.blogspot.com/

The problem that was holding me back was if you adjust where the blog post starts, you have to tell blogger that you want the area where the post shows up to be wider. Once I figured out where to do that, everything sank into place really fast.

Since i figured I was running low on time, Instead of making different sections for all my old art and making thumbnails for everything, I took the thumbnails I had and crammed them all into one blog post named "older work". Once I get the site completely finished, that will just change to "other work".

I still have some things I want to do like add sections for everything, modify the type for the link list as well as the headlines, redraw the divot sorta things i had that created a dropshadow behind the images, I also wanted to move images to stay within the template but not always keep everything neatly in lines (i.e if i have 5 images, dont have a row of 3 and a row of 2...kinda keep some gaps in there)...Blogger is suprisingly completely customizeable once you figure out what you are doing. My misadventures with flash, interactive design and blogger have made me so glad I took all the web design and programming classes I could in high school. Learning visual basic made HTML, CSS and actionscript alot easier to learn than they probably should have been.

Reflection and Final Progress

final progress

I am having a ton of issues trying to get the images to go where i want them. In the meantime I have been making thumbnails for some work to drop in once I get that figured out. Jessica sent me another email about how to get the link system set up and that should go rather quickly once I get past this obnoxious hurdle of finding what the problem is.

Reflection

This class has been incredibly helpful to me. Being able to see how the other people have been rendering things probably helped just as much as doing the projects of my own. This class has taught me essentially how brushes work and how to abuse little things like paths and layer settings to do what i want them to do easily. Previously most of my "illustration" work has either been all illustrator or hand drawn and scanned. Those things worked for what i was doing however it is unknown if being able to do all of it with a combination of photoshop and illustrator would have made the final products better. Another thing was just the practice involved with the class; One of my weak points is just drawing things accurately and is something I am always trying to improve. The resources (delicious, blogger, picasa) have been wonderful tools in being able to help me do this class without being in Warrensburg and are really impressive tools in showing how far the internet has come since I saw it for the first time in the early 90s and in showing that the potential of the internet are becoming more and more limitless.

The skills learned in this class should help a lot in my future as a graphic designer. The two areas I would really like to focus my work on more is packaging and interactive things using flash. Being able to produce better looking illustrations faster seems like a skill that will help in either field. I feel like I have just become a better designer all around with my internship and now having some background in illustration as well.

Thanks Mr. Babcock for helping with your tutorials and advice all along the way and thanks to the other students for helping with advice and ideas.

As for the future of this blog. It will become a link on my portfolio site that I am working on and hopefully maintained with projects I am working on as well as other things.