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Carole and Tuesday (*・∀・*)人(*・∀・*) || My tablet is acting a bit wonky and I need to get more nibs for my pen, so I decided to do some pixel art of an anime I started watching. I’m only about 3 episodes in, but its beautiful animations and   wholesome content has become my temporary muse. I’d love to start selling prints on Red Bubble, but a lot of what I do is fan art. With fan art there’s a lot of legal issues to potentially deal with and I see a lot of other artists sell fan art, but how is “fair use” defined? How are permissions granted or are those generally overlooked? 

[DISCLAIMER: I mean no harm to the business and this post is purely for educational reasons.]

In reference to an assignment that I had Spring 2019, I needed to discuss GUI “bloopers” for a website of my choice. Thinking of “bad” website designs, I thought of one of my university’s textbook sellers, Off Campus Books. Attached to this post would be a link to an essay that contains the following...

Issues with Aesthetics, Functionality, and Organization

Improvement suggestions

Sketches of potential redesign

Design II  |  Assignment 2  |  Book Sculpture

Design II  |  Assignment 2  |  Asymmetrical Character Wire Sculpture

Design II  |  Assignment 1  |  Cardboard Octahedron      

The Summer Bride // BMP

True Reflection // BMP

     Most Disney fans would be familiar with Fa Mulan crying then wiping off half of her makeup, leaving the wiped portion squeaky clean. Anyone who have worked with make up or seen someone remove make up that make up will not magically come off unless the wipes they are using are made of unicorn tears and a magic eraser. In this musical number, Mulan asks, “when will my reflection show who I am inside?”  In this case, her reflection will show a hot mess. 

   For this image, I took a picture of myself bare faced and splotchy, as seen here:

     I then cropped the photo closer to remove any additional folds I disliked in my make-shift cosplay then cut myself out of the background, placing it on a dark blue-green gradient. After that, I made a copy of the pink portion of the “outfit” then recolored parts of it so that it could match the color of Mulan’s dress.

     Regretting my poor bleaching job, I got an image of an updo and placed it on my head as if it was a virtual wig. To make the wig blend in more, I removed extraneous pixels that were a part of the original image the updo was from as well as drew in the fly-away hair that ended up being removed on accident. 

     For the makeup, I made a copy of my face and created a desaturated layer mask with altered levels and curves so that the “foundation” would look more natural. The blush, eye makeup and eyebrows were created with brushes at different opacities. For the lips, I put them on a separate layer and recolored them and smudged where the make up would have been wiped off. 

     To look a bit more true to the character, the earrings were a composite edit of tear drop earrings and just a golden sphere. I altered the color and texture so that the different medals can look more like each other than they originally did. To add depth and have the earring look less like a two-dimensional sticker, I softened the edges and added a drop shadow. 

     For the foreground, I added a blue layer as a tint. I also wrote the Chinese characters that were in the scene of Mulan’s solo musical number. I then added an inner shadow and texture to the characters so that they look like they were carved into polished stone, like the shrine Mulan goes to. This was the image I used for reference:

“Reine Confiante” // BMP

     I was thinking about doing fashion photography concept art, and the first thing that came to mind was Rihanna dressed in Zac Posen’s Resort 2015 Midnight Blue Duchesse and Taffeta Strapless Ball Gown at the 2014 Diamond Ball. I also found huge inspiration from Hannah Alexander ’s modern art nouveau of fictional characters. Since Rihanna looked like she stepped out of a fairytale, I decided to combine the two concepts. Though I did not choose to do the large ballgown, I went for a dress that was more flowy, such the sheer red chiffon Azzedine Alaia gown Rihanna wore to the 2013 Grammy awards. Since Art Nouveau has relatively muted, earthy colors, I decided to go with a moss green instead of the vibrant red.

UFO Renegade: the lack of a return // BMP

     One of the assignments I needed to do over the summer was to join a group to design a video game cover based off the title prompt “UFO Renegade: The Return”.

     The cover has a front, back and spine design laid out as if it were to be printed and used for an actual game cover. The front is a composite edit consisting of my original character designs, the city scape of Dubai, a sculpture resembling something out of a sci-fi film  and background design using custom brushes, layer effects, and variants opacity. Our team felt that going with a semi-vibrant pastel theme made the game seem appealing and so that we can soften the intense theme that could potentially go with the rather intimidating title. We also wanted to go for a PC game cover so that we could have more space to work with. 

     Logos and text boxes were all created using various shapes and the text tool. The company logo, Silent Bowler, the game description, the first scenery screenshot on the back and the game title were created by my teammates. The middle scene was created by painting a crater and the fire, “spaceship” and smoke were edited in to look like a UFO crashing. The third scene is a pixel cityscape (by another artist) with the characters drawn in.   I decided to make the game rated T since it would bring a sense of surprise since the cover appears to be candy-colored and kid-friendly.