My quarter portfolio includes my portrait of myself, my picture of a cloud, and my picture of the London Eye in England. I chose to use these three pieces in my portfolio because I felt that they were not only meaningful to me, but that they also demonstrated certain artistic strong points. The portrait of myself for example, was completely hand-drawn and then retouched slightly on the computer. I felt that the goal of this artwork was to illustrate the thought-process behind an artist and their work. I, for example, often find that I am constantly thinking of new ideas for a given piece while working on it. This is shown through the many small thought bubbles and squiggles around my head, which symbolize my inspiration and changing ideas. I did some cropping in this piece to get a good composition, and I also used the photo editing tools in Photoshop to add contrast to my work. I found that the original work was very dull and gray until I brightened the image and colored in areas that needed to be darker.
As for my cloud, I did some slight retouching on this as well. I photographed the cloud originally because I was cloud-watching and thought it looked like an abstract dragon of some kind. I have always found clouds so inspiring because despite their nonrepresentational nature, we as people are nevertheless able to find meaning and familiar shapes in their forms. For this piece, I once again did some minor cropping to achieve an acceptable composition, and sharpened and brightened the sky as well. I highly considered using the clone stamp at one point to erase the telephone line and rooftops that are present in my image, but thought better of it at the last minute because I really liked the way the lines framed the cloud. I thought they added so much more interest to my piece and I included this photo in my portfolio simply because I loved the effect so much.
Lastly, I added my picture of the London Eye to this portfolio. The original image for this is extremely bad in terms of color and overall photo quality. It required several of the photo-editing techniques we learned about in class to fix. For example, I had to sharpen the image to make it clearer, and then used curves, brightness/contrast, and color correction to bring life back into the photo. There is still a problem area in the bottom right corner that unfortunately cannot be changed, at least with my current Photoshop skill, but regardless, I consider this piece to be one of my best. It also documents a great memory of mine; one in which I was able to travel to London and capture a photo of an attraction that has helped so many people see London and its beauty in its entirety.
No comments:
Post a Comment