Lauren's Life in a Nutshell

      Now that we're finished with Illustrator, it's time to move on to Photoshop. I'm glad she's going to teach us how to use it because I want to make better memes than what I'm currently capable of with my phone. I am afraid that I won't be good at using it, but I surprised myself with the art I've been able to make so far, so hopefully that'll be the case this time too.     Here's the first tutorial video I found.     This video explains the multiple keyboard shortcuts you can use to control the layers. I didn't use layers very much in Illustrator, but I'm hoping to use them more in Photoshop. You can put an image in for the background and press the shift button to change the size but keep the image at the right scale.     This is a tutorial on how to transform stock photos into cool fantasy art.     From what I've seen in this video, I think I'll prefer Photoshop's selection tool more than the one in Illustrator. You can al...

     This project took me roughly 3 hours.  I chose to make my poster about the vaquita porpoise to raise awareness about them because there are less then 30 left in the wild. They'll most likely go extinct within my lifetime, but I do things like signing petitions and raising awareness for them in hopes that the population can recover. This is the picture I used for reference.     This is the picture I used to make the self portrait. I scraped my knee really bad the day this picture was taken, so I might look a little pained in it.     Without further ado, here is my propaganda poster!     Professor Roundtree did edit this to add a black shadow to the words, and she made the "Vaquita" bigger to put more emphasis on it since it's a unique word. This is also the project where I learned how to convert an Illustrator file into an image that can be shared online. Funny how I just figured this out right as we move on from Illustrator.

    For this project, I looked at a clown triggerfish for inspiration.     I picked this fish for two reasons: 1) I consider myself to be quite the clown because people tell me I'm funny and 2) we have one of these at the aquarium where I work and all the workers including me love pointing it out to the guests because it's a baby.     Overall, this took about 3 hours.

      For my calligram project, I traced this shark.     This is a whitetip reef shark, my favorite shark species. It's my favorite species because they spend all day cuddling and hunt together at night. There are two of these sharks at the aquarium where I work, so I get to be up and personal with them very often.     Here is my calligram project, which took about three hours , frustration breaks included.         I personally don't like it, but my professor said she likes how the inside shape invokes the idea of the ripples of the water. Although the coding project took a significantly longer amount of time, I liked doing that more because it was easier to make it do what I wanted. I would love to get better at using Illustrator, but I don't have high hopes, haha.

   the video     I'm really nervous to work with Illustrator because of how many buttons there are on the tool bar. I watched this guy make various shapes and I have no idea how I'll be able to do that. I would love to be able to use Illustrator to make fanart for my favorite stories, but even if I did figure out how to use it, I still can't draw. I don't understand how control points work, so that will be hard to learn. the video     This video made me less nervous about making curves with the pen tool. It seemed very hard to do when playing that practice game, but that's because there were certain nodes you had to meet. When doing it free-handed you can put the control nodes wherever you want. This video also showed me that I could trace images, which will help me practice drawing the things I want to. the video     I learned that you can pick what tools are available on your tool bar. This way I could customize the tool bar to only have the too...

    To make my project, I looked at this image for a reference.     This is Todoroki from Boku no Hero Academia. He's my favorite character, so I figured I would do a portrait of him. It seemed like it would be easy because a face is just a bunch of circles, but I was in for way more than I knew when I first started working on it. All together, finishing this took roughly 8 hours and 30 minutes.     Without further ado, here is my project, Todoroki Disgraced.     Getting the gradient of the background and the base of the face was easy, but everything after that was a struggle. My first obstacle was to switch the gradient of the scar from going side-to-side to up and down. Then I struggled with putting lines in that didn't affect the strokes on other shapes, but others in the class had the same problem, so Professor Roundtree figured out what we were doing wrong and helped us. The Bezier curve gave me the biggest struggle of all- I didn't quite get...

         The Internet - what is it? Well, that's what I'm posting on right now with this blog. Of course, for this assignment, I need to give a detailed definition of what it is. I'm going to look it up on Google; it's ironic that I'm researching about the Internet on the Internet! According to The Guardian, the Internet is an interconnected web of cables and wires that "allows computer networks around the world run by companies, governments, universities and other organizations to talk to one another"(1). The invention of this amazing web of communication is credited to two scientists named Robert Khan and Vinton Cerf (2). They originally used it for transferring data packets between two computers, which we still do to this day, but on a much larger scale as well as many other things.     The World Wide Web - the 'www' that is at the beginning of every website URL- is a way to view all the information that the Internet offers. The web, which is o...