another practice

Today I did another practice using the random woman and some of my ideas. I used zebra skin today. I much prefer the snake skin to the zebra because it looks a lot more natural, so I will use snake skin for my actual avatar. I also prefer the purple skin to the green, because even though they both look good, green is stereotyped with aliens and is too cliche. Next lesson I will try some other effects on my avatar, hopefully cloning will be one of them.

Experimenting & more Brainstorming!!!

In today's lesson I had another think about the design of my avatar. I also had a go at using some of the ideas I have come up with on a random woman off the internet.

As you can see in the picture below, I put the snake skin over the skin of the woman and changed the colour to green. I then changed the colour of her lips and mouth to blue. I quite like the effect of the snake skin and think that I will use this for my assignment, although I might give the zebra skin a try too, as well as some other skin colours. I have also found a willing candidate to be my avatar. She is Shauna O'halloran-Anderson, and I will take some photos of her soon and post them on my blog.

Brainstorming for my avatar

So today we had a think about what we were going to do to create our avatar for our assignment.

So far, I'm not quite sure who I'm going to use as my avatar. I'm thinking about just taking a picture of one of my friends. I'm also thinking about putting zebra or snake skin over their face and skin. I might make them have blue skin, but then that would be too similar to the avatars in the movie 'AVATAR', so I might just make them have light purple skin. I'm also considering putting a scar on my avatar's cheek.
The two emotions that I'm going to depict my avatar in are probably going to be happiness and anger or frustration.
The animal skin that I am thinking about putting over my avatar looks like this:

https://www.killeenisd.org/schools/high/harkerheights/cga_pictures/cga_snake_skin.jpg

Well, that's it for now, more brainstorming coming up soon!

Emotions - Angry/Frustrated

source: http://matt-sky.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html
The image above is of an angry or frustrated child. The eyes are slightly narrowed and the brow is furrowed. The lips are parted and the teeth are clenched as though trying to keep the angry or frustrated emotions inside. The nose and most of the face is scrunched.


source: http://www.ehow.com/how_4919262_coworkers-angry.html
The above image is of an angry or frustrated man. His eyes are quite tight and squinted and his brows are furrowed. Once again, his mouth is parted and his teeth are clenched, as though he is trying to keep his emotions inside due to the fact that he does not want to make a fool of himself, or he may not be able to express his emotions at that point or place in time. His hair is quite scruffy and messy and his hands are clenched in tight fists.

source: http://fr.fotolia.com/id/4061674

The above image is of a frustrated or angry girl. Her eyes are wide in anger and her brows are very arched. Her nose is screwed up and her mouth is open very wide with her teeth showing. Also, the veins in her neck are bulging. This image gives the appearance of the girl yelling at someone or something.

Emotions - Happy

source: http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/baby-smiling.jpg

The above image is of a happy, carefree baby. It's eyes are wide and the eyebrows raised. It's mouth is stretched into a wide smile, with a few teeth showing. The image suggests that the baby is very happy and that there is probably someone or something around that is making it laugh or be so happy and smiley.

source: http://ondrus.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/kid_laughing.jpg

The above image is of a very happy, laughing toddler. The toddler's eyes are almost shut from the force of laughing and the mouth is open very wide, in a big grin. The image suggest what is very similar to the one above.

source: http://7photographyquestions.com/images/11/woman_smiling.jpg

The above image is of a happy, smiling woman. Her eyes are very slightly closed and her brows slightly higher than usual. Her mouth is stretched very wide into a smile with her teeth showing, which suggests that someone or something has made her very happy or is going well in her life.

Frog and Emu

For the first three lessons of Creative Media this term, we morphed together an emu and a frog. By doing the same thing for three lessons, we were able to learn and remember the skills required to do so and were able to become quite good at doing it.

By doing this activity we learnt how to:
-import images
-rotate an image
-use an overlay (new layer)
-use opacity
-use apple T (free transform)
-use masks
-use colorize and desaturation

These are the two images that I started with:

This is my final product:

I morphed the emu and the frog images together by doing the following:
-First I opened the emu and the frog images in Photoshop
-I then clicked image, image rotation, flip canvas horizontal (to flip the image)
-I selected the emu head and dragged it onto the frog image
-I changed the opacity of the emu's head to about 50% and then used 'apple T' to make the size of the emu's head the same as the frog's and line up the eyes of both the frog and emu
-I then renamed the layer of the emu's head 'head' and duplicated the layer. I labelled the second layer of the emu's head 'beak'
-I added a mask to the head layer and rubbed out everything but the hair on the emu's head. I also rubbed out the emu's eyes because they are the 'windows to the soul'
-I clicked on the layer thumbnail (not the layer mask thumbnail) and went to image, adjustments, desaturate (this made the image of the emu's head turn to black and white)
-I then pressed 'apple U' and ticked the box that said 'colorize' and adjusted the Hue, Saturation and Lightness until I had matched the colour of the head with others on the frog's body
-I put the opacity back to 100%
-I repeated the steps from adding the mask to the beak layer, this time rubbing out everything but the beak

Morphing together the emu and the frog was a lot of fun, and in the future I will morph other things together, and even create an avatar, so keep checking for updates! :)