Week 10- 20 Two Page Spreads

 

Last night I suddenly remembered that I already have pages worth of material for this magazine! Several years ago, I made a comic book for my photography class. In the spirit of 1950's B-movies I've titled it "Your Girl Friend is a ZOMBIE NOW!!!" It stars 3 of my friends (with a different friend on the cover) who are oh so patient and supportive. One of them even did everyone's zombie make up with the help of his father.  I don't want to post the entire comic oh here for free but here's a few sample pages.

Week 9- 10 Two Page Spreads

For today we needed to have a total of 10 two page spreads for our magazine. Yes, that's pretty much half of this huge project. Here are the next 8 spreads I made. If you recall I already posted 2 two page spreads in a previous blog post. The first 3 spreads are general photography and digital imagery made with Photoshop and Corel Painter. The bottom 5 spreads are all part of a series of fictional album covers for Monte's Digital Imagery class that I took last spring. Some are stronger than others but my personal favorite is and always will be Miss Genevieve Buthod Plays Jazz for Suburban White People. Red Z could use some work or maybe just some deleting.

Week Eight- 2 Two Page Speads

This week all of our 2-page spreads were due. Here you'll see the first two spread's I've finished. One is obviously from the sky album art assignment. The other one is based on some photography I did my sophomore year. Those colors are actually LEDs at the end of some rave gloves shot in a dark room. I'm very happy with the results

Week Fourteen- Publishing the Magazine

After a long and arduous process, the magazine is finally ready to publish. Hooray! While I would like to have a printed version of all of my artwork, I'm honestly not comfortable with publishing this one. I'm very proud of all of my work in the magazine. But unfortunately due to the time constrictive nature of college, I do not feel that the actual layout of of the magazine is very good. I don't like most of the text or the fonts they come in and I know I can make certain things more dynamic and other most cohesive. But for the time being I'm content to be finished with the mammoth of a project.

Week Fifteen- 60 Minute Drawing in 60 Seconds

Here's a video we all had to make for class. The assignment was to draw something for one hour while QuickTime takes a screen recording of your digital work station. So I doodled for about an hour. I had no real plan going in. I just started drawing with the digital drawing pad and my natural instinct is just to draw some long haired figured. Then of course, this long haired figure would need a friend to occupy all of that negative space. So I created the abstract human form. It almost looks ghostly to me. After all that I still had about 20 or 30 minutes to kill so I just played with brushes in the back ground.

And now for some reason this video won't load. Motherfucker.

Week Five- Shape Drawing

I made this image by using the pen tool in the most awkward way possible. The class and I had to make an image by draw the shape of the changes of light and color. Everyone in the class drew the same coffee cup. For some reason the professor decided not to thoroughly show us how to use the curve function of the pen tool to draw this very round cup. I imagine the gradient tool would have also been useful for coloring it. This process was so frustratingly tedious (especailly while drawing the shadows on the saucer).
After a while I gave up so here is what I have.

Week Four- Color Drawings

For this week we had to make images demonstrating different type of color relationships. The images below demonstrate monochromatic, complimentary and adjacent colors respectively.  I used the brush tool with the digital drawing pads to make these images. My eyes are immediately attracted to the lightest point of the vessels because those smaller and brighter points stand out more. As for why I chose these objects to draw, they were just lying around the computer lab I was working in.

Week Three- Value Drawings

This week we did some drawings demonstrating how light effects different objects. I'm not particularly happy with the way these turned out. They're far too blotchy and there isn't enough subtly between shades of grey. I should have used more vertical lines in a gradient manner to achieve the desired affect. 

For some reason the teapots came out much better than the rest of these pieces. Part of that might be due to the fact that the teapots are made up of several parts like the handle and spout, making it easier to deconstruct and more accurately draw. Notice how the bowl at the bottom of this post, which is essentially one piece, is the most abstract and looks least like what it is supposed to.

Week Two- 100 Stroke Drawings

This week in class we were to generate at least five images of various objects using the drawing pads in the Mac lab. Each of these drawings were composed using about 100 strokes as per the professor's instructions. This proved to be very helpful in developing a familiarity with the pads as drawing with a digital tablet feels much different from drawing on paper. I don't seem to be very good at drawing with either. Here's what I came up with:

Week One- Introduction

Greetings!

My name is Matt Ferguson and welcome to my Computer Graphics Blog! I run this blog as part of my requirements for my bachelor's degree at Saint Xavier University in Chicago. After a few changes over my four years in college, I've finally settled on a major in English Philosophy Mass Communication but this blog is for a class for my Graphic Design minor. I also work as an assistant in the school's Visual Arts Center, which is what inspired me to take up that minor. If all goes according to plan I will graduate in May of 2014. Let's hope for the sake of expensive tuition that all goes according to plan.

In the Visual Art Center's Mac Lab

Hope you like these graphics!

Matt