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I found the digital illustration workshop to be very difficult. I was hoping to create a baseball field, complete with a pitcher on the mound and a batter getting ready to hit. Ideally, I was going to make the view of the field from the batter’s perspective. I was able to make the outline of the field with the foul lines and the wall in the outfield. However, when I tried to make home plate and the batter’s box, the image looked like you were looking down at the baseball field from the sky and not out at the field from the batter’s position. Adding color to the field also proved to be a challenge. I used many different shapes to create the outline of the field and when I went to fill in all of the space that was supposed to be grass, I couldn’t figure out how to do it.

The Illustrator program has many unique features that would have been very useful if I was more skilled in using the program. It was interesting how you had to change your way of thinking in order to be proficient in creating certain objects. To be able to create more complex objects with this program, you needed to be able to break the object down into shapes and lines, instead of thinking of the object as a whole. Using Illustrator helped me start thinking about collage in terms of bringing together different images to create one object, much like we needed to bring together different lines and shapes to create something in Illustrator.

Working in Adobe Illustrator was so interesting because in a lot of way it’s counterintuitive. We aren’t accustomed to thinking in terms of shapes an lassoing angles to try and create images. It’s a challenge. Try and use the mouse like you would a pencil and you don’t end up with much. Try and use your mouse to put down anchor-points and manipulate angles and… if it’s your first try, like it was mine, you still don’t end up with much, at least until you except you’re working towards a colorful, clean-edged abstraction. which is a lot of fun, and it made me think.

This is what I thought. I think in the long run, if any of us were to keep after mastering this program, it would expand our creative capacity. It takes a skill most of us haven’t developed yet to think of, say, a drawing of a cow in the terms of the process we’d need to in order to build it out of these blocks. It underlines the problem-solving exercise inherent in all artwork, the execution half of the process, and that’s got to be pretty valuable.

After reading other people’s posts I noticed that like a lot of people in the class, the collage workshop was much more enjoyable for me than the digital illustration. I am not a really good artist and I doubt anything will change that, but collaging actually allows me to create some type of art by just being creative and combining small parts from different sources. There are really no limits to what you can create with a collage and I will definitely by using this method for my final illustration.

However, I found the digital workshop challenging, in part because there were a lot of glitches and because unlike manual art making, if you’re not very technologically apt like me, it was quite frustrating not being able to create what I was picturing in my head and would have been able to produce on paper. I think another reason the process was difficult was that we got a short tutorial and that one class period is obviously not enough to master the whole program. I had never done anything like it before so I felt I faced a lot of limitations in what I was trying to create. Overall though, digital illustrations are perhaps the most modern way of making art and I really enjoyed the experience and getting to try it.

The workshops this week were enjoyable, to a degree. I enjoyed collaging, as it is something that I have done since I was a child. I was never good at drawing or painting, and so my creative options were relegated to exercises in coloring books and and collaging. I worked with the local newspapers to make a collage of the sections I found to be most prominent and of the most interest to me. The exercise was enjoyable, and in a way therapeutic.

Todays workshop with adobe illustrator was more difficult. I had trouble finding the colors and shapes that I was looking for. The process itself didn’t feel at all organic, and was quite honestly boring  for me. Even though I cant paint or draw, I enjoy working with my hands more than I do on the computer. It’s an interesting medium over which to create, and I’m sure those more apt artistically can find ways to make beautiful pieces of art, but I don’t think digital illustration is the thing for me.

This week truly opened my eyes to my lack of artistic ability.  I knew before this that I could not draw or paint to any significant level of skill, but now I can officially say that technology and I are not friends as well.  However, my lack of artistic skill aside, I do think that it was an incredibly enjoyable week of workshops.

Starting with the first workshop on Monday morning, I was taken back to elementary school art class where I was practicing my collage techniques, and I really enjoyed having complete freedom to cut and place things wherever I was originally driven to place them.  For Monday’s workshop I chose to cut out all of the things that interested me when I noticed them flipping through the magazines.  As I collected all of these seemingly random pieces, I started to see a story forming that eventually turned into the collage I created.  The randomness was able to become a story, which intrigued me because even though I felt random I guess I was not being random.

Today in the Digital Illustration Workshop, I had the opportunity to once again be disappointed in myself as a future artist.  While I have already harped on this point, I did manage to get a lot more out of it beyond my shortcomings.  I thought it was really interesting to see how much more complicated digital illustration is than it looks.  I also  got to experience how many potential things you can do with the computer in the digital illustrator.  I experimented with a few different techniques when I was creating my pieces.

So while at the end of the day I learned a lot about my inabilities, I still got a lot out of using these programs and techniques that I haven’t been able to try before this week.

As many others have said, I really enjoyed Monday’s collage workshop. I didn’t have much of a direction when I began, but I found it was interesting to forego the use of scissors at times and rip out certain shapes with my hands. While purely visual collages are often beautiful and provocative, I was interested in introducing words into mine because I’m a creative writing major. I love playing with language on the page, and I was curious to mix poetic and visual play. I generated a loose theme about reading/poetry and teaching by using a large image of a grandfather reading to a child. I love using words as a decorative element too, so on one side of the collage I wrote “Teach your children well” (from the song by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) repeatedly to create a background in which the text is nearly indiscernible. I also used small bits from the magazines from the 50’s (I think they were called something like “Lifetimes), which had lots of poems and small stories within them. Repurposing and rearranging words in a new space and context really intrigues me. I took words and phrases from different portions of the magazine to make up no poetic fragments. For example, “Casual acquaintance/on my sunlit floor” and “Lead limbed/ lover/ in the kitchen.” It reminded me of magnetic poetry-the random word arrangements that people throw on their refrigerators. The realm of possibility for this type of wordplay is endless, and I love that. If we had more time in class, I would have continued to scrap different words and phrases from disparate sources to create new pieces of poetry, and perhaps create a more coherent poem? In addition to mixing the sources from which I gathered words, I also took this opportunity to play with different mediums in collage. I used glue and crumpled tissue paper (which I haven’t done since kindergarten!) as well as glitter, and even pieces of the Hamilton campus map. As collage itself is a conglomeration of disparate elements,  the open-ended nature of this workshop was quite fascinating and fun for me.

Okay, I’m about to say something provocative: I was not a fan of today’s photoshop experimentation. I couldn’t figure out the buttons. I couldn’t find the colors I needed. I couldn’t add, erase, or draw the things I wanted, where I wanted. To summarize, today’s class was a frustrating one.

I think a lot of this has to do with my background as a painter. I want to reach out and touch the page. I want to move things around with my own hands, not with a curser. “Playing” around on photoshop felt like trying to use chopsticks with mittens on. Why use photoshop when we could use real, 3D objects?

Yeah, maybe I’m being stubborn. Technology has never really been my friend and it’s probably a bad outlook of mine to just ignore all things computer. But why bother if it makes you frustrated? I don’t think it’s fun, so why bring about the headache?

While photoshop may feel like play to some, it feels like work to me.

I had never used a digital platform for illustration before today’s class. Adobe Illustrator has endless of options for creating playful illustrations and allows users to gain a different perspective on what it means to illustrate. Before using this digital platform, I thought it would be more restrictive than freely drawing in the material world, however, I found that I could incorporate even more interesting elements into my work. For example, from the picture I’ve added below, you can tell that I was interested in playing with shape and patterns, which I would not be able to execute as cleanly with actual art supplies. I did not have a plan going into today’s workshop, but after exploring the options Illustrator has to offer, I would be interested in going back to it and creating something like a poster with text. I think it would be fun to compare the work we did with at the printing press workshop and see if one method is more effective or appropriate for certain projects. Did you prefer working with new digital technology or the printing press?

For my final project, I will be working with the book My ’70s Book: The “When I Was A Kid…” Book For The Generation That Grew Up In The ’70s by Darryll Sherman. In this book, the author is reminiscing about the good old days and various forms of play that he participated in as a child. He talks about how he played outside, played board games, played cards, played the piano and various other things. He also comments on how children’s play now is so different from what it was back then. Nowadays, play largely involves technological devices. He personally prefers his version of play (and I agree with him!)

I chose the book after the collage workshop. I was lucky enough to find a story that fit my collage. Currently, the collage shows a man (the author) recounting his childhood to his wife. Underneath them are the memories of his play. The chess board represents the board games that he played. The three characters in the front are the author, his brother and his sister who he mentions in the book.

Now that I have the book, I will add more elements from it to the collage such as music and instruments. I will also add a quote from the book. I will do some more collaging and draw somethings by hand or use what I will learn in the digital workshop. I am excited to finish this project!

Also after making this collage, I really admire Max Ernst. Cutting and pasting images turned out to be so much more difficult than I had initially anticipated. I commend his patience and how quickly he completed entire stories completely in collage. Props to him!