I’ve always had the idea to create a poem out of song titles but I never got around to doing it so I was pretty excited this was one of the assignments I could choose from! I decided to make a love poem partially because it was Valentine’s Day but also because today, February 15, [...]
Peyton Sawyer from “One Tree Hill” is a character that in the beginning represents the definition of a “stereotype”. Her character is misinterpreted completely and through her confusion within herself she becomes a mystery to everyone. What people think of her…… isn’t who she is ……. What she sees is simply …….. a MYSTERY. This Pinterest site created by Peyton exemplifies who is is, what people actually think, & the mysterious secret that no one knows about her ….that Peyton Sawyer can see EVERYTHING.
Get a little glimpse of Peyton… HERE
(Although DesignAssignment563 suggested a screenshot, I made an entire pinterest instead.)
…. Peyton has spent all of her life in a small town where everyone knows everything…. The person that she is today has a lot to do with growing up in Tree Hill. This poster that she made represents the loneliness that she experiences along with the desire to want MORE. One Tree Hill is a mystery within itself…. where are all the other trees? Why does Peyton always feel so alone?
(Inspired by DesignAssignment57 asking for a poster of a tv show location)
Along with my mysterious town….. I wonder who’ll ever figure me out? I find myself feeling like a puzzle sometimes. A stereotypical high school cheerleader with an awesome boyfriend and a “great” life…. Who am I? Why don’t I know? I see sooooo many weird things on a daily basis, when is it all going to be figured out? I know I ask a lot of questions…. but when I figure out the answers, you’ll be the first to know. – Peyton has always been a form of mystery, to herself and to her surroundings. Her creativity and artwork show her secret cry for help, her cry for attention and to no longer feel alone.
(Inspired by DesignAssignment64 to caption a photo found on the ds106 flickr page)
Peyton was always known by her love for music music and her meaningful artwork…Although no one knew what she was feeling at times, her music always seemed to tell some type of story… It was as if she was writing poems to express what she saw, that no one else saw. Or even what she felt… that no one else was aware of. The world around her was always so confusing, but one thing she knew was that she had the support of her father who was always there, since her mother had passed. This iTunes playlist that Peyton created simply shows her hidden feelings in the way her Playlist is organized. It’s almost as if she’s crying our for her help, or thanking her Father for always being there….
(Inspired by VisualAssignment46, to create a poem playlist.)
One of the amazing things about Peyton … is her ability to talk and express herself, even if she is confused and can’t put everything together. Peyton holds a Podcast (nearly every night) and talks about her day … to the public viewers online. The idea of her being a mystery to herself changes once she posts all of her stuff online and expresses herself as well as seeks for help. Through this podcast the world learns about Peyton Sawyer…. and over time she’s more than mysterious…. she’s finds her place.
(I created a video using clips off of Peyton’s actual podcast from “One Tree Hill” and inserted photos of Peyton and her artwork.)
I found an assignment in the visual assignment bank called Stories Written In Windows Media Player:
“Write a sentence (preferably somewhat coherent, yet on the nonsensical side), a poem, or a quick story using the titles of songs you have in your Windows Media Player (iTunes may possibly work as well).”
I used Itunes…
My story is about a couple breaking up, because of the gender usage in the songs it’s hard to tell the dynamic, but I’ll leave that to the imagination. The Dumper says “Alright, I’m moving on. I gotta feeling as if she likes me for me, so sorry it’s over even if it breaks your heart little lion man. Thanks for the memories.” Then the Dumpee says “Say anything else, never say never. I’m only me when I’m with you” … and the very insensitive Dumper says “Get over it.”
It’s probably not a good thing but the desperate tone of this song kind of makes me laugh, that may also be because I hear the story being told as fragments of each song, so its a very musical tragedy.
I made this by: creating a playlist in itunes, draging the songs that I wanted into the playlist and then taking a screen shot.
I found some time over the past two days to sprint through a handful of Mission: DS106 visual assignments. My notes are spread over a few devices (including my favorite red-covered Moleskine), but I’ll try to get my thoughts in order and give a full accounting of each assignment. I’ll present them in asynchronous order by complexity, from what felt like the least complex task to the most complex one.
For these activities, I used a MacBook running OSX 10.6.8 on a 2.26 GHz Intel Core Duo 2 with 2 GB of memory. Chrome is my current browser of choice. When I talk about drawing or coloring something, I mean “drawing or coloring something with a Wacom Bamboo tablet.” (These are like my global variables, thus called.)
Stories Written in a Window – 3 stars
I wrote Still Alive and Climbing the Walls in iTunes. I tried to pick songs that reflected what I have on this computer (which carries only a bit of my poor, neglected-on-an-external-hard-drive music collection). I also tried to include a few songs by friends and friends of friends that I hope folks will go out and find and/or hear on DS106 Radio.
Most of what I listen to is pop of one kind or another, so I wrote a love story. Here it is:
Replay Value – 3 stars
I call this one The Love Triangle. Though the assignment is worth 3 stars, I’ll only claim one here. I’m not entirely satisfied with the result, but something about it’s glaring artificiality defies any further editorial meddling from me.
For this piece, I imagined Steve, Pip Boy, and Journey’s Protagonist meeting in a desert (alas, alack, and rue the day, I couldn’t find any cc-licensed pictures of Lucky Wander Boy).
On Flickr, I found cc-licensed pictures of each of these characters being cos-played. Here are Steve, Pip-Boy, and the
“>Protagonist.
I used Acorn (my trial is almost up, so I am sad) to ditch the backgrounds by using the magic wand to outline and then cut the characters out of the pictures. I then saved just the characters as .pngs with transparent backgrounds.
Then I brought everybody into ComicLife against a desert-climate Minecraft screenshot I took from the DS106 server as viewed from my own computer. I used ComicLife to compose the piece because I wanted to add a witty caption or bit of dialogue. However, after seeing the look in Steve’s eyes, I decided to keep quiet.
Since Steve is armed, I put the characters into a triangle and imagined them embroiled in some kind of emotional struggle with one another – how does one adapt to finding other people where there should be none? What emotional habits kick in once we enter community?
Comic Book Effect – 1 star
I used Photo Booth to grab a silly picture of myself and then headed over to Acorn to throw a half-tone dot effect over it. Once I achieved half-tonality, I opened up ComicLife and set up a half-Dark-Knight-Returns, half-Scott-McCloud, half splash-page layout to show myself sitting the Marvel Way. I look just like my dad looks when he plays video games, but he sometimes sticks out his tongue. Like Jordan. My dad is the man.
Draw it. – 2 stars
I remain drawn to the portrait I used for my Daily Create trace drawing. The amount of detail in the photograph captivates me – it speaks to the part of my brain that has been filling up bookscovers and meeting agendas with cartoon eyes, cross-hatching, flames, flowers, spirals, and stick-figure legs since 1990. I went back to the same portrait for this exercise and the next.
I wanted to find a combination of filters that made the portrait look like a pencil drawing while preserving the volume of the subject’s beard. I clicked through a number of combinations in Photoshop Elements 9, and eventually settled on the pencil cross-hatch effect combined with fully desaturated colors and dust and scratched noise to soften the cross hatching and add volume back to the beard.
Warhol Something – 3 stars
This was the first visual activity I tackled. I found myself using several different programs to get it done. Each program had bits that seemed intuitive to me, and each had bits that seemed obtuse, so I bounced back and forth between them at my whim.
I went back to my portrait and pasted it into SketchBook Pro. I added a layer and colored in different areas with colors that appealed to me in vaguely Warholian ways.
Then I went to Acorn and used the magic wand to prune a copy of the original image so that I would up with a layer of details I could paste over the colored image in SketchBook Pro in hope of creating a silk-screen effect.
I dig it.
An Album Cover – 2 stars
My random Wikipedia search turned up Konrad I, Duke of Glogow. I rolled through his dad’s page and found the Piast Dynasty and its arms.
From there I did a cc-license search for Piast on Flickr and found a sculpture of the arms.
At that point I decided to try something inspired by the work of Rose Chase, a high school drama club pal, who designs for the Lower Dens, a Baltimore-based band.
I am no Rose Chase, but I went into Photoshop Elements 9 and equalized the images of the Piast arms. Next I put a blue photo filter on the image, blurred it five times, and desaturated the colors. To create the band of arms, I threw a 4-panel kaleidoscope effect on the arms, separated out the lower elements, and stitched them back on to the side of the upper elements. I drew, shadowed, and copied a few gold chevrons to represent one of the Piast colors and Konrad’s military victories. Finally, I dropped in the band and album names, adjusting the kerning on “Konrad1″ and the line spacing on “The Duke of Glogow.” I picked Trebuchet MS – a favorite sans-serif font of mine – and pink so that the lettering would conserve some interior weight and pop a bit.
Get ready for the drop:
Picturing Prufrock – 3 stars
I love comic books covers by Brian Bolland and Jim Steranko, and I staggered after them here.
First, I printed and read the poem, marking up lines that spoke to me. Then I started sketching street signs in my Moleskine. Pretty quickly, I decided on iterating a picture of a faceless man whittling a mask while seated on a pile of discarded faces. I gave him some shirt-sleeves because why not?
I went into SketchBook Pro and did a blue-line drawing, which is something I picked up from traditional comic book pencilling – artists sometimes layout a page in blue pencil (which doesn’t photocopy) before drawing “finished” pencils on the page for photographing and inking.
On top of the blue-line sketch I drew a black-line picture of the man and his faces.
After that, I opened Acorn to get rid of the background and keep the figure and faces.
I added a nerve filtered to translucency in a layer behind the figure, and behind that I added a circular patten, coloring every other ring yellow as the fog curling around the house (sorry – couldn’t help it). I also inserted a text layer in a modern font with the lines that inspired the work.
I saved the image and exported it as a .jpg. I brought the .jpg into comic life and added the marquee lettering, which I wanted to be a bit jarring – this would be a Vertigo title, no? I used our bunkhouse logo for the publisher’s imprint and priced the comic according to my ever-loving whim. Finally, I added a lovely portrait called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and pushed it to the back of the image to take care of some of the negative space underneath the circles. I liked using a huge face that someone shot to represent the poem because it fit with what interested me about the poem this time around – the creative donning and murderous abandonment of different faces and identities.
Here is the cover as it stands around, maudlin and modern:
I’m still processing all the work, but I felt delighted and surprised throughout by how some pieces defied my expectations of myself and came out much better – or even much worse – than I imagined. I would like to practice enough visual arts this summer to get a better feel for the kinds of tools and design approaches that can consistently get me into a flow state in pursuit of work that delights me. And I want to connect it all to what I’m learning about coding while noodling about in the shallowest kiddie pools of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and game design.
My First assignment for the forth section
This time I chose an assignment from the Visual Assignment through this semester I really enjoyed doing visual assignments I enjoyed playing around with pictures and learn a lot of how to use an editing program
As I wanted to do something relating this course and this section I choose the assignment called Show Us Your Dream!!!
Here are the instructions:
Through this assignment, you get an opprtunity to show your dream. Bring any picture that yow want, but the photo must relate something to represent or connect your dream: job, plan etc… It does not have to be a one deream. You can choose and put more than one dream.
Be creative !!
Well I have several dreams and I would like to introduce the a kind of a dream but I think it would be better to describe it as something I want to experience it
First the process:
I looked at Flicker but could not find any picture that I wanted to use so I went to Google Image and found these two pictures
Then with FotoFlexer I cut the earth part and put it together with the first picture
Story: This was a really simple picture and process however this depiction is exactly what I wanted to say .
I am talking about here a near future rather than a future after graduating from university. What I learned in these 3 month on the class of CIS made me realize how technology is advancing and there can be better way of learning. What I want to say is why not using the Internet to interact with other people around the world to share ideas works and learn more form each other? Just like the DS106. This is a good way of starting. Not only because you can show to your work to other but also others can learn from you can give you advices to improve your work. I really enjoyed doing the The Daily Create because I found really fun to take a pictures of daily things?things that I would have never thought of taking. Therefore I think that the idea of share ideas and learn not only from people in your college but from other college in another country is a really great idea. I would love to take another class that have interactions with people around the world. The video of Bryan Alexander was really influential for me. Nowadays we have Skype Messenger Google Document and many other programs where it has become easily to share information and possible to make any kind of presentation using programs such as Powerpoint or Prezi. Well my main point in here is that for my future I would like to see a global education that allows people to share with other people from all over the world through the Internet 
Just simply made a sentence with a few songs in my itunes library, put it in a playlist, and took a screen shot. This was the closest thing i could get to something that made any little bit of sense.
So here is my first completed visual assignment. It is a story made up of song titles from my iTunes library. I recorded myself telling the story because I saw that Alan had suggested that on a previous rendition. Ironic how much the audio adds to this visual assignment.
I really enjoyed doing this project. Browsing through all my music and trying to form a coherent story tested my creativity and was a welcome break after a week of monotonous classes and economic research…oh the dismal science.
There is a plethora of stereotypical chick music in my iTunes (<3 Taylor Swift) so naturally a love story developed:
A big thanks to Annie Belle for her awesome tutorial on getting SoundCloud clips into blog posts!
I had a lot of fun with this Assignment. I decided it would be easiest to write a “love story” since I figured I would have enough titles to do this. I simply just thought about things I could say and just played around until I found the titles that I thought would work best. [...]
I decided to do the project about telling a story for several reasons.
I’ve been doing picture after picture for this class so far. It was refreshing not to have to grab my camera for an assignment.
I’m a big music person (aren’t most people?) so this was a perfect assignment for me. Maybe it doesn’t make sense, but to me, it sounds beautiful.
My process was fairly simple. I went through all of my songs, picked out the ones with the best titles and put them in a playlist, then I shuffled them around until I got something I really liked. Used Grab to get the screencap and boom! That’s it!
I think that stories told through music are the most important.
