25th and 26th September - week 2

Went through the briefs for visual studies today.   I half paid attention because I knew that the briefs were on Moodle so I thought all the information would be on there.  I don't learn by listening so I thought I'll put sort it out when I print the briefs off.    However when I printed the briefs off I was confused and had to really read them, talk to tutor and fellow students and put them in individual plastic wallets so I had them separate.   Was feeling overwhelmed but fellow students confirmed that I was not alone. 

On reflection what will  I do differently?  I will not sit there and listen to anything thinking I'll make sense of it later because this makes it more difficult for me. 

In textiles I went through with tutor my vague plans for this year which included learning how to use my knitting machine, moving away from the "personal" themes and doing something more commercial, use some of my holiday photos in a project, learn to use Illustrator more efficiently and consistently.   I've had the summer off not using Illustrator so when I come to use it again now, I'm like a complete novice.   What I actually need to is to buy it for PC and then I've got it at home.   One tutor uses it on PC and says it's absolutely fine so I just to price it up and budget for it. 

I spent a couple of hours projecting some of my photographs onto the whiteboard so I could draw around some of the images.  The CD was full to the brim and ran slowly and in fact stopped working all together at times but I managed to draw up 3 images - stones, door and the flora and fauna of the mud flats in Borth.   I'd never done this before but I was pleased with the results.   I wanted to see what the images looked like in different sizes so I used the photocopier to reduce the images and multiply them.   I also used watercolour paints to give some colour and pattern to some of the images.  I then scanned them into Illustrator and used the live trace to get them into a workable format.   Now I have no idea what this workable format is - I only know that the scanned image was one big clump and I knew I wanted to move parts of each image around so I did what was suggested and used the live trace.    That's as far as I got.  My plan was to use Illustrator at home and work further on these images to submit something to the Tigerprint design competition.  However time beat me as I was going away for the weekend so I only managed to submit previous designs just so I could say I'd submitted something.   The quality of my submission was not great as I just sent off the images as they were and the colour looked unattractive.   Links to my entries on the Tigerprint website are shown below.

This is a scan of my original textile image with slight colour changes - bad colour changes!

This is the blue version which I manipulated in Photoshop

This is the completely manipulated version creating a distortion

http://designcompetition.tigerprint.uk.com/page/WINNERS/sub/Current_Entries/Contest/ShapesasPattern

My scanned images from holiday photos are shown below.


image of stones, projected onto whiteboard and
reduced in size on photocopier

stones with colour added and pattern using watercolours

I spent about 4 hours creating a photo book of all my Borth images.  It took so long again due to the size and number of files I was uploading to Albeli.  I sourced a good deal from moneysavingexpert.com and got a glossy book for £3.95 which was postage.   I now have all the images in one place.   Creating the book was frustrating as it took so long, and I would next time upload smaller numbers of pictures at once, rather than all 180 !