Connor McCormick
DID 2 – Bell 7
1/29/15
Reflection: Monsters and Their Worlds
1. Technology enabled me to gather inspiration and spark ideas for my project by allowing me access to many examples via online sources such as Pinterest. Also with it being online I could easily search other ideas I had and see what other artists have done with the theme I was thinking about. In this project I was going to first do a landscape placed in a forest or wooded area so on Pinterest I searched “vector forests” and things related to that. After looking through those I decided I no longer wanted to do that. The next thing I was able to search through Pinterest was city landscapes. I went through these carefully and decided that the city landscape wasn’t what I wanted either. Without technology I would not have been able search my other two ideas for this project as easily and I might have settled for something I didn’t really want to do.
2. If this technology didn’t exist you would have to do the work by hand. This would provide many difficulties that you don’t have to worry about using Adobe Illustrator. The first would be what materials you would use. Would you use markers, paints, pastels, pencils or any of the other tools that are out there? A lot of this would depend on what you want to do in your art work. With Illustrator you don’t have to pick a material. You can easily blend, add gradient, lighten or darken any color on Illustrator. This prevents you from having to worry about how your materials might limit your ability to do this. An example from my work is the sun and sky. With Illustrator is was easy to create the sunrise effect by blending the different colors. If I had to do this by hand it would’ve been much more difficult to blend these colors. Another example is when I made the leaves of the palm tree. With Illustrator I was able to draw two shapes and create a brush that would allow me to quickly and easily draw the branches and leaves of the tree. If I was doing this project by hand I would have had to draw every individual leaf and it would’ve take a lot longer.
3. Technology makes learning from other artists much easier and much more accessible. Quick access to help sites with instructions, videos and examples can be a huge help especially if it has been over 3 years since you took DID 1. In this project technology helped me learn from multiple artists, one which was Mr. Roberts. Mr. Roberts was able to make a video demo which was very beneficial because you could go at your own pace and it was all on your computer screen. You didn’t have to keep turning from the projector to your computer and back over and over. His “Bunny” demo helped me get acclimated to the system and helped me with gradients which was useful in my project. I also utilized technology in this project to learn from other artists how to create a brush. This saved me a lot of time when it came to making the palm tree. Access to the internet was also helpful for the sun set because there were so many different ways to do it that being able to see how other artist did it allowed me to pick the perfect one for my artwork.
