My friend Alicya is going to the Art Institute for Photography and has been taking pictures of a lot of us from work for her class assignments. Here are some of me that I love! The pictures are taken by her, Alicya Tebo, but any of the changes and adjustments are me playing around 🙂
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
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So, there is my beautifulness 🙂
Well, after playing around in Photoshop for way too long and not getting anywhere, I finally was able to start getting somewhere. It was my first time using it, so there’s nothing particularly fancy going on. I liked the poster I used earlier and wanted to go off of that somehow and make my own version. So, I googled a bunch of vampire pictures, from tv shows, movies, and random ones. I played around with the opacity a bit and messed around with the text to make it pop out more so that it was readable. It took me a while to figure out the best font and colors to make that possible, and then I added in a drop shadow. I wanted to show that vampires can still feel human emotions, and the photos I chose show that; “They can still love”. Most of the photos I know for sure that the male is a vampire, while the female is not, yet they are still able to have a loving relationship with one another. The two more “vampire looking” photos I am guessing that both of the beings are vampires. The larger picture is of the two characters from the HBO show True Blood, which is what the original poster was for.
Using digital technology as an actual art medium create a higher level of participation and are more capable of customizing the art work for specific people and purposes. While it can be argued that all art work is interactive, a painting, for example, cannot physically change before your eyes. Also, as a piece of digital art, it can be customized to the user’s needs or preferences. As a creation, digital art can span many different kinds of form. One could use a computer’s music player’s Sound Waves and manipulate those into an actual piece of art. An example of a well-known type is Digital animation. Some installations are influenced by the movements and decisions of the people walking through them; some are Time controlled.
As a tool, you can take a piece that you found on the internet, and then competely change the way a viewer sees it, depending on the actual change of the piece, or simply putting it into another context to create a different meaning. With digital techology, it is now possible to re-do, change, or create images. It can be used as a tool to do these things, or to simply make them out of nothing.
So, I was just perusing the Denver Center for Performing Arts website, and I just about had a heart attack. I was under the impression that the RENT national tour was not stopping in Denver. In which case, I had planned on going to St. Louis to see the final tour of the amazing musical. However, it’s coming here!!! And I guess the RENT website hasn’t updated the schedule or something, so it was unexpected. And, it’s even more wonderful because Anthony and Adam are going to be saying farewell too 🙂  While I have seen the actual Broadway prodution, on Broadway, as well as the movie about a billion times, this is the last tour EVER!! and it really makes me sad… 😦 
AND, not only is RENT coming (THANK GOD), I also get the enormous pleasure of seeing 
 
 
I’m so flippin excited!!!
Anyway, as you can see, I’m a theater geek (in high school I was in Choir, so musicals=wonderfulness). And, upon seeing the 2009 lineup, I am ecstatic!!!! eek!!!
When I first saw this ad in Entertainment Weekly magazine, it immediately caught my eye. I recently read a vampire series of books and fell in love. However, it wasn’t just that that made me inquire about it. It says nothing about it being related to something (a television show, movie, or book). I was intrigued! The woman in the ad is apparently supposed to be a vampire herself, but looks perfectly alive. Above the photo of the woman it says, “Vampires were people too”. At the bottom is says “Support the Vampire Rights Amendment”, which says to me that all she wants to do is ‘live’ her life, dead or alive, with the same rights that alive people have 🙂 The text is written in red and blue ink, which makes me think of the election. As though this Amendment will actually be voted on. After seeing a couple of these ads in the magazine issues, I finally looked it up out of curiosity and found out it was a promotional ad for a new HBO series called True Blood. Very effective in my opinion. And, after watching the first episode of this show on Sunday, I am hooked 🙂
I’m not sure anybody could truly argue the fact that digital technology has changed western civilization as we know it. It is a natural growth process to experiment with new things, and when they work, we use them, and continue experimenting so we can bring new inventions out of it. As artists, technology only expands our abilities to express ourselves. My personal favorite type of art is photography. While it certainly has not always been digital, the simple ability to capture a moment in time is fascinating to me. It gives people the ability to share a certain moment in their life with another person, visually and not just by storytelling.
Photo-montages can bring things together into one medium, when they normally would not be near each other. You can cut and paste multiple images to create a unified piece of art, without having to find those objects, place them together, and then take that photo of them, which sometimes is simply impossible. Adolph the Superman by John Heartfield is a classic example of anti-Nazi activism using photomontage, (Photo-Montages examples and explanation). Montages can create an alternate reality of illusion, or simply add intensity to the objects by being in an unusual setting. The Lia Fail of Waterford, Irelantis by Sean Hillen is a more modern example of the power of using photomontages. Digital manipulations have different purposes. Christiane Paul mentions Alexander Apostal and his windowless buildings, depicting modernist desolate city landscapes and creating alternate realities (pg 38).
Another cool thing about technology is the merging of mixed media into a piece of artwork. Christiane Paul also uses 2 example pieces by Casey Williams that are photographs of paintings and life to compose a single image. (Untitled).
Says Ellen, in her stand-up DVD Here and Now.
I really hate homework. Especially when the teacher herself says that it will be really hard and some people will possibly not have the eye to do it. What’s the friggin’ point then? We get the general idea. Don’t waste my time, please. It’s very valuable!
Anyway, I am sitting on the couch watching HP & GoF instead of working on my homework that I could potentially spend hours working on, only to have my teacher tell me none of it is right.
So, I have been watching HP and surfing the net ALL morning. And what have I been looking at? Twilight and Harry Potter stuff 🙂 After reading the wonderful Midnight Sun partial(and never to be finished…I’m devastated) draft, I have been desperately trying to hold off on reading Twilight again until right before the movie comes out. However, I think I am going to fail miserably. I cannot stop thinking about Edward and his wonderfulness 🙂 lol I’m a dork, I know. And simply because GoF was on, I got into looking at HP stuff. Getting super excited for the movie. Even though it’s a long ways away :(.
I should really do homework now…oh, wait, I have to work tonight…and all day tomorrow. oops 🙂 Late night for Sasha tomorrow night. As usual. I have realized I work better under pressure anyway 🙂 It’s all good
Well, after working on my assignment in class and then losing it I started not even caring anymore. However, once I began working again, I realized that even without the same program, I could still kind of re-create my original idea. I used Microsoft Word instead of Excel Pro since I don’t have it on my computer. In Excel I had created bubbles with water droplets in them to create a ‘river’, with bubbled fish mixed in as though they were swimming in the water. In Word, I spelled out FISH in blue capitalized letters, row by row, repeatedly. I broke up the word by adding in ‘a fish is a fish’ which stands out with the lowercase lettering as well as the spaces between the words. I then created fish into the water by changing the color of some letters to gold. Although I enjoyed my original, I still enjoy this re-creation in a different program.
A Fish is a Fish by Sasha Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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