Midterm Week! Day 2

Similarity is where elements are seen as the same group if they have a similar shape or texture. I tried to embody both with these separated panels. Funny thing is the panels are actually taken from the original image, and the only color manipulation used is on the background.

The picture is San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, taken from the Santiago Adventures website.

Midterm Week! Day 1

Spring break is fast approaching, and that means midterms are upon us! Most of my midterm assignments are pretty basic. I've got a paper to write for Composition and a report for Journalism, but 2D Design is going all-out.

Some of you may remember the gestalt and organization posts I've made in the past for this class. Well, our midterm project is to find seven nature photographs and modify them to reflect what we've learned. Four for the principles of gestalt (proximity, closure, similarity, and continuity) and three for the principles of organization (balance, emphasis, and rhythm). I'm making this a week-long series so that I can motivate myself to get them done at a steady pace. Here's the first. Closure, based on a panorama of Split Apple Beach taken by Amiram Zocowitzky:

Closure is a gestalt principle that states that familiar shapes can be seen as complete even when they are not. It's easy to perceive this planetoid as a circle despite the variance of form seen throughout.

I'm probably not going to go in any particular order with this project, so I can't say which one I'm doing tomorrow. Let's check back here tomorrow and we'll both find out.



Capture the Sword

This is a little outside of my focus in graphic design, but it's been engaging quite a bit of my time as of late and I'm proud of how it turned out, so I figued I'd share it here. It took a bit of world-building and game design but I made a new style of player vs. player game in Minecraft.

Introducing Capture the Sword! Think capture the flag, but with swords.

Download (Mediafire)

Rules and How to Play

One side of the battlefield. The sides are mirror images of each other, with equal ground, resources, weapons.

The gate that marks your entry into hostile territory.

All the resources needed to protect your sword from invaders are available, but some are more difficult to find than others.

The castle will be your base of operations. Massive and winding, you'll have to navigate both safely in one life if you want to win.

The bedrock altar holds the sword of the each castle, and will be the primary target of attack. Guard it with your life or try to fight your way to the enemy's altar.

The team spawn point is located just above the altar, so if you plan to hack and slash your way in, be prepared to deal with the continuous onslaught of vengeful victims.

And of course, there are secrets to be found. Treasures to be unearthed.

And that's Capture the Sword! Download it and try it out!

Download (Mediafire)

Making Pixel Art from Scratch

It's been a pretty text-heavy week, so let's get some colorful drawings in here. And a tutorial, no less! Today I'm going to show you my method for pixel art. I'll be using a recent icon I made for a friend to use on a Minecraft forum. Meet ChiefofPigs. This is the finished product we'll be working towards.

Let's begin. This is her skin in-game that I'll be using for reference. While we're on the subject, Miners Need Cool Shoes is a pretty good resource for looking up and editing Minecraft skins.

In Minecraft, you can attach carrots to sticks and use them to lead pigs around. This pose seemed fitting. Sketching your idea beforehand is useful to determine angles and detail.

If you've had a lot of experience designing sprites, it's possible to go straight to the pixel-drawing stage from here. But if you need some help, you can make a template to work off of. This is where you open the image editor of your choice and get your guidelines established. I use a vector editor like Illustrator (or PowerPoint, if that's your thing). Just as a side note, a hard black outline adds a lot of bulk at a low resolution, so if that's your plan try to make everything just a bit thinner than normal.

Add details. Keep in mind that you're going to be reducing the resolution quite a bit, so don't add anything too miniscule. To give you an idea of scale, in this instance the pupils ended up being only two pixels tall.



The specific colors you use aren't important, because you'll be drawing over them with new ones when you refine your pixel image. The important part of this step is making sure that you'll be capable of distinguishing all the parts of your image by color. For instance, the skin further away has a darker shade to separate it from the foreground skin. Stuff like that.

Resolution reduction results in a ridiculously ragged replica. The next step is fixing this. Scale your image down to the desired dimensions of your finished product. Finding the right balance is crucial: the smaller you make it, the more detail is lost. Always keep a backup of your source image. In the image editor of your choice, draw over your low-res image using the shapes and colors as a guide. MSPaint works well for this, but Photoshop with a one-pixel pencil brush has the added benefit of letting you work on a new layer to keep your reference and product separate.

A lot of what you do in the refining process is up to your judgement. You'll notice I added a bit of shading on the legs and arms, and used a less solid outline on the headdress to give it a more feathery look. This can be a little tedious, but I've had nothing but great results with this method.

And there you have it! Have fun making your own pixel art and sprites! I'm bad at ending tutorials! Say hi to the family I guess!

The Tanzanian Sun

Composition homework time! We were asked to write about a life experience in the form of a news article. So I did that. Here's that thing I was just talking about. It's right here, under these words you're reading. It's also words, so don't get confused now. They're the words that aren't all slanty. Yeah, you see them. You should read them now. Go on, I believe in you.

The plane begins descent. The captain makes two announcements, one in English and one in Swahili. The view out my window is that of a desert spotted with lush tropical trees as the plane makes a few more rounds and finally touches down at the Kilimanjaro International Airport in Tanzania. I exit the cabin and take my first few steps on African soil. It’s been a difficult journey just getting here, months of preparation, vaccinations, language courses, and fundraising. But the most difficult task is ahead of me. I’ve come here with a group of volunteers from my local church, thirty-five in total, to construct a building dedicated to saving lives. It is an eye clinic, and nowhere on the planet is there a more desperate need for an eye clinic than Mwanza, Tanzania.

There are several traditional African tribes living in the shadow of Lake Victoria, where Mwanza is located. These are groups of people who to this day are led by witch doctors and superstition. In these tribes, it is the woman’s duty to collect firewood for cooking and heating in unventilated mud huts. When they get too old to go out and chop down trees, they will often resort to burning cow dung. Toxins released in burning coupled with the old age of the women will very often cause cataracts. To the witch doctors of certain tribes, cataracts are seen as a sign of demonic possession. It is not uncommon to hear of women being trapped in their homes for years out of fear of being seen and targeted by members of her own tribe. When such an observation is made by these spiritual leaders of the tribe, the woman will be led out of her home in the middle of the night, taken far away from the village, and hacked to death with machetes.

In America cataracts are hardly a serious issue. The surgery is a simple one, and has a 90% perfect recovery rate. But here in Mwanza even this simple procedure is a luxury that remains unobtainable even when facing death. There are optometrists and ophthalmologists from all around the world willing to volunteer their time and talents to benefiting the needy in Africa. Our mission is to give them an eye clinic to work out of.

I am just a boy of sixteen at the time. I have been outside my country, but never my continent. A strange mix of fear and excitement is brewing inside me, probably the same feeling any traveler has when they find themselves suddenly immersed in a strange new culture. But underlying all this is a conviction stronger than any I’ve ever felt in my life. I have a goal to achieve, the noblest task I’ve ever undertaken. I’m still young, and I don’t understand exactly what it means for me to be here. What I do know is that it’s good that I’m here, having this experience and making the most of my efforts.

The roads are rough and dusty as we make our way to the Nyakato Health Clinic. It doesn’t have the proper qualifications to call itself a hospital yet. They lack the staff and the facilities to request a subsidiary from the government. It is nearing sun-down, and around us as we exit the bus are half-finished buildings and astounding exotic brush that must look as common to the locals as petunias look to our suburban church group. Many have come before us, any many will come after us. It is an ongoing project funded and built by volunteers from all over the Americas and Europe, and this week it’s our turn.

I will be staying in one of the completed buildings that have yet to see medical use. The Patricia Ward was named for an elderly benefactor, one so dedicated to the hospital that it would one day become that she had requested her ashes be mixed with the concrete foundation. It will someday be an isolation ward for infectious patients who cannot be kept in the main building. But for now, it is a sleeping quarters for incoming volunteers.

The room is plain. Not much has been done with the interior, as construction remains the primary focus. There is a gurney to the side draped with an overhead mosquito net. Malaria is a very common disease here, carried by nocturnal insects, and the daily precautionary pills can only do so much.

The day begins, and with it construction. Building on the equator is sweltering, and by the end of the first day we have the frame for a single wall completed. Day two sees the completion of two more walls and signs that our acclimation is nearing completion. By day four we have all the external walls in place, and begin work on the rooms and halls. The support beams for the room are up on day six, and on day seven – our final day of construction – the frame of the building is complete. It’s far from habitable at this point. Three months would pass before I would receive word that the eye clinic was completed by another church group, one in a line of three that had worked on it since our contributions. But at the time, we were all filled with such an immense sense of pride at having done all we could do. Markers were passed around and blessings and scripture verses were written on the wooden frame, messages that would eventually be covered with concrete and dry wall. The next team would see it, though. And perhaps they would pass on the blessings to the next team. And even when the messages we wrote on those rough wooden planks have been hidden for decades, maybe someone, somewhere, will remember the effort and good will we poured into those blessings with every bit of conviction that we poured into the construction of the building itself. I know that I will never forget the time I spent in Africa, doing everything within my power to let the lost see the light.

Two Paths

If I were to have stayed in culinary school, I would have graduated this week. It wasn't an easy decision leaving the culinary field to pursue a career in graphic design. For years being a chef has been my only driving force, the thing I wanted to be when I grew up. But when I started to learn how harsh and demanding kitchens in the industry were, I had to do some serious evaluation of what my life would be like if I decided to devote my life to cooking. This is what I came up with:

What follows is a long, kinda depressing series of events. So here's a jump break to keep it from pushing all the pretty pictures off the page. Click to continue.

Shan in Photo Filter

I feel like it's kinda cheating to use photo filters on an illustration, but I also feel like the finished product is very worth it.

Prairie Snapshot Week! Day 7

I think it's fitting that we end Prairie Snapshot week with a sunset. This was a lot more fun than the last week-long event, mostly because I felt like I actually had something to say about the subject matter. On top of that, I've been making stuff over this past week to ensure that I'll be able to keep the daily updates rolling for a bit longer.

I hope you enjoyed Prairie Snapshot week, and I'll see you tomorrow!

Prairie Snapshot Week! Day 6

The sky is badly washed out in this one, but I feel like it adds to the balance of the shot. This is Kansas, where the skys are empty and everything of substance stretches infinitely along the ground. Trees, telephone lines, barbed wire fences, worn gravel roads, fields. All following the gentle ebb and flow of the unending plains.

Prairie Snapshot Week! Day 5

Garage and tool shed. It's sort of a plain picture, and I wish I had thought to move something into the shot to act as a more direct subject, because the contrast running from top to bottom is really cool.