The Re-Direct September 1, 2010

Ladies and Gentilemen, please let me direct your attention to the new and soon to be improved Flathead High School Graphic Design Website!

Please visit this new website every single day for exciting and gripping information you need to know.

This Worpress blog will become, like the slogan says, “Just another WordPress Blog.”  It will live on but I will no longer create posts on this page.  All Graphic Design students for the 2010-11 school year should now visit the Flathead High School Graphic Design Website!

If you have resisted clicking on the two redirect links above, go ahead and click on this one right here to get to the Flathead High School Graphic Design Website!

This new site will allow embed codes, a feature WordPress.com does not support.

Thank you very much WordPress! It has been great, but embed codes are quite handy when trying to deliver information in this day and age.  Ta ta!

Who are you? August 29, 2010

This post will help me to learn about you and you will also probably find out some things about yourself that you didn’t know before.

Read this post and visit the links that are posted.

You will take two surveys today. The first one is based on the studies of Carl Jung, a psychologist who studied personality types.  You will take an easy survey that will ask several questions. Answer them as accurately as you possibly can. There are no right or wrong answers.

Right click on this link:

Jung Personality Test

After you complete the test write down the four letter code.

You will use the letter code to read all about yourself. As you might guess, some of the information may not be accurate. Surprisingly, I found these descriptions were quite accurate for describing my personality. You might find it really interesting.

After you have your code visit this page and read about you:

Sixteen Personality Type Portraits

After you have learned about yourself I would like you to take one more survey. It will help me to learn about each of you. I will use some of the information to create some work groups for our first project.

Visit the link below to take a brief survey:

Graphic Design Survey

Vinyl Wall Installation August 26, 2010

This year we will begin by creating a vinyl wall installation. This project will provide many avenues of learning, from working with others, to finding out your personal strengths, creating an idea and pursuing a final product. The process of creating this installation will introduce you to the graphic design process and the many decisions that must be made for a public piece. You will also learn the process to make your own vinyl wall installations for your room, dorm room, or car.

What is a vinyl wall installation might be your first question. Lets have a look at a few sites:

Wall Stickers on Flickr

Dali Decals

Blik

A very brief tutorial

A more detailed tutorial

Last Project Description & Portfolio Setup May 14, 2010

Today you will create a blog entry that describes your last project. You will describe several aspects of your project.  Start with some basic design decisions, such as which programs are you going to use and what size you want to make it.  The print choices are 8×10, 8×12, 11×14 or 12×18.  Of course the resolution for a printed project should be a minimum of 250 pixels per inch.

Include some links to some different tutorials you want to follow and incorporate some images of something similar to what you envision.

After you complete your blog entry you will compile all of the projects you made this semester in to one folder.  Create a new folder on your desktop and title it with your First and Last name.  Inside of this folder you will place copies of your different projects.  Find the following projects and copy and paste them into the folder on your desktop.  The projects you will find are vector portrait, a play on words, digital painting, hdr photo, 3d glasses, and 3d photo.

Once you have all of these files into your folder you will change the file names.  You will title the file with your Last name_project name.  Make sure you do not delete the file extension from your files, this is the .ai or .psd at the end of the file.

lastname_vectorportrait.ai

lastname_playonwords.ai

lastname_digitalpainting.psd

lastname_hdrphoto.psd

lastname_3dglasses.ai

lastname_3dphoto.psd

After you have all of these files in your folder you will drag and drop the folder onto the FHS-Mac-Server.  Place this folder into the Student Portfolio Folder in the Graphic Design 1 partition of the FHS-Mac-Server.  You can access this through the finder and use your own login name and password.

School: MCAD May 3, 2010

Here is a great school that just made a visitation to FHS.  Not to worry, you can check out tons of information about the school right on their website. MCAD is an incredible school which will provide you with marketable skills when you finish. Check out the site and visit some areas that interest you. Look at the admission requirements to see what they are looking for in your portfolio.

HDR Photography April 27, 2010

Our next project will be to create an HDR image from a series of photographs.

You can practice making an HDR photo from a group of photos of Flathead High School.  When you finish you can have your work featured on the Flathead High School home page. To create an image for the FHS home the dimensions ar 487×675 pixels and is of course 72 pixels per inch.

What is HDR?  Well it stands for High Dynamic Range, and essentially uses a series of digital photos composited together so everything in the photo is in proper exposure.  You can push the color levels, curves and saturation on the different layers to get a hyper-realistic image.

Here are several links to learn more about HDR photography:

Info and how to make your own HDR

Examples of HDR Images

HDR Tutorial with Photoshop 1

HDR Layer Masking Tutorial

You can also search for HDR tutorials on the Web.  If you find a good one share it with the class.

Real Fun Friday April 23, 2010

Greetings from cyberspace students!

I will not be in the classroom today but please take advantage of the day.  Write another post today about what you have accomplished this week. I have watched most of you really apply your time well in class.  I can see you are experimenting and learning all types of things on Photoshop.  Do any of you feel like you could create a better picture of Flathead High School?  Perhaps your artwork can be displayed on the school website? Perhaps one of you can find out how to create a flash slide show that can flip through many images of our school that you have created.

Graphic Design 1:

Post a picture of what you created.  Explain what you did to make the image.  Did you use the drawing tablet this week?  Does it make digital painting easier or harder?  What tutorials did you follow if any?

Graphic Design 2:

What did you find out this week about your subtopic of obesity in america.  Write about what you discovered in your research.  Post an image of what you created this week.  Where will you go from this point forward? How will you display your work?

If your research took you in a new direction explain where you ended up.  What are you working on and how did you arrive at this point?

GD1: Using the Drawing Tablet with Photoshop April 18, 2010

The real fun comes with using a drawing tablet with Photoshop.  Many of the tools can be used with a tablet and also can be set for pressure sensitivity.  This week you will be working with a drawing tablet on a project of your choice.

Open all of these links in new tabs and look for something that is interesting to you:

Enhance Photos with a Pen Tablet

All about the Brush Tool

Digital Drawing

40+ Digital Painting Tutorials for Wacom Tablets

40 Fascinating Digital Painting Tutorials

An Interesting Tutorial to create a nice effect

RF: REAL FUN! April 16, 2010

RF stands for REAL FUN and it stands for REFLECTION FRIDAY.

Today you will write a reflection on what you have done this week. Include some images of things you have worked on and also write about what you have done.  Use the questions below to guide your reflection.  This will be a graded assignment, make sure you answer the questions, write in paragraph form using complete sentences, proper grammar and incorporate some thought into your reflection.

Graphic Design 1:

1. Post an image of the things you have created this week, even if your project is still in progress.  Before posting a photoshop project you will want to save a copy of your project that is WordPress and Web compatible.  Choose File->Save As->Put a check box in the “as a copy” box.  Open this file copy and change the resolution to 72 pixels per inch (our web standard for quick loading images).

2. Write about the many things you learned about this week and last week.  Did you use any of these tools or techniques in your project? Where did you use them?  Some of these things are: Layer styles, layer masks, gradients and gradient masks, filters, various ways of making selections (Quick selection tool, marquee tools, magic wand, magnetic lasso, and quick selection mode), refine edge, clone tool, 3d tools, brushes, brush options and the list goes on).

3. What are some things you still want to learn about photoshop?

Graphic Design 2:

During the last two weeks we have been talking about Problem Based Learning and how this class can help to find some solutions or raise some questions about problems in the world. The class decided to explore the topic of Obesity in America.

Write about the following topics in your reflection entry today.

1. What is your sub-topic about obesity? Describe your thoughts and ideas about your sub-topic and how it relates to Obesity in America.

2. What did you discover in your research? Did you find out anything interesting? How can you find your research again?

3. Did you use any of the Web Tools we have learned about? (Google Docs, Delicious, WordPress)

4. Who is working with you on this project?

5. What are your projections for this project?  What is your vision for your project?  Explain your thoughts or plans.

Tilt Shift Photography April 8, 2010

Today we will learn some new techniques in Photoshop by following a tutorial.  This is called Tilt Shift Photography and creates the illusion of making an image appear as though it is a miniature model scene.

There are several tutorials we can follow to learn the same technique.  In Photoshop you will learn there are different ways of producing a desired effect, it just depends on what works for you.  I will walk you through the tutorial and show you the steps involved.  If you want to check some of these tutorials out for yourself check out the links below.

Use your brain and photoshop to produce diorama illusions on PSDTUTS.com

Fake Model Photography on Receding Hairline

Making Fake Miniature Photos on Still Scripts.com

or

Tilt-Shift Photography Photoshop Tutorial