Poster made with Photoshop

On the Left side is the poster which I made for the documentary on media studies.This has been made in adobe Photoshop. In this poster I have used non-copyright images from http://www.sxc.hu/. After removing their background and other unnecessary elements using magic tool, I repositioned them on the page. The size of the canvas is 900x1300. All pictures were desaturated and a slight purplish color was given to the lights. Than I added the text and used spotlight effect form render tools. This is how the  final poster looks like. 

Trip to mohatta palace

To make us practice on our analysis, our Media teacher took us to the Mohatta palace. We were shown a lot of brilliantly made paintings and sculptures by the Pakistani artists, each work having its in depth meaning. Our task was to choose one piece that we like and answer a set of questions related to that piece. It was certainly difficult to choose an artwork as everything had many different hidden meanings if seen from various perspectives. Finally I choose a simple sculpture of a baby made of Fiberglass.


That work was by Hamra Abbas, a Pakistani artist. Below is the link to her website that include some of her work.

http://www.hamraabbas.com

Below are the answers to the questions related to that art work.

What is my first response to the work?

Given the size and color, I though it is another ordinary sculpture yet it connoted something fearless as we see a baby holding two snakes.It also portrayed a stereotype pf make dominance as a baby boy was sculpted.

What is the title? Does it help to illuminate the work?

The title is "Its a boy!" and it shows the sculpture in whole new light. The artist shows the mind and attitude of a stereotypical society that give more importance to a baby boy and has greater expectations from him. This also shows the low opinion of a society towards the baby girl.

What do the clothing, furnishing, accessories and facial expression to the setting personality?

The baby is sitting bare holding two snakes which in a similar fashion Hercules holds to destroy the snakes. The Boys expression is innocent and child like and here we can perceive that great expectations are made from a boy right from the day he is born while he is unaware and too young to understand the importance of responsibilities.

What is the focus of the composition?

The focus is on two snakes held to be destroyed.

What is the purpose of this piece?

The purpose is to show that how ordinary it is when in a conservative society, a baby boy is automatically seen as a savior, indestructible, and a messiah who will help them get rid of their distresses.

What is the medium? Does the medium has significance?

The medium used is a fiberglass and that enhances the purpose of the sculpture. Fiberglass is a strong material and difficult to break.

What effects does the color have. 

The color is a bright and gay and the texture is smooth which makes the sculpture look more catchy yet serene when one looks at it.

Is the size of the piece important?

The size of the picture is huge which further elaborates the huge expectations of the society.

An exercise to learn more of photoshop

For a Name fest, Arif and I prepared a logo on a Photoshop. Name fest is a competition where we had to think of a name and prepare a logo that describes that name. This was a good exercise to practice Photoshop as now after making a logo, we are more familiar with its elements and can innovate using different applications. Arif came with the word 'sense of Aesthetics ' and we felt it can be quite challenging and interesting to reflect it in a logo. We planned on using as little elements as possible as we did not want to overcrowd the logo and also make to look understandable. The elements were collected from google and after cutting and pasting, we made a diagram as it is in the right. 

Now after making a rough form, we had to change its appearance and make it look more real and elegant. The straight paper was transformed and it was made to look like it is kept on a desk from a persons perspective. To make it look more realistic, drop shadow effect was given from the blending options. After making the slight adjustments on the positioning of the elements, we desaturated the diagram and changed the hue to give it an ancient look. From the filters, brush strokes were used on all the elements.To add more realism, we made duplicate layer of quill and ink and with the gradient tool, filled the shape with black color gradually lightening from right to left, than rotated and changed their shapes to make them look like shadows. The text written was in white color and emboss and drop shadow was used from the blending options for the text to give it a 3D effect. Using a black pencil tool we made a small line emerging out of the quill tip to make it look like a pen mark.To make it look more cultured and sophisticated we added the translation of the word in Urdu and similar effects from the blending effects were used for it.. Our final product looks like this: 

Photographing using different filters

Picture taken outdoor using blue cellphone paper

In todays class session we used different coloured cellophane and butter papers to create differrent effects. we also used shiny papers to bounce off the light on the subjects face. More experimenting was done outdoors using sunlight and indoors using camera flash lights etc.

Work in vacations

For our winter vacations we planned on visiting Pyramid Studios, a post production studio owned by the advertising company Inter flow to see how movies, commercials and drams are shot and edited. We started visiting the studio on December 22, 2010. On the first day they arranged an orientation for us where we were shown around different rooms and were classified into groups. We were to spend three days in each department. In this way we were to experience the editing room, audio room, 3D graphics room and 2D graphics room and learn the basics of professional production and how it is organized- this will help us with our final project. My class mate Afia Lateef and I were assigned to the audio room but since the person in charge of audio was late coming to work that day we were temporarily sent to the 3D graphics room where we were introduced to  3D Max Studio software. We were taught the basics about operating that software. On our first day we were told that the key to mastering a software is to spend as much time as we can to experiment with different graphics and shapes.