Reflection

I really liked what we did this term. I thought that it was fun to learn and fun to do. I think that I like when things are demonstrated to me (a visual learner) and that I prefer to get stuck into it and then learn what to do and what not to do when I'm doing it. If the teacher just stands there and talks, I don't remember anything cause all the lessons just blur together and I cant even remember what we did the day before. In creative media, I like how you just like stand up and talk for like 10 or 15 minutes on a new tool and then tell use to experiment. I like how even though your explaining something, you don't mind if we are still on our computers working and listening at the same time. Usually when you do something, I try to do it with you or after you so I don't forget. By what I just explained, the way that I completed my final project was to just go and do it and then figure out stuff along the way. I didn't really have a plan (even though we were suppose to!). I'm just not a planning type of girl. I might plan something, but in the end the thing I was planning is like literally totally different. For my project, I kept starting and stopping and starting again. One day when I thought I was nearly finished (because I took a laptop home over the weekend) I asked you how to blend something easier and you told me basically that if I wanted a good mark and avatar, I would have to start again. So I started again. And took a laptop home again that weekend. And I practically got it finished! That was really really frustrating for me! I think that next time, I should use my time more wisely, but in saying that I think it was good for me to take the laptop home and do work over the weekend. For photoshop, I like doing it all in one go. I hate how we only have an hours lesson. You cant really do much in one lesson. Once you get really into it and start fully concentrating, the bell goes and I hate it. That was a downer for me. In the process, I kept getting new ideas such as ears and different types of skin and stuff and I changed it because I didn't get how to do it and it just wasn't working for me. I found it really frustrating that the same people were asking you for help every 5 minutes and that sometimes it took you ages to answer a question (but its not your fault). Sometimes the mouse pad would make me really irritated, and this would be one of the things that I disliked. This is because, at home, I have a desktop computer and I use a mouse, so when we started creative media, it was really frustrating to use. I've gotten used to it now, and sometimes I even prefer using the mouse pad. Another thing that frustrated me was the macs. When you press something by accident and something happens that has never happened to you before and you don't know what you did and you don't know how to get out and then when you finally get out you don't know what you did so you can't tell yourself not to do that again. I liked using photoshop as a whole because its really new to me, and I am still amazed at what I can do. This time last year, I had no idea how to do this! I think that next time, I should make sure my blog is up to date. Out of ten I would give myself about a 7 to an 8. I wasn't the best at keeping it up to date, but I wasn't the worst. As for the saving method, every time I did something drastically new, I would save it as a JPEG, name it what I had changed and so when I saved it as a JPEG I saved it again as a photoshop file. Also, on the weekends, I would transfer my whole USB onto my home computer in case something happened to my USB. I learnt heaps of cool stuff along the way of my journey, but ill just name a few. For one, I learnt that the flow is like how much you dip your pen into ink. You told me that, and I thought that it was a really good explanation. Another thing that I learnt is that if you press (I think it is F5 or it might be F4) one of the F keys, it takes you to this screen and it has like all the stuff that you have open. I was doing it by accident heaps until one day I realised that it was one of the keys. I found it really frustrating when the picture would zoom up or turn sideways or something like that. Altogether, I am happy with my final result.

Personality Profile

My race belongs to the Noomwen race who live in an unknown part of the Amazon rainforest. Even though it looks like the Amazon is un civilized, in this tiny little community, the Noomwen are the smartest people on the planet, and they had invented the ipod over 100 years before the 'real humans' world did. They believe that using there smartness is over rated so they tend to act on the how our people say the 'dumb blonde' mode. As you can see my avatars look almost identical, this is because they are identical twins! The one who is looking wide eyed with awe, surprise and wonderment name is Gnikaerb Nawd, and her twin sister is called Espilce Nawd. Nawd is there family name and their brother is often called Nawd by his friends. Talking about boys, both sisters have a crush on this guy called Thgiliwt. The flowers on their eyes are marks of the Nawd family, they are thought of highly because their great-great-great-great-great grandparents saved Eripmav (their community in the Amazon) from being discovered by the 'human world' Little do the rest of Eripmav know that this family is gifted with special powers which allow them to read people's mind, have the strength of dinosaurs and have the beauty of Gods and Goddesses. There is only approximatly 2000 Noomwen, and the generations have lived there happily all together since the dinosaurs lived. The Noomwen can survive any weather - Antarctica, the desert, underwater, up the highest mountain, even underground! They can talk every language in the world - like I said, they're smart as! Because their community is so small, they usually occupy themselves with human activities. Usually the do this in their friendship groups so they are socializing at the same time. They do physical activities such as sport and other sports that the human world doenst know about and will never understand how to play because they have to small of brains. Sometimes they even to 'school' work for fun. They are born with their smartness, so the only thing they really learn in their lives is if anything else is discovered. Noomwen live until they are at least 100. Dying at the age of 100 is a sad time as most of them live to 150-170 years old (human years).

Gnikaerb Nawd:
- is the smarter twin (but as I said before, sometimes you would be shocked about the things she says and does!)
- can be annoying at times, but she is one of those people who is so nice most of the time, that you don't really care about the 3/5 times when she is being nice and annoying at the same time
- she can be really cheeky
- fun and perky
- the twin with the better personality (1/8th)
- favourite (human) TV shows are Gossip Girl, Vampire Diaries and Glee.
- she loooves singing, and is sooo good, together both sisters make the best choir!
- favourite (human) sport to watch is anything on the ice (except for ice hockey which she thinks is boring)

Espilce Nawd
- the prettier twin
- even though she is the prettier twin, Gnikaerb is the one with all the guys wanting to go out with her, she gets them too, but they usually want the personality that goes with almost exactly the same looks
- favourite (human) sport to watch on their (better) Televisions is Gymnastics, even though she sucks at Gymnastics in real life.
- favourite (human) television show to watch is 'Make it or Break it' (a gymnastics TV show with a story plot)
- one day she wants to visit the 'human world'
- She loooves singing, and is sooo good, together both sisters make the best choir!
- loves playing with the moneys in her backgarden

FINAL AVATARS!

I decided to choose the 'Flowers ONLY purple' option. This is how they turned out! Hope you like them :) Enjoy :)

(All photoshopping done by Alisha Seeto, in class, after school and at home!)
(A special thanks to New Zealands Next Top Model for Christobelle!)

String AND Flowers

This here is a picure of what it would look like if i did both the flowers and the string. For the above picture the emotion is suppose to be like wonderment, awe with a thinking face. The picture bellow is suppose to be annoyed and sad.

These pictures are with a different colour flower and different coloured string. There is a difference between the 2. Look at the eyes and hair! They get better!

I still do not know what I will do. These are my choices:

- Flowers ONLY blue
- Flowers ONLY purple
- String ONLY yellow
- String ONLY orange
- Flower blue and String yellow
- Flower blue and String orange
- Flower purple and String yellow
- Flower purple and String orange

Lines?

So this is just something that I did because I didnt know whether I wanted the lines or not (string or whatever). I mean the top bit looks cool, but the bottom one looks weird. And if I only had the top head bit, it looked very strange and stupid. I took away the flowers and the colour of the eyes so that you could see what just the string looked like. This is what it looks like with yellow eyes and yellow string...

The Next Step.

So there is only a litle difference to the last picture and the picture I am about to post. In this picture I have changed:
- The eye colour to a golden brown
- The tilt of the right side of the mouth
- The opacity of the flower (its still the same colour!)

All of the things that I did have already been explained in similar context, so I dont need to explain it again.

Flowers?

I blogged before about the eye flowers and that I wanted to use it. This is how they turned out:
To do this, I got the flower picture onto a new document and used both the magic wand and the quick selection tool. Once I had selected only the flower (this bit reminded me of the emu and the frog! haha) I dragged it onto the Christobelle picture. I did this once and then put it onto the skin so that I could change the yellow flower into a different colour. This is the first colour I came across, and I do not know if I am going to keep it or not. When i had done that, I duplicated the layer so that I had identical flowers, after this, I named one 'left flower' and the other 'right flower'. I moved the right flower on top of the right eye and the left flower on top of the left eye. I made the opacity down to about 40% on both these layers. I dont have a picture of this, but when i first coppied them over from t he original photo, they had these weird bits of the flower that came across with the rest of the picture that I couldnt deselect when i was selecting what i wanted before. So to take these marks away, I masked both the layers and took away anything that I didnt want. After I was happy with what it looked like, I free transformed them individually to fit the eye perfectly. This took ages because I had to make sure that the eyes were like in the middle bit of the flower and so that you couldnt see any of the white bits of the eye. Right now, both the flower, skin and eyes are blue, i will change this later!

Also, you if you look between the two latest pictures, you can see that the hair is different. To get away the really annoying single stands of hairs that showed the background, I used the clone tool and cloned the part of the picture that I wanted and then put it on the bits that I wanted to be closed up. This took awhile because of all the layers I had, and sometimes it got really confusing.

Another thing different from the other picture is that I neated up the blue colour of the shirt so that it is only white (well like the creamy colour or whatever)

Another thing that I forgot to menton is that I took away her eyebrows! I did this my cloning the bit of skin above her eyebrows and then stamping the cloned bit onto where the eyebrows are/were. This was also confusing and took a while to get the hang of.

Christobelle, looking Annoyed and Sad (at the same time!!)

So from my last post, I got up to the bit where I was about to change her expression. This is what I did too change her expression:

First of all, I made two layers, one named 'left eye' and the other named 'right eye'. I masked both layers and took away everything but the left eye for the left eye layer and everything but the right eye for the right eye layer. After this, I went to the left eye layer and free transformed it. I tilted the whole picture (but really only the eye moved) downwards on the left side so that it made the eye look sad. I did the same thing for the right eye except that instead of tilting it to the left side, I tilted it to the right side. After this, I took away anything that I didnt want. I took away anything that looked weird and looked like it didnt belong her. I had to make sure the nose and the eyes still went together and that the blue colours didnt change from the lightness of the shade.

After I made the eyes different, I changed the mouth, I did the same process of making a new layer and calling it 'mouth', masking it, taking everything away with the brush except the part I wanted to change (the mouth). After this, I tried to tilt the mouth to the left, but it didnt look very good, so instead, I was fiddeling around and I found out that if you select the part you want to morph, instead of morphing the whole mouth, you only morph that section you selected. So my selecting the elft side of the mouth, I went to Free Transform, then Trasnformed and i used the 'warp' tool to warp it the way I wanted it to look. I then did the same thing for the right side of the mouth. This way both sides of the mouth tilted the way I wanted them to tilt.

PS: when I made a new layer, I did it from the blue skinned layer so that I wouldnt have to colour the skin again!

Christobelle

First of all, I started off with this plain picture:

The first thing that I did was Liquify her Eyes. I made a new layer and named it 'big eyes' I made her eyes bigger by going into the liquify special section and made the bloat brush bigger than her eyes. After that, I clicked onto the bit that I wanted to bloat. When I had the right size of the eyes, I went onto the right eye and did the same thing.

The next thing I did was make another layer called 'hair'. Once on this layer, I clicked all the layers off except for this one. I then made a mask on this layer and went onto the brush and made sure that it was on black. I rubbed out everything except the hair deliberatly leaving some bits still there (like the the sides of her face). After this, I went into 'Hue and Saturation' and pressed the 'preview' button. I experiment with the different kinds of bluey-purple until I came across this one. I wrote down the numbers of the Hue, Saturation and Light just in case I needed it agan later. I know you can just use the eye dropper tool, but I find it easier just to type the numbers in. This is a picture of what I have done so far: (you can see purple on the background and on her skin, which I will make the right colour later!)

The next step after this was to change the skin colour. I did this by making a new layer, calling it 'skin', masking it, erasing everything but the skin (which took longer than the hair because I had to get a really small brush and carefully white out the shoulder strap of her top). After I had only the skin, I changed the colour like how I did it for the hair. Once again, I wrote down the numbers just in case. As you can see in the picture bellow, the you can still see purple were the hair isnt so its like a hazey purple and you can see purple on the blue face which just looks like a bad photoshopping job, I will erase these colours later to make it better. Also, With the top, you can still kinda see it, so I will take that away later. I will also take away the number on the bottom left hand corner later too.



This picture was the basic structure of both my avatars, because I am going to be using the same picture twice, but changing their expression. My next blog will be about my first expression!

Lines or no Lines?

I forgot to save Jennifer Hawkins as a JPEG so I cant show you what I did :(

When I was doing some research, I found this picture:
I thought it was really odd and interesting. I considred using this on my Avatar, but it looked really weird when I tried it out. I didnt know what the red stuff was. I thought it was like string or something, but I dunno, its really weird.

Other Pictures I was gonna use

I did heaps of like drafts and stuff and I was all ready to choose one of the pictures (you can se ethem in older posts) but then i realised that they are actually really really small. So I went to find some more pictures.


This picture of Emma Watson is really good, because the picture is of her whole body, but when you zoom up to her face, you can still clearly see it and it isnt pixlated. I thought about this, but the hair is very messy, and i thought that it would be hard to colour it and photoshop it. This picture was 2357×3000 pixels. (http://emmawatsonupdates.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/emma-watson-1.jpg)


This picture of Leighton Meester was also really big (1911×3000 pixel) but i didnt like how when the light hit her face, it went really bright. On one of my practise photoshopped images, when the photo looked like that, when the skin was coloured, it didnt look very realistic and looked really weird. Also, if I were to change the hair and skin colour (which I will be doing), the colours of her clothes wouldnt work well together. It makes it difficult to change the clothes. Hopefully when I do my real one, I wont have to chnage the colour of her or his clothes. (http://z.about.com/d/prom/1/0/-/D/-/-/85289849.jpg)

Other pictures I considered:
Keira Knightley (http://www.mailce.com/wp-content/uploads/keira-knightley.jpg)



and Jennifer Hawkins (http://img.blog.yahoo.co.kr/ybi/1/5f/de/eden3159/folder/592926/img_592926_40296_4?1204871137.jpg)



By the way, I have decided to do females only!

Inspiration for EYES

Yellow. Golden Brown. Eyes. I instantly knew that I wanted Golden Brown eyes because of a little tiny eenie meenie saga called: THE TWILIGHT SAGA!! As you may know, at certain times, the vampires have golden brown eyes when they arnt hungry. I liked the colour and liked the idea as using Stephenie Meyer's fictional characters as inspiration! When I tried it out, it looked good on my Avatar!! Blue, Purple and Yellow!! Here are some pictures!

(http://www.badgersden.com/Store/images/contacts/EC2_03.gif , http://www.confessionsofatwilightmom.com/graphics/new_moon.jpg, www.eclipsemovie.org, http://justjaredjr.buzznet.com/photo-gallery/363181/eclipse-movie-poster-11/fullsize/)

Eye Decoration

When I was looking for eyelashes, I came across this picture:




I thought that it looked really cool and that I wanted my avatar to have them. When I tried them on my avatar, it looked really weird, so I took away the eyebrows so that it would blend in better. After I took the eyebrows away they looked wayyyy better! I thought that a flower design was really unusual and that no one would have thought about it (unless they saw this picture). I want my Avatar's to be unique, and this is something that will make it unique. Also on researching, I found these pictures. These are pretty much useless for me now. Here are the other pictures:



I also liked many of these eyelashes, but I thought that they were too complicated. I didnt want my avatars to be too complicated. For my emotions, having complicated ees would not be a good idea. In my emotions, the mouth and eyes are the most dominate part.



I was thinking of using the eyelash in the bottom left hand corner with the little circles on top of the tiny hairs. I also tried this idea, but it really didn't turn out. I might post a picture later of what it looked like. It was really difficult to get only the eyelash and the colour that I wanted it didn't turn out.



These are all very plain, and I think that if I wasnt going to do the Flower idea, I would probably choose one of these. I liked the basic and plainness of these creations. Also on my researching, I found some eyelash brushes that I thought were cool but didnt think they wer worthy enough of being on my avatar.

Coming to the real world...

So, I realised that I had done my avatars all wrong, and if i wanted to make it perfect, i would have to start again. So this is what I am planning:
- Blue skin
- Dark nearly Blue, Purple Hair
- Big eyes
- No eyebrows
- Yellow Eyes

I am going to look for some eyelashes to put onto my avatar.
And any other inspirations...

Recap

So, I HAD started on my final avatar, but then I realised what I had to do, and I had stuffed it all up, so I restarted on the weekend with the laptop I borrowed out. I used the first picture i found (Christobelle) and have practically nearly finished. I just need to decided what smile I want, what colour hair, and if i want a tatoo and whether to change the one i have or leave it. So this is what I have done so far...

The process:











... and finally (there is a difference!) . . .





I dont know which Saddened smile to choose:




OR





Things that I did:
- Widened eyes
- Coloured Skin (Its a keeper!)
- Coloured Hair (I dont know if this is going to stay the same)
- Changed the colour background (got rid of the text)
- Changed the mouth (tilted downwards)
- Tilted both eyes
- Tried numerous tatoos and stuck with the one shown (I dont know if I am going to keep it)
- Coloured eyes


Stuff that I just realized I have to change/do:
- Make the white bit of her eye WHITE
- Make her eyebrows the same colour as her hair
- If I keep the tatoo, change the colour of it
- Take away the page number down the bottom

Surprise! (Emotion)

'Surprise is a breif emotional state that is the result of experienceing an unexpected relevant event. Surpise can have differnt meanings such as neutral, pleasant or unpleasant." (Wikipedia)

Features that go with the word 'Surprise'
- eyebrows raised (so they look curved and high)
- skin looking sretched below the eyebrows and sometimes bellow the eyes
- wrinkles across the forehead
- dropped jaw (lips and teeth are parted (if you have teeth))
- no tension around the mouth. Just 'drops' naturally



As you can see, in this picture, the babys blue eyes are opened as wide as they can go. The mouth is open, and because this baby doesnt have any teeth yet, just the lips are parted. The nose in the middle, is just sitting there. If the baby had its mouth straight, the face would be less longer.



Add to the list: hand over the mouth. This woman put her hand over her mouth. She probably did this to be polite so that no one would have to look in her mouth. Other hand gestures that people do when they are surprised is on either side of the cheek. This womens eyebrows are arched and her eyes are opened as wide as they can go so you can see the white parts of her eyes. It looks like she is about to say something (you can tell this be looking at how the bottom part of her face is going forward with her hand.



As I said before, the other hand gesture is on either side of the cheek. This is shown by the little girl. Her mouth is open really really wide that you can see her bottom teeth. She is hunched, and is leaning forward. Her eyebrows are arched and her eyes are open wide.

Disgust (Emotion)

"Disgust is an emotion that is typically associated with things that are regarded as unclean, inediable, indectious or otherwise offensive (hehe)" (Wikipedia)





http://photographicdictionary.com/images/d/disgust.jpg

Common gestures:
- Open mouth
- Funny, Amusement in the face
- Squinty eyes
- Scrunched up nose
- Eyebrows facing down because of the eyes squinting

Da Baby - This picture is really funny, and I just had to put it on my blog. The baby looks like it has just seen somthing and is DISGUSTED at the sight of it. He has that 'one sided nose lift up' look going on. It looks pretty cute. In this picture, the eys are widening and so the eyebrows are lifted up.

'The girl that ate something nasty' - This girl looks like she just drank something tasting really bad from the straw that is connected to the plastic cup. Her eyes are squinted, her mouth open and teeth nearly together. I dont know how to describe it, but you can see that her neck is squinched up. and also those two lines above her eyebrows are from her eyes and eyebrows squniting up. Her nose is squashed and her eyes look like they are still 'seeeing' the disgutingness.

Worm Girl - The story that goes wit this picture is that a little girl was at science camp and she found something that disgusted her. Her mouth is open and she has a double chin. Her nose, eyebrows and eyes are squished toegteher. It looks like she is so repulsed that she is going to stick her tounge out.

Glasses Guy - This picture is more difficult to desifer because its taken from the sied. You can still clearly see that he's eyes and eyebrows are srunched up. He's mouth however is shut. It looks like he is shutting his mouth really tightly. This could be because he just ate something sour.

Sadness (Emotion)

"Sadness is an emotion characterized by feelings of disadvantage, loss and helplessness. Sadness happens when sad people become quiet, less energetic and withdrawn" (Wikipedia)



When people are sad, tears are usually displayed on their face. In some of the more meaning full photographs that represent sadness, you can see a depth in their eyes (such as the boy wit the red nose and mouth above). As you probably know, the ends of your mouth also tilt downwards, as do the sides of the eyes. The face is usually not very tense, but very soft.



This little girl might be sad because she might have down something wrong and know she is sad and it kinda looks like she is sad that she got caught doing something. It looks like she is just sitting there sort of like a 'time out'. Again, the eyes are tilted downwards again and the mouth is a little bellow straightness.



This little baby shows 'the pout'. Where the chin and lips are pushed outwards to create a different sad face. He kinda looks like he is gonna burst out crying any second. He's eyes are tilted again, but you can see that his face isn't as soft as the other pictures. Also, when the eyes go down, so do the eyebrows. This is my favourite sadness picture!



As I said before, some of the more meaningful photos have depth in the eyes, but this picture of the little girl doesn't have any depth. The girl is in the middle of the pout, but isn't quiet there yet. The eyebrows are kinda coming forward in this picture, but I don't think that is usual in a sad person.

Emotions

Plutchik's wheel of emotions - just thought this was pretty cool!



Its a wheel of emotions which consistes of 8 basic emotions and 8 advanced emotions each composed of the basic one. The 8 basic emotions are: Joy, Trust, Fear, Suprise, Sadness, Disgust, Anger and Anticipation.

A start!

This is what I have done so far for my picture. Hopefully I will use this one for my final assignment peice! For the eyes, I used the liquifying tool. First I tried to put someone elses eys onto Tahnee;s body, but then I realized that it would be easier to just make them bigger. I am happy with what I have done so far.

Research

I did some research.. and found some eyes that I could use. They are really pretty - Emma off Glee!!! Here's a piccy -


(http://latimes.image2.trb.com/lanews/media/photo/2009-04/46443477.jpg)

I thought that it would make more sense to use human eyes rather than an animals eyes, but I dunno. I still might use bugsy's.
I also found this really pretty model that has small lips and biggish eyes. I think that the lips are too small though. But then I just thought about something- I can use the Liquifying tool! haha. I am sooo stupid, I should have thought about that before! Anyways, here are some pictures of Lily Cole!


(http://www.bookofjoe.com/images/2007/06/19/lily_cole.jpg)


(http://gemmadouthwaite.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/lily-cole-at-ms.jpg)


(http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01517/p_lily-cole-weeken_1517129c.jpg)

I almost forgot, here is a picture of bugsy!



Which eyes do you think I should do!?