A few weeks ago, I was inspired to take pictures of the beautiful light that was coming down over the hills. It was such a beautiful day!
I’ve uploaded them in full resolution for your viewing pleasure. Click here for the gallery.

This is actually a really old assignment, but I just haven’t gotten around to posting it till now.

While it seems odd to do something as physical as painting for a class dedicated to working with Adobe InDesign, it was actually a quite educational. The point of the assignment was to teach basic color theory, and our teacher really likes painting, so the two were an obvious match. She decided to work with a project that the painting class was doing at the same time, which was to create a painting of a biblical scene in the stained glass style.

I started by brainstorming some ideas of some epic scenes, disregarding feasibility at this point. I had a few in mind, but ultimately settled on this one for it’s simplicity. This scene is from Exodus 17:8–17, when the Israelites  defeat the Amalekite army:

The Amalekites came and attacked the Israelites at Rephidim. Moses said to Joshua, “Choose some of our men and go out to fight the Amalekites. Tomorrow I will stand on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hands.”

So Joshua fought the Amalekites as Moses had ordered, and Moses, Aaron and Hur went to the top of the hill. As long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were winning, but whenever he lowered his hands, the Amalekites were winning. When Moses’ hands grew tired, they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held his hands up—one on one side, one on the other—so that his hands remained steady till sunset. So Joshua overcame the Amalekite army with the sword.

Then the LORD said to Moses, “Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears it, because I will completely blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.”

Moses built an altar and called it The LORD is my Banner. He said, “For hands were lifted up to the throne of the LORD. The LORD will be at war against the Amalekites from generation to generation.”

Once I had decided on a scene, I started sketching small size concepts, trying to get the proportions of the people right. Humans are hard to get right! Once I was satisfied, I did my final full size sketch on an A4 page and transferred it onto larger thick stock for painting hence the lack of any real boundaries. Then, I went over the lines I had to define where the paint was going to go. The next step was to choose the color palette for it. I settled on a colder, blue-purple for the cliff face to contrast the warm glow above. The most annoying thing about this project was the mixing of the paints. I haven’t ever mixed paints with a goal in mind before, and getting enough of every little distinct shade that I needed for each cell was an exercise in patience.

At the end of the project, the painting students poured a black ink all over their paintings, then washed off the colored parts, leaving the white. Unfortunately, this process turned their beautifully colored, bright paintings dark and dirty-looking. When I saw that, I requested to not have this process done to my piece, since I liked how it was already much better. I realize that Moses doesn’t have his staff in my painting, but I didn’t look up the reference while I was doing it, and I prefer the empty space above his head better then having a stick there.

Download huge version (1615×2569, 4.31 MB)

]]> http://noah.leighweb.com/2010/03/04/color-theory-painting/feed/ 3 http://noah.leighweb.com/2009/12/03/bfa-student-newspaper-redesign/ http://noah.leighweb.com/2009/12/03/bfa-student-newspaper-redesign/#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:59:07 +0000 Rascus http://noah.leighweb.com/?p=135

At the beginning of the school year, in my Graphic Arts class, one of the things that was planned for us to accomplish was a redesign of our student newspaper The Chronicle. I was very excited about this, since it delivers good content, but with a lousy layout and typography. I couldn’t wait to get started. It was the first big project of the year, and with only 2 people in class, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. We started brainstorming various changes we could make, critiquing previous issues, and learning a lot about newspaper layout and design at the same time. Working on The Chronicle entailed lots of back-and-forth between the Journalism class (who writes and publishes it) and us to figure out if we were meeting their needs. Near the end of the process, it was really coming down to the wire with delays in content and printer issues, but me managed to get it out on time. The reaction was very positive from the student body. Next issue, we’ll try to make the online version in color!

Here is an older issue that you can compare to (links to PDF: 676KB)

This one has been on hold for a while, due to technical issues with getting the page layout of PDF version corrected. It came out on October 28th, but hasn’t been fixed till recently.

Click here to download PDF (1.9MB), or use my local mirror.

For this assignment, we had to go around town and find, well, letterforms in the environment. It’s harder then it looks, and requires looking at things in a different way then normal. It originally had a blank background, but our teacher suggested an old paper texture might look better.

Link to high-resolution PDF (11MB).

One of our Graphic Arts 2 assignments was to take 12 landscape photos that exhibit shape. Gave me a chance to get out with a nice camera and lens again. Kandern is so nice in the autumn…

Gallery (uploaded in full resolution)

Last Friday, I went on my sophomore class field trip to the Struthof Nazi concentration camp in France. It was pretty cool, and a great place to take pictures. The camp is split up into three parts. The first part is the main building/museum, with exhibits and movies showing. The second part is the actual camp itself, with barracks, a scaffold, and the crematorium.

The barracks has been turned into an exhibition of life in the camps, with drawings, pictures, and artifacts on display. In the crematorium, we weren’t allowed to take pictures, but there was an oven, a few prison cells, and an execution room.

After that, we went down the hill a ways and came to the gas chamber. It was a small building with a smoke stack coming out of the side, fairly non-discreet. Inside, it only had about three rooms, two of them with storage freezers to hold bodies and body parts for experimentation.

It was a very sobering, yet good experience.

See the pictures here (all pictures are full resolution 3008x2000px.).

After a long period of inactivity, I finally have something new to show!

In my Graphic Arts 2 class, our first assignment was to draw on paper a picture, or collection of pictures that represented us personally, then digitize it with Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. My drawing was a map of the world, with a line tracing through the various places we have lived (see list here).

The point of the assignment was to warm up our Photoshop (or in my case, Illustrator) skills.

I’ll soon post pictures of my completed GA1 portfolio from last year.

Last month, BFA had a talent show called “BFA’s Got Talent”, a play on the British TV show “Britain’s Got Talent.” There were a lot of amazing acts, both musical, and theatrical. It was also the first time I had taken school pictures for a while. It was nice to do that again.

I would’ve uploaded the pictures sooner, but my gallery was having trouble. But they’re up now. Click here to go there.

Before starting on this project, Mr. Bryan showed us a few books with flags and explained the elements that make up a good flag design, like not placing design elements on the right side so that fraying won’t ruin the meaning of the flag.

This is my personal flag created in Graphic Arts. It took me only about half-hour to come up with the design.

Extract from explanation:

To begin, the flag’s proportions are 16:10, which is the standard for computer widescreen monitors, which shows my interest in technology and is also an approximate to the Golden Rectangle. The blue rectangle in the middle is 2.39:1, which is the standard for an anamorphic picture in cinema. The red stripes, white stars on blue represents the flag of the United States and France, two countries that I partially associate with. The stars are in the arrangement of the constellation Orion, one of the more recognizable constellations in the northern night sky, which represents my love for amateur astronomy.
The seven-pointed stars are a symbol of perfection in Christian religions.

Over Spring Break I saw a movie on YouTube showing a hexapod robot modeled after an ant (See here: A-Pod). Though I might make a model of that. It turned out to be a bit more difficult to make.

It ended up being more of a robot scorpion thing. I wish I could’ve had more control over the outlines to give it a better sense of depth.

Now I have to finish my personal flag…

An ambigram, also sometimes known as an inversion, is a typographical design that spells out one or more words not only in its form as presented, but also from another view point, direction or orientation. The words spelled out in the other view point, direction or orientation may be the same or different from the original words.

-Wikipedia

One of my first real assignments for my Graphic Design class was to create an ambigram out of my name. It tok me a while to figure out what I was going to do, but then it hit me: I could do my name in hex code! I looked around for a hex code translator and found this site, which offers hex code and a lot more! It took a lot of sketching and help from Mr. Bryan to get the forms just right. I’m pleased with the overall result.

Noah Leigh (Note: the “N” and “L” are in uppercase)

4E 6F 61 68   4C 65 69 67 68

I’ll have more assignments to post later.

The Gallery has not been updated however, and I don’t when that might happen considering it’s a completely different beast. I’ve been toying with the idea of integrating the gallery into the blog using a plugin, but I haven’t found one that suits me yet. But we’ll see…

I finally got my pictures from the Christmas Banquet and from December up on the gallery. There are still some that were taken on the last days of school that I’ll need to get, so they might be a while.

Enjoy!

In case you didn’t know, Christmas Banquet is a big dinner that happens at the end of November. The guys ask the girls to be their date for it, often with elaborate proposals. I was not one of them, since I didn’t ask anyone, despite my friends constant hounding of me to ask someone. But I didn’t relent. I was planning to take pictures during the event, something would be made much more difficult by having a date. During the whole month of November, I had to endure constant prodding by well meaning friends to get a date, while at the same time hearing about the people that others had asked.

They started selling tickets on Thursday, Friday, and Monday. And I managed to miss it every single time! I asked Mr. Bryan about what to do, and he made arrangements and I got a seat! I asked him about which camera I was getting and was delighted to hear that I would be getting their top end stuff: a Nikon D300 with an 80-200mm f /2.8 lens!

For Christmas Banquet, we’re expected to wear a suit, which I had bought before school. I’ve never worn a suit before, and it was a bit uncomfortable. But I lived

Along with the camera, I also got a flash, which was pretty much a requirement for the low light (think romantic camera light), and a monopod, which allowed me to shoot at 1/40th of a second and get a sharp picture.

Once I had given the camera back to Mr. Bryan, I could safely say that it was one of the most enjoyable photographic experiences I’ve ever had. The subjects were interesting both on stage and off, I didn’t feel limited with inferior equipment, and I got great food to boot!

I took 414 pictures at the Banquet, so it might be sometime before I actually get some up here. I’m also working on a redesign of the site which will, at best (meaning highly unlikely), go live before the end of Christmas break. Here’s a teaser:

Tomarrow’s my birthday, so I’ll be feasting on banana bread all evening!

Yeah, so what if we had it on the 13th? Since I hadn’t posted these yet, I figured today would be as good as any to put them up. Taken with a D70 with a 18-50mm f/2.8, the same one I took these shots with.