My new website is noelle.dev.
If you’ve stumbled across the site, I just wanted to let you know that you can follow my most recent photographic work on my Tumblr: noelleleigh.tumblr.com
After much procrastination, I have finally uploaded the best pictures I took during BFA’s 2011 Christmas Banquet.
All images uploaded in full resolution 3216 × 2136 px.
Taken with a D300 with an 80–200 mm f/2.8 lens.
Our school had this year’s High School Play in November. It was a production of the 1938 Victorian Thriller Angel Street by Patrick Hamilton. Although the stage was terribly dark, I still managed to get some good shots from the 2nd row.
All images taken with a D300 with an 18-50mm f/2.8 lens.
Uploaded in full quality 4288 × 2484 px.
Click for 1920×1200 px. (576 KB)
To demonstrate our skills in Photoshop for Yearbook, we had to make a photo collage using 6 original photos, one of which had to come from the scanner. My original idea was to use the various blue doors around the school and combine them into one door, but there simply weren’t enough different ones, and the shots were hard to get identical. So I tried to come up with other things around school that could work as a theme. That’s when I came up with “Computers.”
Fortunately, there are a plethora of different models lurking around under desks, and school had fairly consistent lighting which made post-processing easy. I tried to arrange them in approximately chronological order, but I found it more attractive to do it simply by height. I wanted some kind of message to go along with it, and “Evolutions” seemed appropriate. I hope you like it!
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.
Click for large version (2.53 MB)
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)
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)
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