Just a little GIF I made. You can tell I kind of fell off during the stick figure animations.

The concept is overcoming challenges no matter the cost. I'm an avid gamer, and I'm always looking for challenging games to beat. Despite my experience, I still struggle in games I deem harder to play, but always keep going even to points past frustration. The same goes for schoolwork. I don't necessarily try, but once if I need to get something done on the last day before a project is due, I will spend hours and hours trying to complete it (like this gif for example). Another example was when I completed a ten page paper in one day with immense dedication. I honestly spent zero time on it in the month we had to complete it. On the last day, I spent, maybe like 8 hours on it (I also had other homework so it was more like 11 for everything?).

That being said, my original idea was a little different. My original GIF was supposed to be this stickman looking into a mirror, while his reflection changes into a monstrous figure. It's supposed to be deep and "edgy", but I decided to scrap it at the last minute because 1) it was going to be hard to accurately reflect movements of my stick person on to the mirror and 2) I wanted a more positive animation.

As I create my current GIF, there are two main symbols: the mountain and steps to the summit.

The mountain symbolizes obstacles that need to be overcome, and the steps represents, well steps. The process of walking so many steps up a mountain may be tedious, long, and full of effort, but it feels satisfying when you make it to the top. The fact that the sky color changes from evening to night also shows the amount of dedication needed.

Me eating seaweed (pretty bad angle & framing though)

2) "Grand Theft Auto V Remastered"

4)

My work

This is my original photo

This is one of the photos I didn't end up using because of the angle I held the game at, which potentially wouldn't sync with the flat photos I would edit in.

1) I decided to do a photo-job on Grand Theft Auto (GTA V to be specific). The game is often ridiculed for being sexist in its depiction of gender roles. In the game, the characters who are male are often shown to be people who are able to handle themselves, are emotionally tough, and generally people who produce most of the work in society. On the other hand, women are shown as people who can't handle themselves, are emotionally weak, and generally as people who leech off others' (men's) productivity.

Having played the game myself, I am not going to be ignorantly bashing the game as an abomination to modern entertainment. I love the game myself and have played for hours and hours. However, I can't help but notice the way gender roles were tacitly placed into the game. You have male characters who are constantly shooting guns, engaging in combat, and breaking laws. Then you have women who are constantly in need of help, women who can't tell from fiction to reality. 

The game is known for being violent and full of action. Only for the dudes that is.

The game's cover itself already implies that those who engage in adrenaline-inducing activity are male. There is a guy on the motorcycle, Trevor (guy on the right) is hold a rifle, Franklin (guy at the bottom) is holding a handgun, and Michael (guy at the top) is wearing a gas mask as if he's preparing for combat. 

I decided to make my concept based on this. On my project, you would notice that every single one of the characters that I have placed in the game's cover is in fact, a female (well, except one of them) from Japanese media. My photo-job serves as satire against GTA, which itself is known as a game full of satire. 

The irony is that the game establishes unequal gender roles as a business tactic in order to attract a certain demographic (teenage or young-adult males) but often criticizes modern business practices with satire against the corporate world.

In my version, the characters, which are female, are holding guns, on motorcycles, and generally also have a menacing look like the characters in the original cover. Why do characters who are violent and self-capable always males? Why not female? On the other hand, why can't men also be characters who fail to handle themselves? However, one should note that my concept pokes fun at not only the game's, but also general society's depiction of gender roles. People who see my personal cover of the game will unconsciously react in shock, because it wouldn't be expected that it would be anime girls shooting guns, breaking laws, and being a social-negative. It's also a bit funny, at least in my opinion.

The third part of my concept, which is less of a social critique and more of a personal preference, is that I simply like the characters in my photo, and decided to incorporate them in a game cover, which design allows for a collage-like placement for my favorites...

This is a reference for the main, original photographs. A lot of distorting, perspective changes, filter changes, lasso-ing, other various color adjustments, and other transformations were implemented, on some more than others (Flandre, the girl with the handgun, probably took the most work).

Put together, this project represents a compilation for a dream game that I would like, as evidenced by the original photograph itself, which shows me holding the game. The fact that I'm holding it shows that it's pretty personal to me.

3) I wouldn't say I'm too happy with my work. I can say I'm satisfied though. I'm still learning Photoshop but I've been starting my own outside-of-school photo manipulations with the program and I think it's a lot of fun. For this project, there are still some flaws such as perspective problems and others that are mostly related to the lasso tool. Layer masks played a huge role for my adjustment layers, but I could have probably also used them directly for my actual layers containing my pictures too.

5) To make image adjustments for features such as brightness and color balance, I simply left-clicked the layer that I wanted to adjust, hovered over one of the "adjustment options between "libraries" and "styles", then clicked of one them. One adjustment I probably made for most of my layers were filters. I wanted my photo to be pretty homogeneous in terms of color tone. Some of my photos didn't fit well together, and I had to fix that. 

For example:

 These two photos don't really fit. One is very bright and has a lot of contrast, and the other is dark and has less of a contrast between colors. What I did was lower the contrast, brightness, and filtered the top image to make it look for fitting. After that, you can see that it at least (in my opinion) looks better together:

 I'd say I did like this project but I feel like there's a lot of improvement still out there for me. I also hope that people who view my project notice the subtle and small things such as the obey hat, sunglasses, "Rated-E", anime girl on the aircraft, among others.

Hey guys, I'm back from after my last post!

I hope you take your time to read what I have to say (even if probably most of it may not interest you personally)!

My Graphic Design course in high school had given me a project on drawing a letter... like F... U... N... etc. Not just any letter, but a letter with some artistic representation, kind of like having to draw O and using a donut as an idea or something.

1) Being assigned W, I didn't know what to do honestly. However, I guess the ideas just came along as the process came along. Being told to brainstorm twenty tiny sketches in order to collect ideas, this is what I came up with:

Masterpiece.

Not very neat, not very thoroughly thought out, but within 10 minutes (the first four took two days, but I had to rush the last sixteen), I had my ideas fleshed out. Well, I'm kidding when I say that, because I felt as if the sketches weren't helpful. I'm not the type of person that usually plans before doing things, but rather do them, fail the first time, then keep trying until I reach my satisfaction point. (albeit this point is relative as many artists would probably consider my final work as their first five minute sketch).

As you can probably see, the blue post-it is a peer review. Although it didn't affect my final idea, I did very appreciate it

Points being made, I did find the drafting the most important part. Check out what I did:

and...

Honestly, I didn't really like the first draft, and drew that in ten minutes. The second draft started with just a few vague strokes of the pencil here and there, literally. I didn't know what I was drawing until I was almost halfway done. I was literally sketching a W and adding two snake heads and a broken tree. But for me, it worked. Thinking back, I probably had this innate liking for animals, and just drew it without consciously thinking about what I wanted. 

2) I really just wanted to draw some animals that I liked, and I would be lying if I were to say there were some deep, hidden meaning that can never be found. But I did want to show some sort of antithesis between opposites. By that I mean light and dark, and opposite directions. A look at my finals might show you:

Although not perfectly aligned vertically, you can see that this snake is black in color mostly, and faces forward.

This snake, on the other hand, faces inward, and is yellow with some brownish stripes

2b) And... here's my final for show as a result:

3) I'd say the most challenging part of the project was the coloring, and the drawing. The black snake gave me a lot of trouble because it was hard to figure out how the snake would look facing forward. The yellow snake, on the other hand, was facing inward, and therefore didn't need even half as much detail. The color part though, was difficult for both of them. I had to figure out how to mix colors but at the same time make them blend and mix, rather than stack on top of each other, if that makes sense. Because I was using color pencil, I found that some colors would sometimes mess with the outcome a bit.

4) Am I satisfied? Yes. It might not be winning any awards, but jeez I felt like I did spend a lot of time on it. I would sometimes come after school to work on it. I didn't feel satisfied no matter how much I kept recoloring over, but I kept mixing more of them. As you might be able to see, the colors on the yellow snake in particular has over 8 colors or so. The black one had a bigger focus on shading and darkness/lightness. 

5) If I were to change my design, I would use more colors, find a background, and maybe draw the other snake facing forward too. Endless possibilities. I wanted it to look more vibrant. But I still like my current drawing. 

And with that, I'll see you next time. 

(feel free to comment if you 1) liked the project or disliked it 2) what you drew yourself if you were in my class)

This summer, I went on long road-trips around New York State. Hours and hours of driving would often bring up the iconic, illuminating activator of the circadian rhythm, otherwise known as the moon. I took a picture as my family and I looked up at the clear yet dusky atmosphere. The red tint suggests that the sun had not hid under the horizon too long ago.

This is just my walk around the city. Over the summer, I had spent much of my time walking around the city, either with myself or with a friend. I would usually find a secluded spot in the outskirts away the metropolitan known for teeming with social activity, such as that of a bench near the river, and leisurely read a book I enjoy. How relaxing.

Another part of my summer? I would have the say another notable part of my summer was the visit to Niagara Falls. The best trip? 5 star hotels on the other side of the planet? No. Very scenic, relaxing, and curative of the body and mind? Yes. The falls reminded me of what kind of place I really lived in. The world is not made of people and cities, but instead people and cities are made by the world. I enjoyed my visit to the Niagara Falls as I remembered the summer, not only my trip, was also inevitably soon coming to a abrupt close. I would soon have to go to school again... but what better way to end a summer than to witness the very essence of life flowing right beneath your eyes?